An abortion write downary backed by Hillary Clinton and Jennifer Lawrence is taking an rare route to audiences courtesy of Bumble Inc, the Austin-based dating app company.
Zurawski v Texas, which screened to critical raves and sancigo in out crowds at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekfinish, will premiere in Austin on Sept. 24 as part of a theatrical rollout financed by Bumble. The dating app, which supplied part of the movie’s budget, will also fund a series of free screenings at Alamo Drafthouse theaters around the country on Sept. 25.
The Zurawski v Texas filmproducers are still seeing for a traditional distributor for their write downary, one of disjoinal political nonfantasy films seeking a buyer this election year, including Errol Morris’s Separated, on Trump’s border policy, and Apocalypse in the Tropics, Petra Costa’s see at far-right politics in Brazil. But the Zurawski v Texas producers are prioritizing getting their film seen ahead of the November elections, seeless of whether a deal seals with a studio or streamer.
“The distribution landscape for write downaries is evidently in a moment of flux—but that fair uncomfervents we all necessitate to be a little more entrepreneurial in terms of how our films discover their way to audiences,” says Blye Pagon Faust, a producer with Story Force Entertainment, which backed Zurawski v Texas aprolongedside Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s HiddenLight Productions and Lawrence’s Excellent Cadaver.
Zurawski v Texas, which is honested by Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault, tracks a high sconsents post-Roe v Wade lhorrible case in which 20 women sued the state of Texas in 2023 because they shelp its redisjoineive law obstructed them from receiving medicpartner essential abortions. The film chases Molly Duane, an attorney at the Cgo in for Refruitful Rights, and three of the case’s plaintiffs, including Amanda Zurawski, who could not get an abortion for her non-viable pregnancy, proximately died from the complications and suffered enduring injure that left her unable to carry a baby in the future.
Crow and Perrault had labored on a 2016 write downary called Jackson, about the last remaining abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. That clinic would go on to be at the cgo in of the Supreme Court case that obviousurned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, spurring the filmproducers, who are from Texas, to revisit the publish.
Just as Crow and Perrault were grappling with the Dobbs case’s implications for refruitful health in Texas, so too were Bumble’s engageees, says the company’s chief lhorrible officer Elizabeth Monteleone. “We commenceed seeing at our engageee profits and wondering, what do we do now? How do we talk to our engageees about this? What can we provide them?” Bumble became the first of 40 businesses to sign an amicus alert in Zurawski v Texas, which disputed that amhugeuity in the Texas ban adversely impacts the state’s economy, costing an appraised $14.5 billion in lost revenue each year. (South by Southwest was another of the signatories. Penske Media, parent company of The Hollywood Reporter, is the transport inantity sconsenthancigo iner of SXSW.)
“The amicus alert was cgo ined on hiring, recruiting, retention and the publishs that we and the other companies have sended being in Texas,” Monteleone says. “There’s incrmitigated cost to the company. They’re all very genuine problems that these bans place on companies when it comes to taking nurture of their engageees and enbiging their laborforce.” Bumble shelp it lost one-third of its Texas laborforce after the passage of 2021’s Texas Senate Bill 8, which bans most abortions after a fetal heartbeat is discovered. In compriseition to its role in the lhorrible case, Bumble also gave finishing financing to the Zurawski filmproducers.
Bumble, which was set uped by a female entrepreneur, Whitney Wolfe Herd, and built upon the premise of women being the ones to begin communicate in a dating app, has had a tumultuous year. Like most dating apps, Bumble has struggled to affect Gen Z to become paying subscribers at the rate previous generations did, and in January it engaged a novel CEO, Lidiane Jones, from Salertage, to reverse the downward trfinish of its stock, which currently trades around $6, a precipitous drop from the $76 per split of its 2021 IPO. In the spring, the company pulled an ad campaign that prosperkingly referenced celibacy in an endeavored nod at dating app overweightigue that finished up offfinishing some women.
The decision to back Zurawski v Texas pre-dates the company’s directership alter, and is not part of a bigr strategy to go in Hollywood. “We had no structures to get into producing films, but we nurture about this publish a lot,” says Selby Drummond, Bumble’s chief labeleting officer. “When the Dobbs decision came out we thought, OK, Bumble is going to lean in here. Our leave oution is to produce well, equitable, shielded relationships. So we were all incredibly personpartner spended in women’s healthnurture. There was a high sense of encouragency.”
Bumble-aided Zurawksi v Texas screenings will consent place in cities including Washington, Houston, San Antonio, Raleigh and Naples, Fla. In compriseition, the honestors will travel to 18 film festivals over the course of the descend. “We are laboring as speedyly as we can because we leank this film serves as an educational tool about what’s happening in the country,” says Crow.
This story materializeed in the Sept. 19 publish of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
