Who Wins When MUBI Loses

The numbers are out, and they are instructive. In 2025, MUBI lost 200,000 subscribers. At its nadir the arthouse streamer had 1.2 million paying customers. It had aimed for 2 million. Its largest theatrical acquisition — Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love, purchased out of Cannes for $24 million — grossed $11.9 million worldwide. Negative cash flow in Q4 2025: $5 million. A dozen of MUBI's 400 employees took three months of salary to leave over a controversy that the company's leadership describes, with understandable exhaustion, as a PR nightmare.

The controversy itself is by now familiar: Sequoia Capital invested $100 million in MUBI and received minority stake ownership in return. Sequoia had also invested in Kela, an Israeli defense-tech company. Film Workers for Palestine organized. Filmmakers signed open letters. The LA Festival of Movies dropped MUBI as a presenting sponsor. The filmmakers of No Other Land, an Oscar-winning documentary about the displacement of Palestinian families, rejected a MUBI distribution offer outright, choosing no distribution over this particular distributor. By any measure, the campaign worked.

And here is the question that interests me: what did the campaign accomplish, for whom, and at what cost?

The moral clarity of the campaign is not hard to state. If you believe that Sequoia Capital's investment in Kela made MUBI complicit in Israeli military operations in Gaza, then boycotting MUBI was the correct response. The logic is coherent: money flows through institutions, institutions are choices, choices have moral weight. You don't get to take Sequoia's billion-dollar valuation without some accountability for where Sequoia's money comes from. This is not a difficult argument. MUBI's CEO understood it; that's why he committed to an Ethical Funding and Investment Policy rather than simply telling critics to look at MUBI's editorial record.

But the campaign's success — 200,000 subscribers lost, record Q4 cash burn, distribution infrastructure strained — raises a second question the campaign did not ask. What is MUBI for? And who else was doing what MUBI does?

The arthouse streaming landscape is not crowded. The Criterion Channel exists; it curates a magnificent archive and releases its Blu-rays to the cultists who need them. MAQAM exists in France. OVID.tv exists in the United States, aggressively underfunded and boutique by necessity. MUBI occupies a position that no one else occupies: a well-capitalized international streamer with genuine editorial conviction, willing to spend $24 million on a Lynne Ramsay film and put it on 1,500 screens before it hits the platform, building the infrastructure that makes ambitious theatrical filmmaking economically viable for directors who are not named Christopher Nolan.

Die My Love bombed. That is a real fact. Ramsay made a difficult film — documented in critical accounts as abrasive, demanding, non-commercial — and MUBI gave it a genuine theatrical run anyway, at significant financial cost. The bomb hurt MUBI. The boycott hurt it further. The combination nearly ended it.

Now: what happens to Lynne Ramsay's next film if MUBI doesn't survive long enough to buy it?

I am not asking this rhetorically. I am asking it as a structural question about film infrastructure, because I think the boycott campaign's advocates have not engaged with it seriously. The argument embedded in the campaign is that MUBI's moral failings made it a legitimate target regardless of what it represented structurally. Institutions can be replaced. Better institutions will emerge. The destruction of a compromised institution clears the ground for a better one.

This argument has a record. It is not consistently good. The institutions that get destroyed by principled campaigns do not automatically generate principled replacements. Sometimes they generate nothing. Sometimes they generate something worse — a market consolidated toward players who never had ideological commitments in the first place, and who therefore have nothing to be boycotted for.

MUBI's recovery, as it turns out, came not from ideological rehabilitation but from international distribution of four of the five Oscar nominees for Best International Feature Film. The audience that returned in Q1 2026 was not the audience that had come back convinced of MUBI's political innocence — it was an audience attracted by MUBI's catalog of films they wanted to see. This is how the market actually works: people subscribe to watch something, not to make a statement.

The full financial disclosure from CEO Efe Cakarel is notable for one phrase in particular. Working with Sequoia, he told the Wall Street Journal, was necessary "to keep backing ambitious cinema." This is either cynical self-justification or a genuine statement about the capitalization required to operate at the level MUBI operates at. I lean toward both being true simultaneously. The economics of arthouse distribution do not permit institutions to be funded entirely by subscribers committed to right-on principles. The money has to come from somewhere, and large-scale capital has political entanglements. This has been true of film production since the medium existed.

Which is not to say that political entanglements should be ignored, or that MUBI's backers should not be scrutinized. It is to say that the campaign that destroyed the infrastructure treated the political entanglement as the only relevant fact — and the structural question of what happens to ambitious filmmaking when that infrastructure contracts was not asked.

There is one concrete thing to watch. MUBI is now partnering on six films at Cannes next month. One of them is Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Schoenbrun is the director of I Saw the TV Glow, which I have argued elsewhere was the most significant film of 2024 from the perspective of what cinema knows about the experience of failing to recognize yourself — which is, among other things, the experience of dissociation, of life lived adjacent to the self you are supposed to have. Schoenbrun's new film will premiere at Cannes. MUBI, which barely survived its 2025, will be in the room.

The arthouse audience that boycotted MUBI, and then came back for the Oscar nominees, and will presumably come back for Schoenbrun's Cannes premiere — that audience needs to understand what it almost destroyed, and why it recovered in the way that it did. Not to feel guilty. To think more carefully, the next time, about the difference between holding an institution accountable and hollowing out the only infrastructure committed to the kind of cinema it claims to care about.

Sources

IndieWire (April 11, 2026): MUBI Lost 200,000 Subscribers Following Its 2025 PR Nightmare. Wall Street Journal (primary disclosure, paywalled): How VC Money and Israel Outrage Derailed a Hot Hollywood Startup. IndieWire: MUBI CEO Addresses Backlash Over Funding. IndieWire: LA Festival of Movies Parts Ways With MUBI. IndieWire: No Other Land Rejected MUBI Distribution Deal. Wikipedia: Die My Love — box office data. Wikipedia: MUBI — service overview and financial history.