Mubi, the upstart indie film company that made “The Substance” into an Oscar sensation, traces its origins to Tokyo on New Year’s Eve 2006, when Efe Cakarel, then a vacationing Turkish-born film fanatic, couldn’t find a copy of Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love” online. Frustrated, he imagined a website from which indie movie lovers like himself could stream the best films from international auteurs. He started writing the business plan for Mubi on the flight back from Japan to San Francisco, seeing it as an edgier, artsier alternative to Netflix. “I hadn’t been to a film school,” Cakarel, 49, says. “I’d never been to a film festival. I knew nobody. I just had this idea of creating a cinephile’s dream.”
Though Cakarel had never attended Sundance, he did have a deep knowledge of technology, having graduated from MIT with an engineering degree before enrolling in Stanford’s MBA program. After working as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and later graduating from Stanford, he sat in a café in Palo Alto and coded a site that, by 2007, would become ‘The Auteurs’ platform, renamed Mubi in 2010.
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It was a risk — “All my savings went into it,” Cakarel says. So from the beginning, Cakarel was hands-on. “We built our own content delivery network, our own encoding tool chains and our own streaming services,” he says. “But we estimate that it costs us 70% less for our infrastructure than those who rely on other platforms.”
Fast-forward two decades, and Mubi, which was recently valued at $1 billion, is nipping at the heels of A24 and Neon, the biggest operators on the indie scene. The company, headquartered in London, is currently on the ground at the Cannes Film Festival, debuting an impressive four films in competition, including Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” Akinola Davies’ “My Father’s Shadow” and “The History of Sound,” a love story that’s one of the highest-profile films at the festival thanks to the red-hot pairing of Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor. Another of Mubi’s Cannes premieres will be Kelly Reichardt’s heist thriller “The Mastermind,” which also stars O’Connor, the first production it has developed and fully financed.
When not stepping down the red carpet in a tux, Cakarel will be brandishing his checkbook, deploying it to outbid other indie companies for the sexiest projects and films on offer at the festival. It’s a statement-making moment for Mubi, which has evolved from a niche streaming service to a full-fledged studio involved in theatrical distribution and production. The company, with more than 400 employees in 15 markets, is on top of the world after the $83 million global success of last year’s “The Substance.”
Cakarel has been on a spending spree. According to sources, Mubi landed “The History of Sound” in the spring, after A24 aggressively bid on the period piece. Mubi’s innovative marketing on “The Substance” was enough to convince filmmakers that the new boutique distributor was the best suitor to get audiences in theaters for a steamy gay romance.
But Cakarel isn’t just interested in topping the box office. He wants to reinvigorate moviegoing culture by creating an ecosystem that extends from streaming to publishing to art-house theaters, offering movie lovers the chance to see the kind of offbeat, visionary work that other studios are afraid to make. In doing so, he’s intentionally creating a worldwide community of film devotees that has been neglected for too long.
Mubi is a privately held company, and Cakarel is vague about its finances, beyond saying that it has double-digit profit margins. It’s also about to have even more firepower. Venture capital firm Sequoia is leading a $100 million round that Mubi will use to fund acquisitions and new productions. Cakarel is also considering taking Mubi public at some point in the future, “in order to access capital markets.” Mubi’s growth over the last decade has been seismic, moving from 100,000 subscribers in 2016 to 20 million registered users around the world in 190 territories.
The company’s impressive audience has allowed it to join the original-content business — a crowded and challenging field. But there is still a void in the landscape for the kind of elevated movies that ’90s-era Miramax, then run by Harvey Weinstein, used to bring to the masses with the help of aggressive Oscar campaigns. But that business — one that relied on a dependable audience of older, sophisticated moviegoers — has largely evaporated post-COVID, with art-house breakouts becoming something of an endangered species. Many people in the industry are skeptical that Mubi can maintain its enormous growth.
And it’s true that with ticket sales a fraction of what they were just five years ago, the margin for error has never been narrower. Indie companies that pursued similar strategies to Mubi, including deep-pocketed ones such as Annapurna and Broad Green, have folded after spending too lavishly on the movies they made and released.
Asked about how he plans to avoid a similar fate, Cakarel is practical: “Just remember what brought you here. Take the long-term view. Don’t do anything short term for short-term gain. Don’t chase popularity or box office. Just get on a bike and ride.”
While Cakarel has been active on the acquisition front, he’s cautious about how much money he’s spending. “I’m not going to risk what I have for what I don’t have and don’t need. The risk is important, but it’s a calculated risk,” he says. “The No. 1 rule of business is to stay in business.”
We’re sitting in the kitchen of Cakarel’s 200-year-old Notting Hill home, a stunning, art-filled retreat. Between sips of Darjeeling tea from Mariage Frères — he let it steep for exactly three minutes — Cakarel says he “built Mubi brick by brick for over a decade,” knowing he was “building the foundation of a skyscraper.”
But like the precise way he times the tea, Cakarel isn’t in a rush to tell all. First, there are cookies.
At the center of the table, he’s placed a plate of chocolate treats from his go-to London spot, the Prada-owned pastry shop Marchesi 1824. An impeccable host, he offers me one before delicately taking one himself. “In Turkey, we say, ‘Eat sweet, speak sweet,’” he says. Then Cakarel begins telling me about his past.
Cakarel was expected to study at a local university when he grew up and to take over his father’s business, a prominent electrical engineering company. But he went against his family’s plans and applied to MIT, where he got in on a full scholarship. He’s always been talented with numbers, in high school ranking third in the 1994 European Math Olympiad in Geneva as part of Turkey’s national team. But what really mattered in the creation of Mubi was his persistence.
Greg Williams for Variety
“It took me more than two years to sign our first film, ‘La Antena,’” Cakarel says. He received the 2007 picture — a black-and-white Argentine fantasy melodrama — on a videotape from Buenos Aires and encoded the film himself before uploading it on Mubi’s website.
It would take another decade, though, for the banner to have the financial muscle to buy new movies that it could premiere on the platform. Getting to that place meant relying almost entirely on word of mouth and “zero marketing” spending.
Mubi began with a rotating library of more than 500 films from major festivals like Cannes and Venice that were struggling to sell distribution rights in some international markets where the company operated. The service really took off when it introduced a model of one new film per day. “Take smaller but firmer steps in your journey. Don’t prematurely try to run everything,” Cakarel says of his approach. “I learned that from Charlie Munger [the former VP of Berkshire Hathaway], who came as a guest lecturer in a class on investments that I was taking at Stanford. What we’ve been doing with Mubi actually reflects that. Everything was just slow and nice and steady. This has all been part of a long-term plan.”
Cakarel can pinpoint exactly when things started to look up for Mubi, dating it to the last three months of 2019. “That was our first cash-flow-positive quarter,” he says. Add in a global pandemic and a streaming service with sophisticated tastes, and Cakarel had all the ingredients he needed to establish Mubi as a force in indie film. “The business grew by more than 60% in one quarter because more people just stayed home and watched content on their devices,” he says. “The business started to throw off millions of dollars, which we then took and invested back into content and growth.”
Cakarel used the profits to land streaming rights to award-winning indies like Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory.” “We saw incredible growth with those two films,” Cakarel says. “I realized that the key driver of growth was new films exclusively available on your platform right after cinemas.”
In 2016, Mubi underwent another metamorphosis, getting into the theatrical-distribution game. It started on a small scale in the U.K. before expanding into Germany, the Netherlands and Latin America. Three years ago, Mubi entered the U.S. by buying and theatrically releasing Park Chan-Wook’s twisty romantic thriller “Decision to Leave.” It became the Korean filmmaker’s highest-grossing movie in North America.
Unlike that of other streaming services, Mubi’s primary mission has become convincing its subscribers to see movies in theaters. While the basic membership starts at $14.99, Mubi also launched a premium subscription for $19.99, which includes a service called Mubi Go that provides a free ticket to a theater in the U.S., the U.K. or Germany every week.
The U.S. is now Mubi’s fastest-growing market and the top priority for the company, says Cakarel. Within the past 12 months, he’s assembled a team of senior executives — notably Mark Boxer, the former head of Amazon MGM Studios Distribution, and Arianna Bocco, the former IFC Films president — to run distribution in the country, reporting to Mubi’s chief content officer Jason Ropell.
“I never refer to Mubi as a streaming company,” says Cakarel. “We have our platform, but Mubi’s goal is to bring people to cinemas, and we are releasing our films in theaters and encouraging people to go.”
To that end, Mubi recently launched a magazine and a publishing arm “to put out books about the cinema culture,” and is behind the “Mubi Podcast,” which highlights stories from Hollywood history.
Mubi has also gotten into exhibition even more directly. It is building cinemas in Mexico City and Los Angeles; later this year it will unveil events in 11 cities around the world. “From Chicago to Istanbul to Milan to Buenos Aires, it’s going to be a physical festival where we bring our members together,” Cakarel says.
“Mubi has established itself as the home of global auteurs — it’s bringing our stories to a global audience that didn’t know what it was missing until now,” says Oliver Hermanus, director of “The History of Sound.” “Efe gives me hope for the future of filmmaking.”
Cakarel attended the Oscars for the first time this year — and he wasn’t just there to admire the A-list stars. “The Substance” was up for five awards, including best picture; “The Girl With a Needle,” a Danish psychological thriller that Mubi released to widespread acclaim, was nominated for best international feature. The MIT whiz kid had become a Hollywood player.
“When I walked into the Oscar ceremony, I saw every great filmmaker, every best picture nominee — from Walter Salles to Edward Berger, Brady Corbet, Sean Baker and Denis Villeneuve,” he says. “I consider them friends. For the last 20 years, we’ve been championing their films. They’re all on Mubi. At this point, we’re like the restaurant that the chefs go to.”
“The Substance” wasn’t conceived as a Mubi production. Over a month before the film’s 2024 Cannes premiere, Universal, which had financed the film, parted ways with director Coralie Fargeat over creative disputes. Almost every other indie distributor passed on the film. Then two weeks before the bow on the Croisette, Cakarel swept in, believing the gory Hollywood satire would resonate with Mubi’s subscribers. And he was willing to give it a full theatrical release to raise its profile.
Greg Williams for Variety
“I tell people that a streaming service bought the movie for their platform and turned it into a theatrical success,” says Eric Fellner, the co-head of Working Title and a producer on “The Substance.” “That’s a bit of an oxymoron, but it shows the way in which the business can be disrupted.”
Fellner believes that Mubi’s cachet with its cinema-obsessed users helped “The Substance” become a box office hit. “They created a huge community,” he says. “They’ve engaged with fans. They’ve built a subscription model, and now they’re building a traditional distribution model.”
Mubi is using the money it earned from “The Substance” to amass an impressive slate of films. Aside from “The History of Sound,” the company snapped up worldwide rights to Oscar-winning Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino’s next film, “La Grazia,” beating out French studio Pathé during the European Film Market in Berlin. It also landed “Lurker,” Alex Russell’s dark exploration of celebrity, out of Sundance, despite facing intense competition from other indie studios.
On the horizon, Mubi has signed a co-production deal with Our Films, co-led by Lorenzo Mieli and Mario Gianani kicking off with Paweł Pawlikowski’s next project.
“They’ve managed to create an environment that reminds me of some great moments in the 1970s or the ’90s and transposed it in today’s world,” says Mieli, who previously worked with the company on “Priscilla,” which they distributed internationally. “The transparency and level of trust that you can have with them is unprecedented. They really champion worldwide cinema in a way that no one is able to do right now.”
If there’s a commonality among Mubi’s diverse portfolio of films, it’s that they are director driven. Cakarel is more interested in who is behind the camera than in the stars who appear on-screen or the style of the story being told. “Everybody says they are filmmaker driven, but they would prioritize the film and then related things, such as positioning, box office, and so on, above the filmmaker,” he says.
Cakarel’s focus on international auteurs has established Mubi as one of the best sources of subversive, genre-bending stories in film. Its cool-kid swagger is reminiscent of when A24 launched more than a decade ago and shook up the indie film world by pumping out buzzy titles such as “Moonlight” and “Uncut Gems.”
“They’re definitely similar and they’re of the same DNA,” says Bryan Lourd, CEO and co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency. “There’s still great specialty divisions and companies like A24 and Focus and Searchlight and Sony Classics, but the entry of this group from England with the sort of taste and non-U.S.-centric look is rare. I feel that Mubi is trying to do something different.”
Fellner believes that all the years that Mubi spent establishing itself as a word-of-mouth streaming sensation have given it a competitive edge when it comes to pitching its movies to younger audiences, who are perpetually online. It’s the very crowd that other indie studios struggle to reach.
“Mubi is using marketing in a really interesting way,” he says. “They understand digital because they’re primarily a digital company, and they somehow seem to connect with their user base in the way that A24 does.”
That’s left the two indie companies facing off against each other in several hard-fought bidding wars. While A24 missed out on “The History of Sound,” Mubi failed to land “Sorry, Baby,” which A24 ended up buying out of Sundance for approximately $8 million. “When we both bid for a film, it gives it momentum and brings other buyers in,” Cakarel says.
Cakarel wants the films he releases to feel curated. Sometimes that means passing on a movie that other studios believe has the potential to be a hit purely because it doesn’t mesh with the Mubi brand. “We don’t follow trends, and there are a lot of films, even in the independent world, that might have also done well in the box office that we wouldn’t touch with a stick,” he says. “We’re not trying to please every household, and that’s OK. In a world where no one really stands for anything, we want to stand for something.”
Greg Williams for Variety
“He could have created some tech start-up that made billions doing things that I would never understand,” Fellner says. “But he’s chosen to work in an area where he has real passion, and that’s admirable.”
Cakarel claims that Mubi’s vast network of like-minded users allows the company to better understand what films will appeal to its consumer base, both on streaming and in theaters.
“We have a very strong audience that we’re in daily conversation with, and when we read a script from Sorrentino, we have statistically significant data that tells us who wants to watch it and where, whereas a traditional distributor would look at Sorrentino’s previous films and how they did in the box office.”
“But,” Cakarel adds, “nothing starts with looking at the data; it starts with greatness. I cannot overemphasize how important our gut feeling is. All that data just informs how much we’re prepared to pay.”
As Mubi moves deeper into distribution and production, Cakarel says he intends to tightly control the number of films that he releases annually, as well as their budgets. Mubi hopes to release a slate of 15 movies that will cost between $5 million to $25 million apiece — a relatively modest sum to spend.
“Can we stretch that a bit for the right project and filmmaker? Yes, absolutely,” he says. “Ask me next year what the number is. It’s going to be bigger. But we want to really stay focused in this particular space and budget. When you make a movie for $100 million, the expectations of what the film should do is a lot higher.”
Cakarel is confident about the future of his company despite the geopolitical turbulence that’s taking place as he looks to expand into markets like France, Italy and Asia.
He isn’t even sweating Donald Trump’s May 4 Truth Social announcement that he plans to impose a 100% tariff on movies “produced in Foreign Lands,” which could be a huge financial liability for an international producer and distributor like Mubi.
“Honestly, it’s all noise,” Cakarel says. “With this much uncertainty, there’s really nothing intelligent to say. We’ll focus on making and distributing great films and let the politics play out however they will.”
After dedicating nearly two decades to creating Mubi, Cakarel isn’t looking to sell the “skyscraper” he’s built from the ground up for a huge payday.
“When my private equity investors asked me what my exit strategy was, my response was death,” Cakarel says with a laugh. “I feel like it’s Day 1, like everything that I’ve done in my life has been to get to this point. Only now it gets interesting and exciting.”