Ticketmaster, Taylor Swift and Tamil epics: Where the Toronto International Film Festival goes from here

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If 2021 was a year of resilience for the Toronto International Film Festival – at least according to the opening line of TIFF’s most recent annual report – then what has 2022 meant for Canada’s glitziest not-for-profit institution? According to chief executive officer Cameron Bailey, now one year into his role leading the organization solo after co-head Joana Vicente’s departure last fall, TIFF 2022 was all about “recovery.”

“I’m not good at milestone reflections, but I do feel a real sense of satisfaction in terms of having worked with everyone here to deliver a festival that was successful for filmmakers, audiences and Toronto,” Bailey said during an interview last week inside TIFF’s five-screen Bell Lightbox headquarters. “The city had a deeper, longer shutdown than many other places with a big festival, so it was important for us to stake our place on the map again.”

Newly released numbers mostly bear this sentiment out. The 47th edition of TIFF brought in a total of 214,000 ticketed attendees across in-person (208,000 guests) and digital public-ticketed events (6,000), with the latter program substantially smaller than the one offered during the 2020 and 2021 hybrid editions.

TIFF says its 2022 festival attendance reached 89 per cent of its 2019 numbers “based on capacity,” meaning in terms of total tickets available each year. (In 2019, the festival’s last “regular” edition pre-pandemic, TIFF screened 333 titles: 245 features, 82 shorts, six series. This year, programming was slimmed down to 245 titles: 199 features, 39 shorts, seven series.) Unadjusted for capacity, though, 2022 attendance represents 69 per cent of the 307,362 public-tickets scanned in 2019, or a drop of about 30 per cent.

“Attendance is always a concern because you want full houses, but this year’s numbers reflect fewer films, fewer screenings, fewer seats to be filled,” Bailey says. “The seats that we want filled are being filled at roughly the same capacity as in the past.”

To that point, don’t expect the festival’s programming slate to go back to pre-pandemic levels. Bailey says that while the 2022 edition could have benefitted from three or four more screens, the organizing principle going forward is ensuring a walkable festival – with venues concentrated near the downtown King West corridor – that offers something for every kind of audience without feeling overwhelming.

“Could it be a little smaller? Yes. Could it be a little bigger? Maybe. Could it be a lot bigger? No,” says Bailey.

Still, for a film festival to operate, its guests must be able to secure tickets with relative ease – an experience that a sizable and vocal contingent of TIFF attendees missed out on this year thanks to a frustrating Ticketmaster system, prompting Bailey to issue an apology the day before the festival began. The process is now being dissected and reworked by a team led by newly appointed chief operating officer Beth Janson.

“If you’re on the receiving end of things, it looks like a technology problem, but it’s mostly one of process,” says Bailey, noting that Ticketmaster will still be part of the 2023 festival. “Beth is focused on looking to simplify things that are mostly on our end. We’ve made decisions over the years that have added layers of complexity, like barnacles on a whale.”

Another element up for a rethink is how TIFF handles its star-studded press conferences. This year, TIFF required journalists to submit questions ahead of time instead of asking them live in the room, with the selected queries delivered by moderators without attributing them to reporters or outlets.

“Having spent years as a journalist, I understand the work that journalists are doing here. I also know that the people who bring films to us are working in a climate now where there are all kinds of risk factors – there are sometimes challenges in keeping a conversation on topic during an open session,” says Bailey. “But we’re all in agreement that this was not the ideal way.”

On the programming side, this year’s festival featured such global superstars as Taylor Swift and Harry Styles alongside huge world premieres, including Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the latter of which is now playing a one-week engagement at the Lightbox. But there was also a glut of middling streaming fare and the absence of high-profile awards-bait films that debuted instead at the Venice (Tár, Bones and All, White Noise) and New York (Till, She Said) festivals.

“We’re all trying to do the best for our own festival, and there’s always that jockeying for titles,” Bailey says. “But the real value we bring is in terms of the Toronto audience, a fact which became so much clearer to me over the course of the pandemic. For films that need to understand how they might play with North American audiences, there’s something irreplaceable about coming to Toronto.”

The so-called “Telluride Rule” is also still in place at TIFF. Meaning that, for the first half of the festival and in its biggest venues, TIFF will focus on films that, says Bailey, “come to us first. … It doesn’t mean that we won’t invite your film. There’s a Tetris to it all.” (Empire of Light, The Wonder and Women Talking all had their world premieres at Telluride days before screening during TIFF’s second half.)

Outside of the festival, TIFF’s five-screen Lightbox has delivered a number of 2022 success stories, all of which are crucial given the relative dearth of new theatrical releases across the exhibition landscape, let alone the increasingly challenging art-house market.

TIFF’s new-release fall season has seen a 158 per cent increase in gross revenue compared to the same period in 2019, with box-office highlights including Triangle of Sadness (the Lightbox was the film’s No. 1 venue in Canada, and No. 8 in North America), David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (No. 1 venue in North America on opening weekend), and the Tamil-language epic Ponniyin Selvan: I, which became the Lightbox’s third highest-grossing new release ever (after Moonlight and Pina), earning $270,921.

“We know there is a structural barrier for independent cinema exhibitors in Canada, so where the well was dry, we dug a new well,” Bailey says. “Partially this means playing films from streaming platforms, but it also means playing films for South Asian audiences that previously didn’t make it downtown.” (Just announced this week, TIFF will in December host the series Spectacular, Spectacular: The Mythic Cinema of S. S. Rajamouli, director of this year’s global Telugu-language sensation RRR.)

Any conversation about the state of art-house film, though, is currently happening under the shadow of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which collapsed last month along with its associated Filmhouse cinema, the city’s leading independent theatre.

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“Edinburgh is a very specific situation with its funding model, and I don’t think that other festivals are vulnerable in the same way,” Bailey says. “But we are all vulnerable in terms of how do people want to watch movies now, and what kind of movies. That’s constantly changing, and I feel we’re stronger if we can figure things out together.”

To that end, TIFF is set to become the largest member of the Network of Independent Canadian Exhibitors (NICE), which formed in 2018 to support the country’s struggling indie sector.

Meanwhile, TIFF is now one year into its latest three-year strategic plan, which carries familiar long-standing goals ( ”Reinventing the TIFF Bell Lightbox Experience”), but this time is built on the back of a widely refreshed senior leadership team. There is COO Janson, who came over this past spring from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, but also Anita Lee (chief programming officer), Elisabeth Burks (vice-president, partnerships), and Marsha John-Greenwood (vice-president, people and culture).

“The festival will always be the most important thing we do, but there is work to be done to make sure we’re set up to deliver year-round,” says Bailey. “Partly it’s what films we get to play – the biggest part, actually – but also once people come into the building, what’s the experience like? You can’t assume any more that movie-going outside the house is a habit. Movie-watching is a habit, but movie-going is something else.”