Toronto opens a market today and nobody agrees what it is for

TIFF: The Market opens today and runs to 16 September. It is the first formal market in the festival's history, which is a strange sentence to write about an event that has been selling films for four decades.

The numbers are respectable for a launch. More than 130 buyers from 49 countries have confirmed, drawn from a list of 200 recommended by international sales agencies and funding bodies. More than 150 sales companies and promotional agencies have taken space, among them Goodfellas, Anton, Playtime, AGC Studios, CAA, Pyramide, XYZ Films, WME, FilmNation and UTA. On the buying side: Picturehouse, Tanweer, Cineart, Bona Film Group, Metropolitan Film Export, Tobis, Eagle Pictures and A Contracorriente.

The awkward arithmetic

Roughly 800 buyers already come to Toronto every year. They came before there was a market, because the films were here and so were the sellers.

So the 130 are not new arrivals. They are 130 who have opted into a formal structure that did not exist last year. The organisers have invited more than 250 international buyers on top of the usual 800, which is the number that will actually tell you whether this worked.

What it is competing with

Cannes has the Marché. The American Film Market has November. Toronto is inserting a formal market into a calendar where the two established fixtures sit either side of it, and where sellers have finite travel budgets and finite films to sell.

The argument for Toronto is simple enough: the buyers were coming anyway, the premieres are here, and a deal done in a screening-room corridor is a deal done without a booth fee. The argument against is that a market with no scarcity has no urgency, and urgency is what makes people close.

Sellers arriving this week have said, on and off the record, that they do not know what to expect. That is not scepticism so much as an honest description of a first edition.

The number that settles it

Not attendance. Completed sales, reported between now and the end of the month, and specifically how many of them involve a buyer who came because of The Market rather than in spite of it. TIFF runs to 20 September. The verdict will be written in the deal announcements that follow it.