1 Year Old, SnagFilms Unveils Online Doc Fest and Comcast, Sundance Channel Pacts

Morgan Spurlock’s “Super Size Me,” which was the most popular documentary on SnagFilms during the first year, receives its own special place in a new widget entitled “SnagFilms Presents – The Best of Year One,” available now. The widget contains other well-received titles from SnagFilm’s library, including “Confessions of a Superhero,” which follows actors on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame dressed up as comic book characters, and “Darkon,” the remarkably bleak and revealing portrait of adult fantasy role-playing that served as inspiration for David Wain’s studio comedy “Role Models.” 

The widget also features Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s “The End of America,” an adaptation of Naomi Wolf’s non-fiction tome, and the fraternity exposé “Haze.” Both films were part of a unique release strategy last fall in which they simultaneously premiered at the Hamptons Film Festival and on SnagFilms.

In addition to such unorthodox distribution experiments, SnagFilms has cultivated a number of partnerships with other entities in the film community and beyond it. In March, the company brought parts of its library to Hulu; April found it entering into Founders’ Alliances with Hot Docs, Outfest and Full Frame, bringing documentaries from the festival circuit to broader audiences; in May, it joined forces with IMDb and YouTube. Now, the company has announced that Fancast will begin carrying titles from SnagFilms’s library this week, and that it will distribute documentaries provided by the Sundance Channel.

Allen emphasized that SnagFilms aims to maximize audiences for three types of films: Traditionally released features, undistributed features and those with immediate relevance (such as “End of America,” with its election season hook) that require an expedited release schedule. In every case, the financial logistics remain more or less the same. “We’re creating a dual revenue stream,” Allen explained, “sharing ad revenue, and converting casual viewers directly into DVD and other e-commerce buyers.”

Allen said the rate of change involved in online developments — reflected in the massive reception of SnagFilms’s widgets, one billion pageviews strong — continually takes him by surprise.  “I have been running web businesses as part of bigger media companies for more than a decade, but it’s really accelerating,” he said. “We’ll grow by making it even easier for a worldwide audience to find, watch and share films, and to become more active global citizens.”

Highlighting the notion of “filmanthropy” invented by SnagFilms founder Ted Leonsis as the guiding ethos of the company, Allen sounded a note of optimism about the future. “By next year,” he predicted, “everybody will be snagging.”