Dallas Sonnier


Dallas Sonnier is an American film producer, publisher, and entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder of Cinestate and, from 2018, the publisher of Fangoria magazine. He has producing credits on the films Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99, The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, and Dragged Across Concrete, among others. In 2018, he purchased the rights to Fangoria and relaunched the defunct magazine as a print-only publication; he additionally expanded the Fangoria brand to encompass a publishing and film production company.
Beginning his career as an agent, Sonnier later gravitated towards production, initially founding the California-based Caliber Media with partner Jack Heller. Wanting to bring major film productions to the state of Texas, he returned there in 2016 to found the Dallas-based production company Cinestate.

Early life and education

Dallas Sonnier was born Joseph Albert Sonnier IV in the Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, US. His parents, Becky and Dr. Joseph Sonnier moved from Shreveport, Louisiana to Dallas, Texas, shortly before he was born in 1980. Sonnier's nickname originated with his parents referring to him as “the Dallas baby” and the moniker stuck with him throughout his life.
Sonnier developed an ambition to begin making movies while still in high school; to this end, he began taking continuing education classes in screenwriting at Southern Methodist University during the Summer before his senior year at Highland Park High School. He attended film classes at the University of Southern California while still in high school, and later as an undergrad, becoming one of five students to inaugurate the school's joint business-film program, introducing him to studio executives, entertainment attorneys, agents, and talent managers. During this period, he learned about aspects of the film making process beyond writing and directing.

Career

After graduating from USC, Sonnier obtained a job with United Talent Agency, beginning in the mailroom and working his way up to Agent Trainee. After a few years, he left the agency to join a start-up management firm run by David Schiff. In 2008, Sonnier and Jack Heller, a USC classmate, founded Caliber Media. While attending San Diego Comic Con, the pair met former wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin, eventually collaborating with him on nine low-budget action movies that were sold to distributors and premiered on DVD and video-on-demand. Caliber segued into other independent projects before raising funds for two years in order to shoot Bone Tomahawk; the script had been written by one of the pair's clients, S. Craig Zahler, whom they had been managing for two years.
Zahler's script attracted Kurt Russell and Richard Jenkins, but the interested financiers wanted the script shortened. After several years of negotiations, Russell's agents were ready to move on if the movie was not fully financed in a matter of months. To secure financing for the film, in 2014, Sonnier took a new mortgage on his house. The film went on to become a financial and critical success, earning $10 million, a figure five times its $5 million budget, and garnering a 91% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Following production on Bone Tomahawk, Sonnier departed Caliber to found Cinestate, a production company based in Dallas, with the intention of bringing film production to Texas. Sonnier would go on to collaborate with Zahler for two more films, Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete.

Production philosophy

Sonnier's has stated that his approach to production is giving total creative freedom to writers and directors while also keeping budgets low enough that their projects can still be profitable. In interviews, he has been adamant about not making films that “pander” to any audience, as well as not filtering directors’ creativity. His business model relies on making films as widely available as possible—through purchase, rental, or streaming—on multiple platforms to “piece together” revenue from every possible source.
Sonnier is also an advocate for filmmaking outside of New York and Los Angeles and not relying on the model of traditional studio systems.

Cinestate

Sonnier founded Cinestate upon his move back to Dallas from California.
According to Sonnier, the unique selling point of the company is that the company produces films that are creatively unfiltered by producers or executives, and which represent the artistic vision of their creators.
While revenue from Cinestate productions are a fraction of major studio releases, the company remains profitable by keeping production costs low and relying on word-of-mouth.
In 2018, Sonnier completed the deal to acquire all the assets and trademarks of the Fangoria brand, including the horror movie magazine, and relaunched it as a division of Cinestate. Fangoria Magazine became print only and Sonnier hired a brand-new editor-in-chief, Phil Nobile Jr. of Birth.Movies.Death. As part of the arrangement, Cinestate controls all material from over 300 issues of Fangoria Magazine, which means all articles, photos, and exclusive interviews, spanning the past 40 years. Sonnier and his team are further developing Fangoria into a brand for producing movies and podcasts, as well as publishing horror novels.
Cinestate has also extended its brand into other content, publishing six genre novels, as well as audiobook adaptations of screenplays.

Movies