In 2014 Megan Ellison made headlines by becoming the first woman to receive two best picture Academy Award nominations in the same year, in recognition of her role as producer of Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) and American Hustle (David O. Russell, 2013). She had also been nominated in 2012 for producing Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty (2012). Ellison was the only film producer included in Time magazine's 2014 list of ‘The 100 Most Influential People in the World’, placed in the ‘Pioneers’ category alongside NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and José Mujica, Uruguay's marijuana-legalising president (Time 2014). She was profiled in Fortune magazine's ‘40 under 40’ list of ‘the most influential young people in business’ (Fortune 2014), while also making Out magazine's list of ‘The Top 50 most powerful gay people’ (Out 2014), sharing the plaudits with Apple CEO Tim Cook. This flurry of recognition reflected the fact that Ellison, daughter of software billionaire Larry Ellison, was beginning to assert an unquestionable impact on the ecology of the American independent/specialty film business, via her production company Annapurna Pictures. Titles such as Her, American Hustle, and Zero Dark Thirty, placed alongside others such as The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012), Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2013), The Grandmaster (Wong Kar Wai, 2013) and Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller, 2014), conveyed emphatically the company's objective, stated on its website, of ‘creating sophisticated, high-quality films that might otherwise be deemed risky by contemporary Hollywood studios’ (Annapurna 2015).

That broader context of risk, referred to in the company's mission statement, is one that provides the narrative backdrop for Annapurna's and Ellison's rapid rise to prominence. The wake of the 2008 global financial crisis saw what Yannis Tzioumakis describes as an ‘extensive shakeout’ (2013: 28) of the American specialty film market, as evident in the folding of a number of the major studios’ specialty divisions, such as Warner Independent Pictures and Paramount Vantage. Allied to coterminous developments such as the parlous decline of DVD sales, Alisa Perren diagnosed the ‘near collapse of the specialty sector’ (2012: 231) at this time. With hindsight, it appears that rumours of its (near) death may have been greatly exaggerated: indeed, Geoff King argues that episodic narratives of crisis are one of the sector's enduring characteristics (2013). But what is clear is that the aftermath of 2008 has seen some discernible shifts in film financing and production.