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Mubi CEO Efe Cakarel praised Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime” while in a rare public appearance at the Zurich Summit. Talking about the phenomenon of young audiences returning to cinemas, the exec said that when he hears
about a $20 million opening weekend for a film like Oppenheim’s Venice hit, it is “incredible.”
“You look at the demographic of who’s watching this story, which you would think appeals to an older audience, and it’s incredibly healthy—the younger audiences who are watching,” he added. “I think the experience of watching a film, watching original, bold storytelling is here to stay, and it’s gonna grow. We as an industry need to embrace it. We need to continue to produce and finance these films. We need to try to find their audiences because they exist. It’s not huge. It’s not the majority of the households, but it’s meaningful enough for us to continue doing what we love.”
Cakarel brought up his 14-year-old son, who lives in Geneva and travelled to watch his dad speak on stage but dodged the idea of a family dinner in favor of watching Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms” in the cinema with a post-screening Q&A. “That is profound. And that is also the reason why you started to see the box-office success over the past 24 months—a lot of this independent, bold storytelling.”
The exec also spoke about being in the same room as one of his “heroes,” Oscar-winning director Edward Berger. Cakarel brought up the “Conclave” helmer when talking about a desire to grow his company.
“I started Mubi 19 years ago,” he noted. “It took us 15 years to get to a place where you could start imagining being able to finance a film by Paweł Pawlikowski,” he said, referring to the Cannes-winning “Fatherland.”
“In 15 years, we went from zero to 40 employees and then, in the past four years, we went from 40 to more than 400,” continued the exec. “But it took 15 years of putting together brick by brick this vision. Everything takes a long time. You just need to have a vision and stick with it—that’s my resilience formula.”
Growth, for Cakarel, is not “for the sake of ambition,” or having “more and more.” “It is just to be able to do the things that you want to do. If you want to be able to greenlight and fully finance an Edward Berger film and release it, distribute it globally, you need the capital and also capabilities to do that. And the goal for us was to get to that place as soon as possible, but not sooner.”
“The road to growth and success is never a straight line [because] when you are growing really fast, sometimes growth hides a lot of problems,” he said, before adding that 2023 and 2024 were “phenomenal years at Mubi,” whereas 2025 was “slower.” “This year, again, incredible. The idea is not just grow, grow, grow. Become big, big, big.”
Cakarel recalled growing up in a small Mediterranean city on the West Coast of Turkey. “There was a beautiful arthouse cinema that my mom used to take me to. That’s how I fell in love with films,” he said, before mentioning how his 20-year-old sister, who still lives in that same town, needs to rely on “multiplexes in shopping centers” for entertainment. “It’s mostly really big, IP-based, you know, blockbusters, right?”
“Over the past 20 years, we saw this significant decline of the kind of films that we represent not being exposed, not being distributed, because it’s just very difficult to reach audiences,” he continued. “There’s this whole era of TikToks and so on and so forth, where we are just so addicted to immediate short-form content.”
As he “thinks about the future,” what Cakarel is observing is that younger audiences “are actually quite discerning.” “They are not easily fooled, and they seek high-quality entertainment in a world where they can reach anything, and they really value experiences.”
