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.