Despite numerous instances of damage control, the controversy around MUBI’s $100 million investment from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital for months refused to go away, and it derailed what could’ve been a year of increased growth for the arthouse streamer.
A new report in the Wall Street Journal on Friday detailed just how severe MUBI‘s losses were throughout 2025, with CEO Efe Cakarel speaking to the paper about what amounted to the streamer ending the year with roughly 200,000 fewer subscribers, down to as low as 1.2 million subscription subs, than it had prior to securing the investment from Sequoia and after it had earned its first Best Picture nomination for “The Substance.”
WSJ also reported that in addition to the subscriber losses, MUBI lost $7.3 million on revenue of $200 million, and it offered three months of salaries to a dozen of its 400 employees who chose to leave over the controversy before laying off a handful more staffers. MUBI had a goal in 2025 of reaching 2 million subscribers, which would’ve required adding 600,000 subs. Following the box office bomb of “Die, My Love,” which grossed only $12 million after MUBI acquired it for $24 million out of Cannes, MUBI had negative cash flow of $65 million in Q4 2025, WSJ reported. However, it had a strong first quarter of 2026 thanks to being the international distributor for four of the five Oscar nominees for Best International Feature Film and is now up to a record 1.7 million subscribers.
“Losing subscribers and growth slowing down — it was all very real,” Cakarel told WSJ while adding that working with Sequoia was necessary “to keep backing ambitious cinema.”
The trouble for MUBI began last summer when an Instagram post called out MUBI for its investment from Sequoia, saying that Sequoia had also invested in an Israeli military start up called Kela. The post suggested that MUBI was complicit in a genocide of Palestinian people, and as IndieWire originally reported, half of MUBI’s staffers signed an open letter demanding MUBI return its investment and distance itself from Sequoia.
After an initial statement that the staffers saw as dismissive of the concerns, MUBI denied such involvement and said that Sequoia was only a minority investor, it did not have oversight over editorial or financial decisions, and it agreed to launch an Ethical Funding and Investment Policy to govern future investments and partners the streamer worked with. The controversy persisted, and the LA Festival of Movies dropped MUBI as a presenting sponsor, a planned MUBI Fest in Mexico City was scrapped, a group of filmmakers signed an open letter urging MUBI to drop its ties to Sequoia, and the filmmakers of the Oscar-winning “No Other Land” even came out and said it turned down a distribution offer from MUBI, going without distribution entirely, over the Israeli concerns.
Earlier this week, MUBI announced another partnership with European content investment fund manager IPR.VC to fund European films, and the streamer is partnering on six different films at Cannes next month, including Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland,” and Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.”
