This week I mentioned MUBI to a couple of people. They’d never heard of it. I said, “They made The Substance with Demi Moore. It’s an app on your SmartTV.” Again, crickets.
But MUBI is the new power player in Hollywood. In the last week the company — owned by an actual 49 year old Young Turk named Efe Cakarel — has bought a stunning nine movies out of the Cannes Film Festival.
Cakarel is not fooling around. Suddenly everyone’s going to be looking for the MUBI logo on their Smart TVs.
Among the films he bought was Jennifer Lawrence in “Die My Love,” for a shocking $24 million. That’s twenty four million dollars. Cakarel is going to push JLaw for an Oscar the way he did Demi Moore, which means another $20 or $30 million.
Others on the list include all hot titles that were available: Sentimental Value, The Sound of Falling, The Mastermind, The Secret Agent, Alpha, It Was Just an Accident and Sirât.
Cakarel may not be done.
Who is he? According to Wikipedia, Cakarel — “Following his graduation from the American Collegiate Institute in İzmir, Turkey, he earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to founding MUBI, he spent a number of years at Goldman Sachs[8] in investment banking. He was part of Turkey’s national math team and placed third in the European Math Olympiad.[9] He also has two patents related to monetization of web applications.
He’s really not playing around. Reports say MUBI — which started 18 years ago — is already worth a billion dollars. So they have money to spend, and they’re on a tear.
