Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: While buyers were a little lukewarm about a lot of the 2011 Toronto Film Festival fare, there was much buzz about The Raid, the Gareth Evans-directed martial arts film that won the Midnight Madness Award. The distribution rights to that movie are already controlled by Sony, so the action on the film consisted of studios vying for remake rights and agents and managers trying to sign Evans, the Welsh filmmaker who lives and makes his movies in Indonesia. Evans has signed with Management 360, and it will be that company that takes Evans around to meet studios that have been screening his movie over the past week. Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group smartly bought most distribution rights (Alliance has Canadian rights and Momentum has U.K.) based on partial footage in Cannes, and that gives the studio the inside track on the remake rights that are controlled by the film’s producers at XYZ Films. While Evans will eventually sign with an agency, he doesn’t need a job right now because he wants to go back to Jakarta and shoot a larger-scale film that incorporates the actors and storylines from The Raid. Then he will look to make a Hollywood film. Here’s the trailer: