Fathom CEO Jason Brenek On Bringing ‘Wildwood’ To 3,000 Theaters, ‘The Amazing Digital Circus’ Surprise, And Finding Animation’s Next Big Audience

Those re-releases and anniversary screenings established a strong relationship between the companies. Of their latest collab, Brenek notes that Wildwood had been in development for 16 years.

“They had built a real understanding through these anniversary releases that we had done and these bringbacks,” he says. “They knew that they had the base of an audience that they were serving. They also felt, after working within the studio system, the traditional Hollywood system, for the entirety of their existence, that they wanted to have a creative hand in how to reach that audience, how to actually bring their content to their biggest fans. And that was something that they didn’t feel that they could get through the traditional studio system—where oftentimes films, television programs are put together by production companies, thrown over the wall to their distribution entity, the studio, and then the studio says, ‘We’ve got it from here. Don’t worry about it. We’re going to go and market. We’re going to create the art. We’re going to create the trailers.’”

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Looking ahead to Fathom’s growth in the coming months and years, Brenek says, “We are looking at what we do well. What audiences do we serve? What audiences do we think have growth potential and are feeling underserved from the amount of content?”

“This is one of the reasons why I’m here in Tokyo with our team,” he adds. “For the 20 years that we have existed, we have been the largest distributor of Japanese animation and anime products into United States theaters. And so taking that subculture, people who are avid fans in the United States for animation and anime out of Japan, we are doubling down on that demographic and trying to bring more in a timelier manner, so that they’re not waiting a year for something.”

Brenek points to a digitally connected global anime audience as a reason for more timely releases.

“Frankly, one of the things that I think a lot of Japanese production companies and creatives aren’t aware of—because it goes through multiple layers of bureaucracy and production committees and all these things just to get projects made and released in Japan—I don’t think they realize necessarily that at the end of that chain in America, it is almost always Fathom releasing that product into theaters. So I guess this is to say that we want to connect more with these demographic groups, and as a result, we’re connecting much more closely with these production entities and creatives in places in the world that are responsible for such amazing artistic works. Another is the creative online community that we talked about. That’s another area that we’re getting heavily into.”