Early on in “The Substance,” the body horror film starring Demi Moore that has been nominated for five Academy Awards, Dennis Quaid grotesquely consumes an endless amount of peel-and-eat shrimp while firing Ms. Moore’s character for the crime of turning 50. Shells fly and sweat collects on his upper lip while he gesticulates wildly with a crustacean wobbling in his fingertips.
It was this scene that convinced Efe Cakarel, the chief executive of the niche streaming service Mubi, that he had to buy the audacious horror film. The movie had been left for dead by Universal Pictures after the director, Coralie Fargeat, refused to recut it to executives’ tastes.
“This was something incredibly unique,” Mr. Cakarel said. “This was going to be our first global acquisition. I had never been this sure about anything.”
What followed was a $12 million purchase for the global rights to the film, and a rare success story in the middle of the doom-and-gloom times of the Hollywood film business. “The Substance” has now earned over $82 million worldwide and is up for best picture and best director, and Ms. Moore is the heavy favorite to win best actress at this weekend’s Academy Awards. And it has catapulted Mubi, once a company lost in the morass of innocuous four-letter word streaming services, into a real Hollywood player for the first time.
The company has made the leap with an unusual business model. Subscribers to the service, which starts at $14.99, get a curated selection of independent films, from classics to new releases. Subscribers to a higher tier, the $19.99 Mubi Go, also get a weekly ticket to a theater in the United States, Britain or Germany. The company, which is based in London and has 400 employees worldwide, declined to reveal how many people pay for the service but said 16 million people had registered on the site.
“Somehow they have managed to pull off the impossible,” Eric Fellner, producer of “The Substance,” said about Mubi. The company, he said, was able to get “a big audience globally to come out and watch it — which is no small feat these days — and still end up with a premium piece of work for their members.”
For Mr. Cakarel, a 48-year-old Turkish entrepreneur with an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. from Stanford, this was the plan all along.
He founded the company in 2007 — the same year that Netflix started streaming movies and television shows — as a service for movie lovers. The goal was to support the theatrical moviegoing experience and curate high-end films on its service. Originally called the Auteurs, the service began by offering subscribers a new film a day, with each movie staying on the service for 30 days. But Mr. Cakarel didn’t want just any film. He was interested in only the best films from the most acclaimed filmmakers.
“Mubi, from Day 1, has always been really opinionated about cinema,” he said.
It took years to get any of the Hollywood studios to buy into his idea.
“I would go to a major studio, and I would say, ‘These are the 32 titles that I would like to get,’” Mr. Cakarel said. “They would say: ‘No, this is not how this business works. If you’re getting those titles, you need to also get these titles.’”
“They would literally throw me out of their offices,” he added.
Then in 2015, both Sony and Paramount agreed to give Mubi films for its subscribers in Britain. In 2017, the company signed its first multiyear, multiterritory streaming deal with Universal Pictures, giving Mubi access internationally to films in its library like “A Serious Man,” by Joel and Ethan Coen; “Being John Malkovich,” by Spike Jonze; “Double Indemnity” from Billy Wilder; and a handful of films from Alfred Hitchcock.
In 2016, the company started distributing movies in theaters in select markets, ramping up in 2022 with films including Charlotte Wells’s “Aftersun,” which it released in Britain, Latin America and Germany, and Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” which it released in the same territories.
In 2022, Mr. Cakarel said he spent an “irrational amount” to acquire the U.S. and British theatrical rights to Park Chan-Wook’s “Decision to Leave,” which became the Korean filmmaker’s highest grossing movie in the United States. Its feature “The Girl With the Needle” is a nominee in the academy’s best international film category.
“It’s been about steady incremental growth over time,” said Jason Ropell, Mubi’s chief content officer. “Hiring the right people. Raising money. All of that has happened incrementally. We were ready when this opportunity arose.”
The opportunity to jump on “The Substance” arose after Universal Pictures told Ms. Fargeat that it would not release the film in its current form, which had been in the works for nearly five years, but she was allowed to shop it elsewhere.
“No one was taking my calls anymore,” she said at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival this month. “Everyone thought my movie was dead.”
But she entered the movie in the Cannes Film Festival, which accepted it into its 2024 competition.
Mr. Cakarel had been tracking Ms. Fargeat’s work after her 2017 film, “Revenge,” performed well with Mubi audiences. While vacationing in Vietnam, he saw the announcement of the Cannes lineup; reached out to Working Title, the producers behind the film; and days later was sitting in a screening room in London watching the movie.
“I left the screening room and was punching walls from excitement,” he said. “I hadn’t seen anything like this in a long time.”
Mr. Cakarel outbid the fellow indie distributor Neon and bought the worldwide rights to “The Substance” ahead of its Cannes debut. The film has since reached heights that perhaps only Ms. Fargeat thought possible.
When Ms. Moore won the best actress award at the Screen Actors Guild awards on Sunday, she thanked Mr. Cakarel. “I think as a result of the reception of this film, other bold original films will be made,” Mr. Cakarel said.
This year, the company bought the U.S. rights to the Hollywood satire “Lurker,” one of the few acquisitions at this winter’s Sundance Film Festival. And it recently announced the acquisition of the North American rights to “The History of Sound,” a gay romance film starring Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal.
“The platform itself is a fan favorite with filmmakers,” said the WME Independent agent Will Maxfield, who sold Ira Sachs’s “Passages” to the company in 2023 and negotiated the “Lurker” deal with Mubi at Sundance. “And they have been building their brand as a filmmaker-friendly distributor.”
The streamer is venturing into original productions for the first time this year with three films, Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind,” a nearly $20 million heist film starring Mr. O’Connor; Jim Jarmusch’s “Father, Mother, Sister, Brother,” starring Cate Blanchett and Adam Driver; and “Rosebush Pruning,” with Riley Keough and Elle Fanning. Mubi is still tiny compared with other streaming services, but it intends to release some 20 films this year theatrically — a welcome addition to the independent film space that has been struggling to connect with moviegoers.
“The past 18 years have been really good,” Mr. Cakarel said. “The next 18 years are going to be incredible. I feel like it’s Day 1. Everything is coming together.”
