In July, the chef and food-media personality Eddie Huang woke up to a text message from Jason Ropell, a film executive at Mubi. It sounded urgent: “Let’s talk soonest.” Mubi, which distributes indie and foreign films and streams them to millions of monthly subscribers, had been preparing an August premiere for Huang’s documentary Vice Is Broke, which charts the rise and fall of his former employer Vice Media. Mubi had acquired rights to the film in January for a healthy six-figure fee, which included some theatrical screenings — a good deal for Huang in today’s documentary market. But, according to Huang, Ropell proceeded to tell him over the phone that those screenings were now canceled.
Mubi claims Huang all but requested to cancel the screenings himself. A day earlier, Huang had posted on Instagram about his opposition to venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital acquiring a 10 percent stake in Mubi for $100 million. The investment, announced in May, had caused an uproar in the indie-film community. Sequoia had invested in an Israeli defense company called Kela following the October 7 attack, amid Israel’s subsequent genocide in Gaza. In his Instagram post, Huang stated that unless Mubi properly addressed the situation, he would not promote his own film. “I’m not being dramatic or corny,” Huang wrote. “We have to start saying ‘NO.’”
In the end, Vice Is Broke premiered on Mubi’s platform in August, though without its theatrical screenings or Huang’s participation. But Mubi’s problems were only multiplying. An activist group called Filmworkers for Palestine launched an online campaign demanding that Sequoia partner Andrew Reed be removed from the company’s board. In the past six months, at least 10,000 Mubi users have unsubscribed in protest of the Sequoia investment. Festivals and brands have canceled or paused key partnerships with the streamer, hundreds of Mubi employees have voiced their dissent, and some filmmakers have even withdrawn their work from the platform and canceled deals that were in progress.
For Mubi’s founder and CEO, Efe Cakarel, the Sequoia backlash came as a surprise. Other film studios have received questionable investments without stirring up controversy. Last year, A24 secured a reported $75 million capital injection from Josh Kushner’s venture-capital firm, Thrive Capital, a major investor in Israeli start-ups and the military-AI company Anduril Industries. This did not dent the reputation of the studio responsible for Moonlight and Uncut Gems, described in a fawning New Yorker profile as a company where “even the money guys are cineastes.”
Mubi, however, is not like A24 or any other film studio. When Cakarel founded the company in 2007, Mubi was primarily known as a message board for hard-core cinephiles to discuss their favorite directors. His plan was both ambitious and unlikely: to make a globally dominant studio out of art-house cinema. Somehow, he succeeded. Mubi became a powerful indie distributor in the U.S., releasing some of the most innovative American films of the past decade, such as Zia Anger’s My First Film and Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral, and masterpieces like Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. It connected with a younger generation of fans that was attracted to the company’s willingness to show some of the world’s most outré and marginal films and that forged an organic community whose views on politics skewed heavily toward the left.
However, as Mubi’s ambitions grow — its 2024 film The Substance grossed more than $80 million at the box office and was nominated for multiple Academy Awards — it could alienate the very community that made it successful. For Cakarel, the Sequoia investment was supposed to be proof that Mubi could give art-house cinema mass appeal. But art-house cinema was niche for a reason: It demands deep engagement with artists and their works. By turning art house into a global brand, Mubi risked emptying the values that made the genre niche in the first place.
As Cakarel tells it, the idea for Mubi came in 2006 while he was on vacation. Sitting in a café in Tokyo, he had a sudden desire to watch Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. When he looked up the movie on his laptop, however, he couldn’t find a stream. “I would have paid anything for that,” Cakarel later said. “And nobody was offering it to me.”
Cakarel had no background in cinema. Born in 1976 in Turkey to a family of entrepreneurs, he attended MIT for electrical engineering and computer science, then Stanford for his M.B.A. There were stints at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker and the German software giant SAP as an app developer. “I knew absolutely nothing about film distribution,” Cakarel told an interviewer in 2009. “But I knew two things really well: one, how to build web applications, from concept to interface design to programming, and two, how to do deals.”
In 2007, Cakarel launched his art-house streaming company from a small office in Palo Alto. He called it the Auteurs. Using money he raised from his friends and family, he quickly built a streaming platform. To stock it, he negotiated two film deals, the first with the Criterion Collection, which gave Cakarel a handful of films while he helped to code Criterion’s own nascent streaming platform. (“We took our code base and just rebranded it for Criterion,” Gabe da Silveira, the Auteurs’ lead engineer, told me.)
The second was a partnership with Celluloid Dreams, the legendary Paris-based production-and-distribution company founded by the late Hengameh Panahi, who offered 200 films from its library and joined the Auteurs’ board. The distribution rights to this portion of Panahi’s collection, which included little-known works like Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi, were up for grabs. “No one was really watching those films,” Edward King, the product and marketing manager at the Auteurs, told me. “They appealed only to the real, real cinephiles. They were the kind of films no one else bought.”
Cakarel had ambitions to grow the company’s library to draw in a reliable pool of subscribers. “I think Efe wanted to be what Netflix became in terms of charging people a monthly fee to subscribe and watch stuff,” King said. “And I was like, ‘That’s going to be challenging.’” At the time, early in streaming’s lifespan, most distributors were either skeptical of doing business with streamers or charged them outrageously high licensing fees for the privilege. “You would try and get some Spanish-language title, maybe an early Penélope Cruz film or something, and they’d say, ‘We want, like, $250,000 for a three-year license,’” said Ted Hope, a former indie-streamer head who went on to help lead Amazon’s movie program. “No one was going to do that. We could pay maybe $10,000.”
When streamers did spend on acquiring indie films, there was no guarantee that they’d attract a big enough audience to sustain their platforms. King had joined the Auteurs from a now-defunct competitor called Jaman, which King says blew tens of millions of dollars acquiring thousands of independent films, only for them to be watched by nobody. “Hardly anyone was really watching stuff online back then because there weren’t really Rokus or Fire TVs yet,” King told me. “And nobody watches black-and-white French documentaries on their phones or laptops.”
King saw a different sort of opportunity. By 2009, the Auteurs had become an online meeting place for cinephiles around the world. The website hosted a blog called Notebook and a message board where users posted all kinds of cinema chatter. (“Remember that poor ox in APOCALYPSE NOW?” a popular thread went.) King, who had previously worked at Myspace, saw that the user forum was the only part of the website generating significant traffic. “I said to Efe, ‘Why don’t we build a social network around cinema? That way, when rights do become available, you will have a community to actually watch the films.’” (Mubi claims its social network was already in place before King joined the company.)
The result was Letterboxd years before Letterboxd existed, a place where users could not only discuss films but generate valuable metadata about them. Cakarel’s team noticed that films from important festivals like Cannes and Venice often weren’t added to IMDb until the official premiere (or weren’t added at all), so they built their own movie database and listed most feature-length festival films as soon as the lineups were announced. They also created more robust “favoriting” capabilities and the ability to add films from the database to custom lists. They let users follow other users and made a news feed so that people could see what their friends were watching and sharing.
The website began to acquire a cultlike, word-of-mouth following, especially in Europe, accruing 40,000 members by 2009. Cakarel was soon flying to Paris many times a year to take meetings. In 2010, he relocated the company to London.
He also changed its name. Mubi, which sounds like movie and business slammed together, came from a Japanese ad agency Cakarel had hired. It had no real meaning, but it could be spoken by just about anybody. The branding jibed with his ambition “to make the best films ever produced available globally in every language,” Cakarel told IndieWire. “It’s a good vision. We’re going to get there.”
Mubi launched a new streaming model in 2012, leaning into its brand as a curator. With a subscription price of $5 per month, the company made just 30 films available on its platform. Each film was accessible for 30 days, and every day Mubi added one new film to replace one that had expired. The model transformed its small selection of films into a strength. Each was hand-picked and assured to be worth watching. The rotating carousel gave an air of urgency to films that were about to leave the platform. It also lowered the costs of maintaining the company’s library, which was now limited to 365 films per year and purchased on cheaper short-term licenses. “We realized we needed to grow our core audience, the people who were really sticking with us,” said da Silveira, who was eventually appointed chief technology officer and given the title of co-founder. “Because those were the people that saw the vision.”
In 2016, following in the footsteps of other streamers, Mubi began distributing films it bought from top festivals. It acquired work from established auteurs (Lover for a Day, by Philippe Garrel), mid-career directors (Arabian Nights, by Miguel Gomes), and up-and-coming filmmakers (Mimosas, by Oliver Laxe). And unlike Netflix, which dumped movies onto its platform with little promotion, Mubi put its films in theaters and marketed them. “We really believe in the cinematic experience,” Cakarel told Variety in 2017 while planning to book Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria in more than 100 locations in the U.K., a record for the company.
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Mubi also began investing in art-house infrastructure. It sponsored local film festivals and special screenings at museums and repertory theaters and partnered with local culture magazines. The company’s signature cadmium-blue tote bag began appearing on shoulders in art-house theaters around the world. “They were carpet-bombing people with tote bags,” Jon Dieringer, the founder of the website Screen Slate, told me. “You couldn’t go to a fucking art-house film thing without someone throwing a tote bag at you.”
Mubi’s promotional efforts didn’t always land well. In 2018, the company plastered the New York subway with ads that compelled passersby not to subscribe to Mubi if they lacked knowledge about famous film auteurs. “If you think Tarkovsky composed Swan Lake,” one ad went, referencing the Soviet director of 1966’s Andrei Rublev and other masterpieces, not the 19th-century Russian composer Tchaikovsky, “don’t try Mubi.” The bit, pretentious and alienating, went viral for the wrong reasons. Cakarel issued an apology.
“Brand credibility is what made Mubi into a sustainable business,” da Silveira told me. “We knew that it was very fragile. You can lose that trust in a minute if you make tone-deaf decisions.”
And that audience came to be overwhelmingly opposed to the war in Gaza. For years, Mubi had courted younger, highly educated audiences in European and South American metropolises — not exactly hotbeds of Zionism — whose politics were distinctly left wing. The company became known for programming documentaries about militant revolutionaries (Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, by Shola Lynch), gay liberation (F.H.A.R., by Carole Roussopoulos), and even an Israeli massacre of Gazans (Samouni Road, by Stefano Savona). “Mubi framed itself as a streamer that is different, that seeks to take on political films, that is unlike the other big U.S. streamers,” Yuval Abraham, co-director- of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, told me. “At least, that’s what we thought.”
News of the Sequoia investment leaked to Puck in May. The following week, Variety ran a cover story about the company’s rise and its new billion-dollar valuation. The profile was literally glowing. Cakarel was photographed in his 200-year-old sun-drenched Notting Hill townhouse as he discussed his strategy over chocolates from Marchesi 1824, a pastry shop owned by Prada. “In a world where no one really stands for anything,” Cakarel told Variety, “we want to stand for something.”
Within weeks, the pressure began to mount. Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, Mexico City’s Cineteca Nacional, and the Cinemateca de Bogotá all declined to participate in Mubi Fest, a public and heavily branded two-day film event at which influencers gather to watch movies in different cities around the world, eat dinner, and post shots of their hotel rooms. Film festivals in Melbourne, Los Angeles, and Valdivia, Chile, either canceled their Mubi partnerships or stated they would not accept any Mubi films. Food vendors in the U.K., publications in New York, and film collectives in Toronto stepped away from the company.
Filmmakers also took action. A group of animators based in India and Pakistan removed several of its films from Mubi’s platform. The team behind No Other Land was in the middle of negotiations with Mubi for a streaming deal that would have helped support the residents of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank when the Sequoia news dropped. “We were surprised and heartbroken,” Abraham told me. The deal fell apart.
Inside the company, morale was sinking. In a note initially sent to its employees, Mubi’s management dismissed the pushback as “trolling.” (A spokesperson for Mubi claims it took the criticism seriously “once the scope of the public response was understood.”) Later, at an all-hands meeting, Cakarel announced that at least 10,000 users had canceled their Mubi subscriptions in protest. “It felt like the company was bleeding,” one former senior employee told me. “And it wasn’t bleeding money as much as it was bleeding something spiritual — the passion that people had working there.”
More than 200 employees sent a letter to management, signed anonymously, that presented their concerns. “The Sequoia investment will inevitably continue to harm our reputation and our work, threatening our partnerships and our mission,” it read.
Cakarel had negotiated the deal himself but hadn’t known about Sequoia’s investments in Israel, according to an executive at Mubi. He also didn’t conduct any formal vetting of the investment firm — a conspicuous oversight for a CEO whose attention to detail included sometimes reviewing Mubi’s email-newsletter copy.
“Look at all the events that they do where they put Mubi tote bags on chairs or parties where the lighting is, like, Mubi blue,” the former senior employee told me. “Mubi is not a film company. It’s a lifestyle brand. And if you’re a lifestyle brand, but your customers’ personal lifestyle includes caring about human rights and children not dying in a war, then bringing in Sequoia was always going to be a huge problem.”
Weeks later, spurred by a letter in Variety signed by top Mubi filmmakers like Radu Jude and Aki Kaurismäki urging the company to act, Cakarel made a number of concessions. In a written statement, he acknowledged “the immense suffering, displacement, and starvation of the Palestinian people” as “a humanitarian catastrophe that must end” and announced an “Ethical Funding and Investment Policy” that would set criteria for future funding partners, an artists’ advisory council to offer guidance on the funding policy, and an “Artists at Risk” fund, which would help filmmakers “working under conflict, displacement, or censorship, including Palestinian filmmakers.”
This time, he did not apologize.
Indie film is a fragile ecosystem: There are increasingly fewer buyers and less money — dirty or clean — to go around overall. “When it comes to indie filmmaking, you’re dealing with filmmakers who are literally scrounging,” one Mubi filmmaker told me. “Mubi has a huge upper hand with us to be able to say, ‘Well, we’re the only people that are funding you guys.’”
With more money now at its disposal, the question is if Mubi still needs the community it has so carefully cultivated. The company has added splashier fare in the past year. In May, it acquired Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, at Cannes for $24 million, a record for the streamer. In the film’s teaser released in September, Mubi name-checked itself as “the studio behind The Substance,” positioning itself as a destination for Oscar-winning films.
While Cakarel has played down Mubi’s commercial ambitions in public, the company is now dabbling with content strategies reminiscent of those of Netflix and Amazon when they abandoned indie film to pursue rapacious growth.
In recent years, Mubi has hired top executives from Netflix and Discovery. This year, it acquired its first new television shows: Mussolini: Son of a Century, Joe Wright’s dramatization of the rise of Il Duce, which turns the history of fascism into titillating pop, and Hal & Harper, directed by Cooper Raiff, a pseudo-mumblecore family drama starring himself and Lili Reinhart as 20-something siblings. The company is building theaters in Los Angeles and Mexico City and spoke to the Lower East Side’s Metrograph about a possible sale. The point of all of this is expansion: The Sequoia investment is supposed to help Mubi prepare for an IPO, which Cakarel hopes to launch in something like ten to 12 years.
The executive I spoke with insisted that the company’s television shows were more like movies told in several parts. Nor, they said, would the company ever waver from its commitment to good cinema. Cakarel’s models of creative control are Mark Zuckerberg at Meta and Elon Musk at Tesla. Cakarel controls the majority of seats on Mubi’s board and plans to retain his majority share even in the event of an IPO.
His faith in his own ability to insulate the company from market pressures is a bet against streaming precedent. After all, Netflix and Amazon also made series that were attached to auteurs, like House of Cards, whose first two episodes were directed by David Fincher, and Prime’s Too Old to Die Young, which was directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. The distance between those shows and bottom-of-the-barrel streaming fare like Stranded With My Mother-in-Law or Cocaine Quarterback is shorter than Cakarel may think.
Sequoia believes the dominance of low-quality streamers gives Mubi an advantage. “In this world of AI-slop content, there’s a big opportunity for a company to stand for the opposite,” Sequoia’s Andrew Reed told me. “Could you imagine something better than bringing long-term tech money into a company that’s deeply committed to the cinema and independent storytelling?”
For now, much of Mubi’s current and upcoming film releases remain a testament to Cakarel’s vision. In addition to recent films by Ramsay, Jim Jarmusch, and Kelly Reichardt, Mubi acquired Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, which won this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, and has films by Park Chan-wook and Julia Ducournau planned for next year. It’s a slate that rivals those of A24 and Neon, two of the savviest American independent-film distributors operating today. For Mubi, the cost of success might not be eminent filmmakers, who have shown no sign that the Sequoia investment will keep them away. Instead, it is the respect of the company’s core audience: discerning filmgoers whose perception of the company over the past year has indelibly changed. “It’s been a wake-up call for everybody,” Dieringer told me.
A sign of this shift came in July, when a new tote bag began appearing on shoulders in art-house theaters in New York and Los Angeles. The bag, designed and sold by Hollywood Entertainment, a repertory film-programming group based in Los Angeles, looked nearly identical to Mubi’s — the same cadmium blue and logo design — but with one important change. Mubi was replaced with “Tubi,” the free, ad-supported streaming platform owned by Fox, known for scattershot programming that includes both slop (Girls Getaway Gone Wrong 2) and the sublime (Lucio Fulci, Maren Ade, Kinji Fukasaku, and Claude Chabrol all currently have films on the platform). Much like the Auteurs, Tubi has attracted a cultlike, word-of-mouth following.
“Time for a new tote,” Hollywood Entertainment’s website stated. Proceeds would be donated to a mutual-aid fund in Palestine. It sold out in a few days.
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