The sudden end of Participant Media came as a shock to many in the entertainment industry, but it hit documentary filmmakers particularly hard, with some concerned that backers for serious-minded, issue-driven projects are becoming ever more scarce.
Since its founding in 2004, the company — which sought to bring stories that could spark change to a wide audience — has been a staunch supporter of documentaries focused on social and justice issues, funded by the largesse of a billionaire, ex-eBay president Jeff Skoll.
None of its other nonfiction titles quite achieved the heights of 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, released just two years after the company was formed: The Davis Guggenheim-directed film about Al Gore’s climate change slideshow rocketed to become the third-highest-grossing doc ever at the time and focused mainstream attention on climate change, inspiring studies about its impact. “That’s why we exist,” Skoll told The Hollywood Reporter in 2006, as Truth became a sensation. “To help some of these projects get made, to reach audiences and make a difference in the world.”
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Participant’s documentaries accumulated awards (American Factory, Citizenfour), provoked sustained media attention and, sometimes, controversy (The Cove, Waiting for “Superman”) and, in some cases, were credited with bringing about larger awareness to the issues they spotlighted (The Look of Silence, Citizenfour).
For issues-focused documentary filmmakers, Participant was an ally, a champion and deep-pocketed backer willing to tackle tough subjects in an increasingly commercialized nonfiction environment. But now, as industrywide cost-cutting and corporate consolidation have hit even the once-booming documentary sector, some filmmakers see the end of Participant as part of a larger trend. “The ecosystem for serious social-issue documentaries was already challenging before today and as of today, it just got a lot more challenging,” says RBG (2018) and My Name Is Pauli Murray (2021) co-director Julie Cohen in an interview on Tuesday. “It is just not easy to get a documentary on a serious issue developed, let alone funded, let alone distributed out into the world, and Participant was one of the major avenues for that happening and also one of the best. So to have them disappear is devastating.”
Margaret Brown, who worked with the company on 2014’s The Great Invisible and 2022’s Descendant, wrote in an email, “They were not like any other company in the way art and activism were partnered.” (Indeed, as former Participant CEO Jim Berk told THR in 2010 about the philosophy of the company, “A film could lose money but actually be ‘profitable’ for us in terms of its impact on the issue.”)
Participant’s track record of making purpose-driven documentaries that could find an audience helped smooth the way for those kinds of stories in the marketplace. Participant’s former chief content officer Diane Weyermann (who died in 2021 after a battle with cancer), formerly a public interest lawyer and the head of the Sundance Institute’s documentary program, was legendary in nonfiction circles for her taste and her advocacy for films she believed in. Weyermann championed An Inconvenient Truth even after executives at one major studio fell asleep during an early screening, Guggenheim recalled to The New York Times in 2021. “Just wait till Sundance,” he recalls her saying, not giving up.
To have Weyermann choose to work on a film entailed a certain level of prestige that had practical implications, said filmmaker Dawn Porter, who worked with the company on 2020’s John Lewis: Good Trouble (Participant helped distribute the film) and sat on its board. “That meant something in the marketplace: Participant has vetted this and selected this for you. It was kind of like being selected for Criterion,” Porter said. Not only that, but Participant was willing to invest in these stories. “If you are a buyer and you have a well-respected, curatorial company that’s also putting money in, that film gets to the top of the consideration list,” Porter notes.
Another quality that distinguished Participant for justice-focused documentarians was that the company had an entire department dedicated to impact campaigns — outreach programs that attempt to get audiences further engaged in the core issues of the film. Cohen notes that for RBG, Participant organized “hundreds” of screenings around the country for various groups over several months in 2018, connecting the film’s portrait of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the larger feminist movement amid the Donald Trump presidency. “There really was no one else that could do a huge full-blown engagement and impact campaign in the way that Participant did for a documentary,” Cohen said. In the summer of 2018, RBG became a surprise box office success, racking up over $14 million in the U.S.
Filmmaker Robert Kenner (Merchants of Doubt, Food, Inc.) was in the middle of his campaign for this year’s Food, Inc. 2, about the corporate consolidation of the food industry, when the news broke on Tuesday that Participant was shuttering. He had just spent time in Washington, D.C., with the film, holding a screening for congressional members including Sen. Jon Tester and Sen. Cory Booker (who appear in the film) and taking meetings with the Food and Drug Administration and the White House about front-of-package food labeling, analogous to systems in Chile, Mexico and Canada. “Those are ongoing meetings and I’m not sure how they will be affected post their breakup. So that’s the one thing that’s of concern more than the release of the film,” which is being handled by Magnolia Pictures, he said.
Meanwhile, as Participant shuts down, the options for documentaries about weighty subjects appear to be narrowing after major mergers and an industrywide contraction. In 2022, the same year that Discovery merged with Warner Bros., CNN Films — behind Blackfish (2013), The Hunting Ground (2015) and Navalny (2022) — cut back on commissioning projects from outside partners, while its nascent streamer CNN+ also shut down. Showtime laid off the documentary head who presided over 2022’s We Need to Talk About Cosby and 2016-23’s The Circus as it merged with MTV Entertainment Studios last year, while HBO has cut back and feels like it’s “on hold,” according to Kenner. Netflix, whose longtime head of documentaries and indies Lisa Nishimura exited in 2023, downsized its originals release slate in 2023, according to reporting from Bloomberg.
For Geeta Gandbhir, the co-director of 2022’s Participant-co-produced Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, the current contraction feels like a return to an earlier time. Gandbhir recalled when “there were maybe two places that you could go to get your documentary funded and/or distributed, which was PBS and then HBO.” That changed in the 2010s, as the rise of streamers resulted in a spike in nonfiction titles, especially those with broad commercial potential, like celebrity and sports stories and true-crime tales. “Obviously we’re seeing the inability to monetize documentary, to again make it something as profitable as was hoped for,” Gandbhir said. “With Participant going away, it feels a little bit like the canary in the coal mine; it feels like we are going back to that time period where people are having to really look for other ways to fund their documentaries.”
What are those other options? Grants, support from philanthropists and PBS remain standbys, as well as funding from major companies and streamers that selectively work on social-issue documentaries. “We just have to hope that other executives will want to champion these kinds of films,” wrote Brown. The breakout success of Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV — an investigation from past New York Times Presents contributors into workplace conditions on former Nickelodeon shows that combines both nostalgia and the larger issue of child labor — this spring on Max could potentially help boost those chances.
Documentary filmmakers focused on issue stories are “resilient,” said Porter. “It just feels like a lot of pressures are coming into focus all at the same time. Simultaneous pressure on the documentary ecosystem is feeling kind of relentless right now.”
