This blog explores US influence (financial + cultural), Anglocentric (ie, primarily English) representations, digitisation, ownership, industry developments, audience, media theories, tracking key news + events, with Film/Media A-Level/undergrad students + educators in mind. Examples often include Sheffield's Warp (Indie) and London/LA-based Working Title (NBC-Universal subsidiary), ie This is England/Four Lions v Bridget Jones/Green Zone! Please acknowledge the source/blog author: Mr D Burrowes
$100m+ budget movies are known as tentpoles for a simple reason: no company can afford too many consecutive flops at this level.
So why, as Elberse argues they all should, do the big 5 all focus on tentpole or (as Elberse calls them) blockbuster productions?
Remember too that the prints & marketing spend is typically about the same as the production budget which is why, with cinema's cut factored in, box office needs to hit triple the production budget to start making money!!
2019 distributors total box office (the-numbers - no surprise who's #1!! STX [Wiki] join Lionsgate as mini-majors - Paramount actually fell below Lionsgate...) Note that various big 5 subsidiaries are given separate listings
UPDATE: 1 OF 5 RECOMMENDED MOVIES TO STREAM ON BLOODYDISGUSTING.COM GUIDE, APRIL 2020. https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3611040/editorial-diving-weird-world-fan-made-horror-games/
Haunted by its synonymous shadow: spookily TWO ghost stories out (URL)
October 29th and still no box office hits for Ghost Stories - I wonder if the release of A Ghost Story, with a couple of US stars (UK release August 11th: Deadline), but a miserable flop (under $2m worldwide: The-Numbers; BoM), is undermining release plans? The-Numbers; BoxofficeMojo. Its extraordinary how often similarly themed/named movies emerge at the same time, something that helped undermine The World's End (WT) too. Ghost Stories has been screened at the London Film Festival, but its looking doubtful for a theatrical release.
IFC Midnight is acquiring North American distribution rights to supernatural thriller Ghost Stories from Altitude Film Sales. The film stars Andy Nyman, Alex Lawther, Martin Freeman and Paul
Whitehouse. Its based on the Olivier-nominated stage production and is
co-written and directed by Nyman and Jeremy Dyson. The deal was negotiated by Altitude’s Mike Runagall on behalf of the filmmakers with Arianna Bocco of IFC Films. The film is produced for Warp Films by Claire Jones (Sightseers, Kill List), and Robin Gutch (’71, Kill List) and is backed by Ultimate Pictures and Screen Yorkshire. Catalyst Global Media and Screen Yorkshire serve as executive
producers. Altitude Film Sales is handling worldwide sales. Lionsgate
will distribute the film in the UK/Ireland in Spring 2018. Ghost Stories has its World Premiere today (Thursday 5 October) at the BFI London Film Festival. [Screen Daily 5th October 2017 report, spotted by Richard]
Warp announced a new film in Feb 2016, already picked up by 'big 7' Lionsgate for UK distribution, with Altitude handling international sales
Pre-selling rights at the pre-production stage is common for Indies (legendary social realist auteurs Ken Loach + Mike Leigh have done this throughout their careers). German rights were also pre-sold to Tele München/Concorde after a pitch at the Berlin European Film Market in feb 2016
This is an adaptation of an internationally successful play, bringing some comparisons with Woman in Black (but note the IP is limited compared to Les Mis)
Warp's reputation for allowing creatives to retain control, not the accountants, saw Nyman reject interest from Hollywood studios (who immediately suggested star-based changes!)
Martin Freeman's casting led most reports; star of the $3bn Hobbit franchise this suggests a more ambitious/commercial approach from Warp ...
...BUT he's no A-lister (the IP and CGI sold the Hobbit, not a UK TV star!), and its no coincidence that as of May 2017 the UK remains the only territory with a distributor
Warp's online efforts at building interest and an audience through the pre-/production/post- stages has been typically lax ...
... BUT co-director/writer Andy Nyman has exemplified the ability of cast and crew to use social media to promote a production (eg the 5 crew badges Twitter draw)
... AND Altitude have been very active
Lionsgate UK, however, have yet to properly launch; their website contains only a coming soon message!
PRODUCTION ANNOUNCED AT A FAN FEST...
Okay, so its not the 80,000 packed into the Dallas Cowboys football stadium just to see a teaser trailer (1 strand of the epic Avatar campaign, arranged through ComicCon, the world's leading fan forum for such announcements), but Ghost Stories is following a smart path of pre-/production promotion, launching a 'concept teaser trailer' at FrightFest:
ScreenDaily (US) announce the production, Feb 2016
So much for the auteur theory! Empire (UK) also led on Freeman's involvement
Casting Martin Freeman seems a real coup for Warp - after all, he was the lead in the tentpole Hobbit franchise (combined budgets $675m, box office $2.9bn). However, IP was the key marketing factor there, and he cannot be considered an A-List star any more than Lord of the Rings star Andy Serkis can 'open a film' by himself. Freeman's presence does help with marketing though, and gaining distribution, but the lack of progress there is significant. Hollywood conglomerate Lionsgate picking the film up for distribution is a coup, as one of what many now argue should be called the big seven to reflect their considerable global success in recent years (expanding the traditional big six of Disney, Warner Bros, Fox, Universal, Sony, Paramount).
Is Hobbit Freeman really such a BIG star...?!
No star billing!
However, that is for the UK only (reflecting Freeman's greater profile in his home market, where TV show The Office made him a star, popular with men and women as his role centered on a romance narrative), Lionsgate are not, for example, picking it up for the US or any other territories. Many of Warp's films (especially on their digital subsidiary Warp X, or the also low budget Warp Australia) have failed to attain UK distribution, with fewer still getting theatrical release in the US or other markets.
Even when they have, the case of Tyrannosaur is typical of their struggles to make impact with films lacking stars, and typically centred on working class protagonists, often outside of the London setting that is familiar to an international audience. Tyrannosaur's US distributor sent 2 prints on a 4-month arthouse circuit, taking a mere $22k as part of a $450K global take (about 80% from the UK) on a £750K budget. Even more successful US releases have been relative successes only: both Four Lions and This is England took 3 months there to reach a $300K total, peaking at just 14 screens. This would represent a small % of a WT flop, with 8/9 figure takes their usual expectation, way beyond the 5/6 figure Warp takes!
Pre-selling rights, the power of IP
Indeed, they have actually pre-sold the UK and German rights, with shooting not commencing until 6 months after Lionsgate picked it up, based on Freeman being attached and the marketing potential of the IP (intellectual property) of a hit West End play that also gained multiple international markets, from Russia to Peru! This is a financing model more typical of the very low budget social realist movies by British auteurs Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, whose lack of scripting routinely denies them access to UK grants through the BFI/UKFC, but who typically pre-sell rights to several European territories to fund their productions. Without the additional element of a hit book, however, it is questionable how far the theatre link will guarantee box office success. Working Title have had success adapting multiple hit books, not least the Bridget Jones franchise (and About a Boy, which WTTV have also adapted into an NBC TV series), and of course had huge success with Les Miserables - though its $61m budget and global distribution through parent company Universal, plus the multiple A-list cast, helped!
A significant genre change? Abandoning social realism?
However, this is actually a notable step away from Warp's typical genre base - most movies have blended in/hybridised a social realist approach to more saleable genres, from their debut feature Dead Man's Shoes (horror) to teen rom-com Submarine (although the Warp X fantasy with animation Bunny and the Bull was a clear exception). The Screen feature announcing the movie noted the Woman in Black comparison: a low budget horror fantasy that hit big, and this (alongside the IP factor with the promise of pre-built recognition), given Freeman's modest international profile, was probably key to the pitch, given the film industry's aversion to original ideas, which are hard to market. Warp's high concept, high budget TV co-production with Sky Atlantic, Lost Panthers, is another signal of a company preparing to give commercial returns a higher priority - but until we see the same routine level of narrow stereotypes in characters and setting, and US stars among their cast (the Working Title model), it would be premature to think this clearly signals a change.
The importance of creative relationships and the Warp brand
It must be noted that Warp are the production company while the company that will get the main co-production credit, Altitude, are exclusively handling sales. The importance of personal relationships in this large-scale, even at Warp's level, industry is clear to see: Altitude's founder, Will Clarke, was formerly a key figure in Optimum Releasing, UK distributor of many Warp releases (now StudioCanalUK, just another NBCUniversal subsidiary!).
Warp's typical funding (centred on grants plus pre-selling UK TV rights to either BBC or C4/Film 4) model, and low budgets, enables them to take more creative risks than Working Title (though their selection of an Indian director for historical epic Elizabeth, who confessed to know nothing of the monarch, shows they too can take risks). This reputation for allowing the creatives, not the accountants, to retain control, was behind Nyman's choosing to go with them. In reading the quotes below, from ScreenDaily, consider the experience of Coz Greenop, whose £30K Wandering Rose became Demon Baby at the hands of its US distributors, a title (and trailer) that rather misrepresented the film.
Speaking on a panel about the future of UK horror filmmaking, chaired by Screen, Nyman said there had been interest from US studios back in 2010, when the show was playing in the West End. But they decided to team with Warp in order to retain creative control.“There was a lot of interest early on from a couple of big American studios that wanted to do it, but they hadn’t even seen it,” said Nyman.... Nyman recalled changes suggested by US execs that ultimately convinced them to team with UK producers.“The first meeting we had with an American producer, they said we should take one particular character, turn it into a girl and it make it a breakout role for someone from the Disney channel,” said Nyman.“We thought, ‘Oh god, that’s not what we want to make’. We’d rather make the film for no money and have the freedom to express ourselves.”... “Ghost Stories is deeply British in all of its oddness and quirks, and Warp get that and support our artistic vision.”
If this had been a WT production, with a much bigger budget, surely there would have been similar pressure to add a significant US star?
The Lionsgate announcement came in Feb 2016, but there is still no release date or even evidence of press packages. Indeed, as of 28.5.17, the Lionsgate UK website remains a placeholder only, with nothing more than a coming soon message, suggesting it still hasn't completed setting up its UK distribution office!
Warp failing again to build interest in their own productions?
With the notable exception of Le Donk..., which provided customisable Christmas cards and a downloadable comic, Warp's use of web 2.0 tools has been surprisingly weak. In theory, the radically reduced costs of online distribution (with digitally equipped cinemas, something the UK leads the world on, able to stream films or play through hard drives/DVD/Blu-Ray) and marketing somewhat level the playing field with studio subsidiaries like their UK rival Working Title.
Remarkably, this is the extent of Warp's own promotion of their upcoming film!
Marketing is of course the principle domain of distributors, not producers, but Working Title have shown how a producer can successfully boost the marketing of a film independently from their distributor. The Cornetto Trilogy was boosted by clever, but cheap, arcade game adaptations (Shaun of the Dead Pacman, Hot Fuzz Space Invaders: fun for a youth audience used to mobile gaming, and nostalgic for an older audience who are also represented by the films' characters). They commissioned web designers RedBridge to boost their website with such marketing materials, accompanied by a wide range of stills and videos posted during pre-production, the shoot, post-production and all the way through the release phase, including Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's video diary. Films such as Paul, also starring Frost and Pegg (with the usual Working Title addition of an American A-lister, Seth Rogen, and also set in the US; the Brits were the true aliens of this sci-fi comedy hybrid) also benefit from Facebook pages run by both Universal and Working Title in multiple languages to directly target multiple territories (France, Spain and more in the case of Paul).
Click on the YouTube and this is what you get!
The YouTube link has been clumsily mis-entered - and never corrected
As of May 2017, over a year since the Lionsgate pick-up announcement, with shooting wrapped in Nov 2016, the Warp website presents a single image with a broken YouTube link, and a non-functioning hyperlink on the sole image itself. Click on the Twitter link and instead to taking you to the film hashtag, you get a tweet template. Click on a dropdown arrow and you get greeted with an illustration-free ream (3 scrolled PC screens worth) of grey text on a black background - which hasn't been updated for nearly a year ("shooting started yesterday...")!
They even seem to have messed up the Twitter element
This highly unappealing text, horribly outdated, is all thats below the dropdown arrow.
No BFI - but a grant through Screen Yorkshire
What is also notable is the lack of any mention of BFI (formerly UK Film Council), BBC or C4 involvement, some combination of all 3 being central to the financing of the entire Warp catalogue up to now. The film is listed on the British Council site as in post-production, but there is no mention of any link with the BFI. However, they have once again received a grant through Screen Yorkshire (set up as a regional wing of the national UK Film Council, whose role of distributing government/National Lottery funding to boost the film industry and film culture in the UK has been taken up by the BFI), so perhaps this isn't such a huge shift in production strategy after all. Warp shot the film over 5 weeks (compare with Le Donk's 5 days!) in in Yorkshire during Oct/Nov 2016.
Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the county of Yorkshire all offer funding for production, which is further stimulating growth. Screen Yorkshire’s £15 million ($19 million) Yorkshire Content Fund has invested in films like “Ghost Stories,” starring Martin Freeman, and TV series like “Peaky Blinders.” [US trade mag Variety]
Director Andy Nyman's tweets shows Warp how its done
Before looking at what Nyman has done, its worth reiterating that marketing is the domain of the distributor, NOT the producer. However, building interest from the earliest pre-production surely makes sense when these same production companies will eventually seek to persuade distributors to take a financial gamble on their title? WT are exceptionally pro-active in this field; Warp are fairly lax to date.
Social media, and the web 2.0 convergence it represents, is one means by which marketing can be carried out with low overheads, thus in theory enabling underfunded Indies to compete. It also enables creatives, such as Nyman, to take this on themselves - their careers are linked to the success of their work after all!
Nyman was tweeting throughout the shoot, providing snippets and images which could be shared by fans (of stars as much as the play), but also used by the media. This was a convincingly organic process, a seemingly unfiltered, 'genuine' insight into and access to the shoot, with star Paul Whitehouse pictured eating hummus on set for example. Nyman also offered up a random draw for 5 crew badges for anyone who tweeted badge to him - simple but smart marketing.
Nyman consistently uses the hashtag ghoststoriesfilm, which Altitude are also using in their 'official' marketing to potential distributors. As you'll see below, the badge competition required entrants to tweet ghoststoriesfilm, NOT andynyman!
Its interesting to note that Warp's retweet picked up fewer hits than Nyman's original - the company actually has a smaller online footprint than the creative (though neither are getting 1000s of hits, never mind the millions that Universal often achieve). Altitude have also been busy tweeting behind the scenes content to build interest and momentum, as they seek to pick up sales in more territories:
Simple, smart, effective - and extremely low cost!!!
You can see how this activity sparks media interest - Nyman is providing FREE content for media producers, no investigation or travel required, just monitoring a twitter feed; here's an example that Empire magazine (UK's leading film mag) featured at the top of their article:
As I've written on/discussed these elsewhere, I'll simply add the screenshots. You would never try to remember all, but rather pick out a few, looking for one or more of:
the total UK box office
the total US box office
the rough % of world box office the US (or UK) represents
the length of run [how many weeks it was in cinemas for] - especially useful looking at Indie films that basically tour the arthouse circuit with a limited number of prints
the number of screens
if the Gant Rule can be seen with the figures
the number of countries it got theatrical distribution in (many WT films get 40+; World's End was notably quite disappointing)
You can find some tallies and notes on this in both the Warp pack and the list of WT films
Other films that come close: Bean(1997) $257m, Love Actually(2003) $248m, 4 Weddings(1994)$242m [their most profitable film as a $4.5m budget!], Everest(2015)$204m. Those are the 7 WT films that grossed $200m+ worldwide.
That brings the disruption of digitisation to the a new level, and undermines (though it may take time yet for its impact through user numbers to grow) the traditional cinema exhibition business model: movie 'prints' (just as likely to be streams, Blu-Rays or HDDs now) are rented by cinemas from distributors and a further share of ticket revenue passed back to distributors. There is variation in this basic model depending mostly on the power of the distributor and whether its a tentpole big six production they're touting, but thats a rough outline of how the production (sell all rights to or agree a revenue share with a distributor) to distribution to exhibition film cycle ends up (before further distribution and exhibition through TV, and distribution through physical media, downloads and streams - rental and purchase.
If the audience figures are no longer a simple guide to box office, that suggests a steep medium to long term decline in revenues. Unless its the cinema-avoiding public (non-noisy nuisances, ie kids/teens!) that mostly takes up these passes. The 15-24 age range is the key cinema market as you can see from this BFI chart (page 4):
You can find a great analysis of the older audience in 2017 here, by Stephen Follows. This US analysis by Nielsen also shows roughly 30% of the cinema audience as 12-24, or nearly 50% for 12-34.
There is dispute over how big a revenue driver concessions (popcorn etc) really are, but this certainly will (in the style of bucket airlines like easyJet) shift the profit-making onus onto food and drinks - which distributors are locked out of. See this post for details on how vital the huge mark-ups cinemas make on concessions (typically 85% profit on every dollar spent) are.
The unlimited is limited: one viewing a day, no IMAX or 3D (maybe a supplement charge for longer movies?), but that still means a possible 30c viewing!
This isn't actually completely new ... many moons ago I bought Virgin Cinema monthly passes - £15 if I remember right, back in 1999. That enabled me to be amongst the shellshocked hordes stumbling out of the Phantom Menace midnight premiere wondering what the hell we'd just seen, and what kind of evil madman could invent JarJar Binks - but get over it by going to see plenty more decent movies in the days and weeks that followed.
I figured Curzon, with its membership scheme, would likely do something similar, and sure enough they also offer an unlimited annual pass for its cinemas.
Here in Luxembourg you can also get a monthly pass from the monopoly chain.
UPDATE: PREMIUM FOR HOT NEW FLICKS + AMC LAUNCH RIVAL
MoviePass are selling this as working with the industry to help push passholders to their quieter midweek slots: charging a $2 premium for some new releases, though often specifically for weekend screenings; they're also adding 3D/IMAX to their offering. MacRumors reported:
Surge pricing is a dynamic, time-based strategy that apps like Uber use when a large amount of customers are requesting rides in the app but there aren't enough drivers to taxi them around. Now this will extend to MoviePass, so on opening weekends or at particularly busy late-night showings of popular movies, monthly subscribers should expect to pay a bit more above their locked-in $9.95/month subscription price. For IMAX and 3D movies, users will be given the option to pay an added fee for the premium screenings, ranging from $2-$6 according to Lowe. The MoviePass news comes after AMC just yesterday revealed its own movie subscription service, which will let customers watch three movies per week for $19.95 a month -- including IMAX and RealD 3D showings.
(tbc) Peggy + Wright will combine again, B Driver sequel: https://www.slashfilm.com/edgar-wright-and-simon-pegg/
This post will compare 2 movies to get a better insight into the different approaches taken and challenges facing a notable UK Indie producer and a prestigious UK big six studio-backed subsidiary. The film's are selected to be a mixture of typical for the companies but also contrasting in some key ways. Neither can be judged as a great commercial success - typical for one company, fairly unusual for the other...
IN THIS POST: A definition of 'the Gant Rule'; testing it out with the summer 2016 UK/US box office; why is this so profoundly significant for understanding the British cinema market; how satirical cartoon Curtisland illustrates this; why does it not always work (including Bridget Jones example).
I was surprised just now to find that 'the Gant Rule' doesn't bring up many relevant hits ... until the phrase 'box office' is added to the search.
Lets have a fresh look at this...
A SHORT DEFINITION OF 'THE GANT RULE'* Box office analyst Charles Gant (who has a weekly Guardian column, but whose writing appears in many other publications worldwide) has long argued that a typical transatlantic hit (a success in both the UK and US markets) will make ten times as much in the US ($ figures) as in the UK (unadjusted £ figures).
In short, for a UK/US hit, UK £box office x10 roughly = US $box office
*it is highly advisable to put such terms in '' to help denote them as technical terms; the media world is so vast and complex, no single examiner will be familiar with every conceivable term
Is he right? Usually, yes!
READ MORE:
I have blogged on this a few times...
Use the Gant Rule tag to find previous posts - or simply make your own comparisons with films' UK/US box office!
TESTING THE GANT RULE: SUMMER 2016 UK v US BOX OFFICE
Captain America: Civil War +The Secret Life of Pets examples
Using figures from his ScreenDaily column, Gant looked at the 2016 summer box office on both sides of the Atlantic. Jump straight to the number one hit and you'll see a prime example of the Gant Rule in effect: Captain America: Civil Wartook £37m in the UK and $407m in the US. That's precisely x11 the UK figure - pretty accurate forecasting there!
If you're bewildered by the intertextual puns in the above, it may be that you're not old enough to remember Alice Cooper in his prime (the artist in the video below) - Working Title don't go back nearly 50 years in the biz like Cooper, but they do go back 31 years at the time of writing (2016), so their bold social realist (with a comic edge) debut feature My Beautiful Laundrette(they're associated with 1984's The Man Who Shot Christmastoo).
THEORY TIP: Stuart Hall argued that semiotics, and much early media theory, had one major flaw: assuming that meaning was completely tied to the producers of a text and their intentions (what they attempted to encode). He argued that meaning is also generated by the audience, and that the meaning they take will be influenced by their age, gender, nationality, cultural tastes, education level etc. Adult readers may pick up on my Alice Cooper intertextual puns, but younger readers may not - though they may generate their own independent meaning too.
If you followed my meaning, thats a preferred reading (the textual author would prefer that); if you follow some but not a substantial part, a contested or negotiated reading; if you reject or interpret in a very different way, thats an oppositional reading.
Today's juggernaut company, with its latest ultra-commercial hit Bridget Jones's Baby yet another franchise release featuring major US stars to boost its international appeal, is barely recognisable from the radical young company that produced a gay, inter-racial romance tale at the height of 1980s Thatcherite homophobia and race riots in Britain, following it up with an edgy wartime drama making a star of its young (unknown, just like the MBL leads) female lead and her catchphrase, up yer bum!
This post focuses on the LA Times' box office coverage, which provides very specific audience breakdown and analysis. The headline above is from Gant's column on the UK box office, matching a more common downbeat view on the film's fortunes and prospects (its still on wide release), noting:
Star Trek Beyond may have suffered from director JJ Abrams’ exit into rival franchise Star Wars (he remains as producer). Or fans might have been more excited by Benedict Cumberbatch as the main villain last time around, with Beyond baddie Idris Elba less proven at the box office. And Paramount may have struggled to persuade broader audiences to see a third Star Trek film.
Critics and audiences have been highly positive, but the film has failed to crossover to a wide US or UK audience (RT)
The various box office columns (global, US, UK) in the Guardian make for great reading and will teach you a lot about how the industry works, and provide very specific examples that might help you in exam and/or coursework efforts. Variety and many others also provide in-depth, highly informed analysis and commentary - you can keep an eye on these by adding RSS feeds to your own blogs.
This example is from the LA Times, which you'd expect to be highly versed in industry practice as Hollywood is in its turf. The fragment I picked out below comments on:
Okay, so this might not be part of the OFFICIAL marketing blitz from NBC-U - but such trivial but viral UGC as this vine is worth many millions in advertising spend when considered as a whole, able to penetrate beyond core audiences targeted by the distributors. Here's where I found it:
My main point here, however, is a good example of how the mega-conglomerates can flex their muscles to mutually benefit different wings: NBC-U both creating and benefitting from pre-release hype of the new Bourne movie by playing the Damon-starring previous films across EIGHT of its NBC-U channels. Research indicated that existing franchise fans were the key audience for the movie, so NBC-U sought to reinforce familiarity with the long-running franchise:
Cinema is at once BOTH a highly globalised industry utterly dominated by the big six US conglomerates AND a highly localised industry in which local stars, settings, even IP/cultural reference points, sell.
The Gant Rule is a useful means of explaining the US dominance, even as this is swiftly undermined by the surging scale and value of the Chinese market, pushing the typical US box office share of a typical global hit to well below the traditional 50%+ (closer now to 40% and falling). This has seen Hollywood squeeze in Chinese stars and settings, shoot alternative endings and extra scenes for different markets, buy up or partner with Chinese firms (with the complication of strict Chinese laws on exporting money), and generally be more sensitive about portraying Chinese as villains or simply the traditional crass stereotype of inscrutable, unemotional, indistinguishable masses (not that this has entirely disappeared).
...in other cases studios don’t alter their movies until post-production. Chinese censors cut large chunks out of several movies released last year, including 40 minutes from “Cloud Atlas” and 12 minutes from “Men in Black 3,” excising all scenes in Chinatown. They also cut parts of the latest James Bond film, “Skyfall,” including a scene that featured the assassination of a nameless Chinese security guard.
Marvel had initially planned “Iron Man 3” as a Chinese co-production, a tactic that has been taken with films like “Looper” and “The Karate Kid,” in part because co-productions are not subject to China’s quota for imported films. Chinese censors must still approve them. [The Wrap]
Just 20 years ago China banned all foreign cinema:
China only opened its market to the Hollywood studios in 1994, when its own film industry had reached its nadir. “It wasn’t out of admiration for Hollywood but to save the Chinese film industry,” Rosen said. “People weren’t going to the movies.” At the time, China only permitted 10 foreign movies to screen, then increased it to 20 before the current total of 34. Those additional 14 slots are all reserved for IMAX or 3D films. [The Wrap]
There is no questioning the ongoing utter dominance of the UK market by Hollywood - for figures read the annual BFI reports. BUT ... localised content still often retains an edge.
The US star helped market the film globally, but the British setting did not help US box office: boxofficemojo.
Localised here is a very broad concept - as is the legal definition of 'British production' for tax purposes:
These are mainly Hollywood productions, but with enough of a lingering element of Britishness to give them a home market boost, and so undermine the Gant rule. The Bridget Jones franchise is a more direct example, although it too is ultimately Hollywood fare (Brit producer WT being an NBC-U subsidiary, Polygram at the time of the original).
Gant's latest box office column highlights The BFG as the latest to benefit from this element of Britishness.
He also noted the latest example of event cinema, an annual classical concert now programmed in an incredible 534 screens, plus a stylized limited re-release earning more than the original run:
Also flying the flag for event cinema was Secret Cinema’s presentation of Dirty Dancing. ... The run of just six dates delivered a final box office of £1.90m. That’s more than the combined runs of the original 1987 release (£1.62m) and the 20th-anniversary rerelease in 2007 (£224,000).
A little bit more on the rising influence of the Chinese market, from an article which looks at directors outraged by remakes of their movies, in this case Red Dawn. The original 1980s flick saw Russians invade a US town, the recent remake swapped Chinese forces for this...until it dawned on the money men that they'd lose out on the Chinese market...so this was belatedly switched to North Korean forces:
The average ticket now costs $8.73, up from $8.58 during the first quarter and a 1.4% year-on-year rise. The numbers represent an average across all venues, titles and times; this tends to rise as the family and blockbuster season begins.The year actually began down on the numbers for 2015, which hit $8.70 in the fourth quarter, as Star Wars: The Force Awakens screened.However, prices in North America continue to compare favourably with those in the UK, where the average price last year was £7.17 ($9.47) – a rise of 48.25% over the decade.In China, whose box office revenue is due to overtake that of the US later this year, the average price is $6.50. The cheapest tickets are to be found in India. Average prices for single-screen cinemas in 2013 were around $0.93, rising to around $3.95 for multiplex screenings.
