Bleecker Street hires ex-A24 sales chief Frank Martinez to lead distribution
Bleecker Street has hired Frank Martinez as head of distribution. The company announced the appointment on 25 September 2026, with Martinez joining immediately. He takes charge of getting its films into cinemas across the country. It is a behind-the-screens role with a direct effect on what audiences can find at their local multiplex.
Martinez will oversee theatrical distribution strategy, planning and execution across the Bleecker Street and Crosswalk slates, as reported by Variety. That covers release dates, the number of cinemas booked and how a release widens after opening weekend. He will report to chief executive Kent Sanderson, according to Screen Daily. The reporting line is short, with a single boss and two slates to steer.
Martinez arrives after three years as head of theatrical sales at A24. Sales in this context means pitching finished films to cinema owners and agreeing the terms that put them on screens, often auditorium by auditorium. During that period, A24's yearly box-office total in US dollars rose from $151 million in 2023 to more than $333 million in 2026, Variety reported. Those company-wide annual totals give a sense of the scale he was handling.
Before A24, he served as executive director of domestic distribution at Paramount Pictures. Domestic, in industry language, means the United States and Canada, the home market that studios track separately from overseas. There he worked on Top Gun: Maverick and on releases across the Mission: Impossible and Scream franchises. Those are large, date-sensitive releases that require coordination across thousands of individual cinema bookings.
He began on the cinema side in theatre management and operations, the front-line work of staffing, projection and daily showtimes. He later moved into film programming and buying at Bow Tie Cinemas and at The Film Group, part of Rave Cinemas. Programming means deciding which titles play on which screens and for how long, balancing audience demand with limited auditoriums. That experience gave him the exhibitor's view before he moved across to the studio side of the table.
Martinez was a founding member of Film Row, a professional network for people working in film distribution and exhibition. He served as its president for two years before becoming honorary chair, a role that keeps him connected to peers across the business. He currently serves as vice president of the board of the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation, which supports workers across the cinema trade.
What makes this stand out is the breadth of the path, from box-office shifts to buying films for cinemas to selling studio titles. For general moviegoers, the effect is quiet but practical, felt in opening-weekend cinema counts and in how long films hold their screens. Success in the post is measured in towns reached, screens held and weeks played.
