Efe Çakarel and the value of a missing film

Efe Çakarel wanted to watch a film. He was in a café in Tokyo, the connection was fast, and the film was Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. Yet the internet could not supply the evening he had in mind. For most people, this would have been an invitation to order another coffee. Çakarel began thinking about a company.

The irritation mattered because the parts appeared to be in place. People were already watching long videos online. Japan had the devices, the audience and the broadband. The missing piece was a legitimate way to get that particular film onto his screen. On the flight back to San Francisco, he started a business plan. In 2007, he founded the venture that became MUBI.

It is a pleasing origin for a film business: an absence, a desire, a journey. The complication arrived after the opening scene. Being able to build a streaming platform did not mean that anyone would let him put films on it. The future had excellent connectivity and rather a lot of contracts.

The engineer takes a different exit

Çakarel grew up in Izmir, Turkey, and attended the American Collegiate Institute. He went on to study electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, then earned an MBA at Stanford. Goldman Sachs supplied another kind of education, in investment banking in London and New York. His résumé could have led quite comfortably away from cinemas.

There was a family route available, too. His father was an entrepreneur in electrical engineering, and Çakarel has described being raised with the expectation that he would eventually take over the business. He had considered architecture. At MIT, the developing internet caught his attention. Adding computer science to electrical engineering gave him room to follow that interest.

The attraction of banking was practical. A business would need to raise money, make acquisitions and understand its finances. Those were things he could learn. Later, the combination became useful: he could understand the machinery, explain a business to investors and care about what appeared on the screen. None of those abilities, taken alone, would have supplied the whole enterprise.

A good idea meets the rights department

The company began as The Auteurs, a name that announced its loyalties more clearly than it helped people spell its web address. Its early identity included a social network for film lovers. The proposition was appealing; the audience was harder to assemble. A service made for computer screens still had to find its place in people’s evenings.

A deal bringing MUBI to PlayStation looked like an answer. Audience numbers rose at launch, then fell back. Cash grew scarce. Çakarel cut staff and considered whether to continue. The episode is an awkward fit for the tidy entrepreneurial anecdote in which an insight is followed immediately by a queue of customers. Here, the insight survived while the business kept needing repairs.

He stayed because he believed that the audience existed, even if the route to it remained unfinished. That distinction explains much of his career. Predicting that people would watch films through the internet was one task. Building a company that could earn a living helping them do it was a much longer assignment.

The new name acquired its own subplot. Çakarel wanted four letters that travelled easily between languages. Friends at Dentsu in Tokyo proposed MUBI. The domain belonged to an electrical-appliance shop owner in Pakistan. As Çakarel tells it, the negotiation became so confused that he paid $14,000 for the whole shop, then returned the assets he did not need. A global film company had briefly taken a detour through refrigerator repairs.

Thirty films, and a reason to press play

MUBI’s defining early subscription offer made a virtue of restraint. One film arrived each day; each stayed for 30 days. There were always 30 to choose from. A catalogue could be small enough to look through, and a departure date gave an evening’s entertainment a deadline. The service had the rhythm of a programme rather than a warehouse.

Çakarel’s argument began with the time a film asks of its viewer. A song can introduce itself in seconds. A film requires a larger commitment. A recommendation from someone whose judgment you trust can help you make it. MUBI wanted that relationship with its audience, even when the recommendation was unfamiliar, foreign-language or decades old.

He has also resisted the idea that viewers must already be specialists. He enjoys big studio films and has joked about the encyclopedic knowledge of his own programmers. His audience could include people who simply wanted someone to put a worthwhile film in front of them. There is something hospitable about that ambition. You need not pass an entrance examination before the lights go down.

“We stand by great cinema and curation.”

Efe Çakarel, 2018

The product eventually grew beyond that original limit. In a 2021 interview, he described a newly opened library of hundreds of additional films alongside the daily selection. The shape changed while the act of choosing remained central. A larger collection still needed an editorial point of view; expanding the shelves did not relieve anyone of the job of deciding what belonged on them.

The streaming founder who wanted a cinema ticket

In 2015, MUBI moved into theatrical distribution with Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights, working with New Wave Films. It was a three-part work running about six hours. An accountant designing a gentle introduction to the cinema business might have asked for something shorter. Çakarel saw a film that deserved a release and a chance to rethink how a release could work.

The choice made his position tangible. Getting a film onto a laptop did not exhaust his interest in it. He wanted people to encounter films in cinemas, too. Working with a distributor that shared MUBI’s tastes offered a way to connect those experiences. The company could participate in the life of a film before it reached the subscription service.

The acquisition of The Match Factory and Match Factory Productions in January 2022 extended that reach. The German companies brought experience in international sales and production, and relationships with filmmakers whose work MUBI already knew. Michael Weber and his colleagues had helped films travel across borders. Bringing those abilities inside MUBI made the company’s ambitions less dependent on waiting for finished work to become available.

MUBI GO takes another route to the same audience, including a selected cinema ticket each week in participating markets. Its arrival in Mexico in 2025 added a concrete invitation to leave the house. For a founder whose business began with a missing online film, sending a customer towards a cinema is a consistent extension of the idea: make the encounter possible.

A hundred million dollars, and a harder conversation

Growth brought a different test of judgment. In 2025, MUBI secured $100 million in investment from Sequoia Capital. Çakarel celebrated the backing publicly. Filmmakers and subscribers then challenged the relationship because Sequoia had also invested in Kela, an Israeli defense technology company. A business built around a community of artists had discovered that its financing was part of the conversation, too.

In August, Çakarel responded with a letter defending MUBI’s independence and disputing the suggestion that its work funded the war. He announced an ethical funding policy, an artists’ advisory body and expanded support for artists at risk. Those proposals addressed a question that a film catalogue could not answer: how should an institution’s choices about money relate to the values its audience attaches to it?

The consequences were measurable. Reporting in April 2026 put the subscriber loss during 2025 at more than 200,000. Çakarel acknowledged the slowdown. By the end of the first quarter of 2026, he said the subscriber count had recovered to 1.7 million. These are dated subscription figures, a more specific measure than the much larger community-membership numbers used in earlier accounts of MUBI.

He continued to describe plans to broaden the slate and expand in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. The dispute gives those ambitions a harder setting. A company can raise capital quickly; the people who gave it their trust have their own timetable. For Çakarel, choosing a film and choosing a financial partner now sit within the same public account of what MUBI represents.

Keep the machines. Let people make the films.

At the Zurich Summit in September 2026, Çakarel drew another boundary. MUBI was using artificial intelligence in business functions, including engineering and forecasting. For the films themselves, he wanted distance. His reasoning allowed for the possibility that generated entertainment would become technically accomplished. Human intention, authorship and the circumstances of making a film would become more valuable as polished material became easier to produce.

That position returns him to an old problem with new proportions. The early internet promised access; a world of generated entertainment promises almost limitless supply. His proposed answer still depends on a person making a choice and other people trusting it. He also renewed his ambition for physical cinemas. The original service is becoming an argument for an institution that can stay with films over time.

There are smaller pleasures in this life of large plans. His favourite film is Fellini’s 8½. Asked for an ideal evening at home, he offered cacio e pepe, Barolo and a double bill of Elio Petri and Akira Kurosawa. Dinner, apparently, also benefits from programming.

In London, he has singled out a slice of Torta Aurora at Marchesi 1824, with cappuccino and a book, as a pleasure worth making time for. He has spoken of wanting to make a film with Martin Scorsese. The scale runs from a quiet afternoon to a collaboration with a director he admires. Behind both is a recognisable appetite: to arrange the conditions for something worth experiencing, then give it his attention.