Searchlight Pictures marketing chief Michelle Hooper is leaving the Disney-owned studio after two decades, stepping away as executive vice president of marketing in the middle of an awards season she was helping steer. The exit was first reported by Variety on Monday.
Hooper joined the studio in 2006, back when it was still Fox Searchlight, and her work across publicity, awards and creative marketing helped the specialty label become an Oscar regular. Over her time there, Searchlight earned nearly 200 Oscar nominations and won 49 of them, along with more than 130 Golden Globe nominations.
Five Best Picture Winners On Her Watch
The Oscar run during her tenure includes five best picture winners: Slumdog Millionaire, 12 Years a Slave, Birdman, The Shape of Water and Nomadland. All five also landed best picture nominations at the Golden Globes, and the studio picked up Globes best picture nominations for 15 other films over the same stretch.
The studio became part of Disney when the company bought 21st Century Fox in 2019, and it dropped “Fox” from its name the following year. Hooper stayed through that transition and kept running awards pushes under the new name, with Nomadland arriving as the studio’s first best picture winner as part of Disney.
Leaving Mid-Campaign
The timing is what stands out. This season Hooper was leading campaigns for Wild Horse Nine, the spy comedy that premiered at Venice, and Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, among other titles.
A longtime colleague described her as a leader with “keen ability to read a film for where it fits in the zeitgeist,” and called the departure “a loss for the studio,” adding that it “will be another’s gain.”
Before Searchlight, Hooper spent four years as vice president of entertainment publicity at Fox Broadcasting, working on campaigns for The Simpsons, Arrested Development and American Idol. She also worked at CBS Entertainment as director of entertainment communications, where she helped with publicity strategy for Survivor.
For Searchlight, the change comes with the heaviest stretch of the awards calendar still ahead, and with two of its contenders in the middle of their campaigns. Behemoth! stars Pedro Pascal, who has called his cello work in the film the hardest thing he has done, while Wild Horse Nine arrives with a Venice premiere behind it.
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