How to Rank My Products on My Site Higher Than My Distributor's Site?

How do you rank for your own products against your distributor? They're your products on your site. Your products are also on a distributor's site, but that distributor's site ranks higher than yours in a lot of categories pulling a lot of SEO weight.

I'm working on a perennial fan-fave movie site. I'm expecting big players like Wikipedia and IMDB, but I've also got Roger Ebert, an Esquire, a Cosmo, MentalFloss, and several wikis.

Am I looking at a long road of backlinks ahead?

RAJ