BIG 5 GLOBAL DOMINANCE

Statista is a great source

Some useful links for now (I've posted similar before with lots of analysis within the posts below...)

A mix of US and global figures/analysis

2020 will be not so useful for assessing big 5 BOX OFFICE dominance as there is so little box office to consider, but...

Deadline analysed the prospects for 2021. Note Paramount's struggles

Statista: Disney were emerging in a league of their own but have lead the shift to PVOD/streaming

Deadline.com's analysis of 2019 + 2020 forecasts.

The-Numbers.com: global, US + international 2019 hits.

Same as above but IMDB table.

ALL-TIME box office - each DISTRIBUTOR's biggest hit (the-numbers)

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

Wiki all-time worldwide box office

UK all-time box office (Wiki)

Most successful 18-rated films (UK: screendaily.com)

Age + gender of UK box office (statista.com)

Proportion of films by age rating (UK: statista.com)

Mark Kermode blog discussion on age ratings

Guide to classification (independentcinemaoffice.org)

How film regulators are responding to an industry in flux (screendaily)

Bridget Jones's Baby boom? Smart marketing, modernised values

DIRECTOR: Sharon Maguire
BUDGET: $35m
BOX OFFICE: UK $60m, US $24m, World $212m
PRODUCTION COMPANY CREDITS: Miramax*, StudioCanal, Universal Pictures, Working Title Films *presumably they retain rights as original film co-producer with WT
DISTRIBUTION: Universal, UIP 62 countries 'Universal is releasing in most territories with Studiocanal handling France, Germany and Austria' [Deadline]
AGE RATINGS: BBFC 15, MPAA R, Lux EA.


Much more to come on one of the most significant Working Title productions for years. They have multiple highly successful franchises (Nanny McPhee, Bean, Johnny English...) but none are as iconic and central to their identity as BJD, the franchise based on Helen Fielding's hit novel.

LINKS:
Wiki.
BoxOfficeMojo.
IMDB.
The-Numbers.
Working Title page.
Daily Mail. #1 in 24 countries; biggest UK September opening ever


AGE RATINGS
Quite an extraordinary variation on this one: BBFC 15 and MPAA (US) R, but U in Luxembourg!

PRODUCTION HISTORY
I've blogged on this for a few years now (here; here on novel + musical; here in a wider post on WT franchising): BJD3 was announced in July 2009! It was then formally greenlit by Universal + WT in October 2011 ... but would take another 4 years for shooting to commence, with Hugh Grant dropping out and a change of director (Paul Zeig was originally attached, but with the film seeming dead in the water Sharon Maguire wasn't attached until negotiations with the principal cast resumed again in June 2015). [details from Wiki]

DIRECTOR
Sharon Maguire was overlooked for the first sequel...

Sharon Maguire, who directed the original Bridget Jones’s Diary in 2001, returned to direct the feature film from a script she co-wrote with David Nicholls (One Day) [source]

FRANCHISE HISTORY

BoxOfficeMojo BJD franchise page.

RATINGS MPAA and BBFC ratings

Just a quick post to ensure you have quick reference of the two main age ratings systems we'll refer to.

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) you'll recognize from the green background on US trailers. [see Wiki]

The BBFC are the UK censor ... but they dropped the word censorship from their name quite smartly to take on a more neutral name ... the British Board of Film Classification. Their website is excellent, including a student-specific section, and a quick search tool to find their rationale for specific movie ratings.

In most cases, the 18/NC-17 rating is box office cyanide - see this post on Zombie, and here, where I analyse the record of 18-ratings including Fifty Shades of Grey, an exception. (There's also the possible F for feminist rating, the Bechdel Test applied in Sweden!). Wal-Mart won't stock any NC-17 DVDs, a serious consideration as the biggest DVD retailer in the US!

I include the BBFC explanation for 3 case study films in this post: This is England, Hot Fuzz, The World's End.

Do the regulators favour the studios and treat Indies more harshly? There's certainly a case to be made, and the 18 ratings of TisEng and Sweet Sixteen seem to be quite typical, as are the 12 ratings of films like The Dark Knight. You can make an interesting comparison of Warp and Working Title on this.

The following trailer is the ironic, entertaining (NB: and UK 18-rated) documentary investigating the ultra-secretive MPAA, This Film Is Not Yet Rated (IMDB; Wiki). In the full film you'll hear Trey Parker comparing his poor treatment by the MPAA when he submitted his Indie debut feature ... and how this changed utterly when he was behind the Sony-backed South Park movie.

(Can't embed the trailer: here's the link)

Here are the two ratings systems graphically compared.

(CMD/CTRL-) Click picture to enlarge

...

AUDIENCE BBFC 18 rating usually a disaster but not Fifty Shades

I've raised this point in several blog posts, and frequently in lessons, so a short post to emphasize quite an important point. As teens and tweens are the key cinema-going audience, producers and distributors will generally seek to avoid 18-ratings (the US, MPAA, equivalent of R means that the biggest DVD retailer, Wal-Mart, won't even stock it).

There are always exceptions, and Fifty Shades of Grey was one where anything lower would have been distinctly off-putting, given audience expectations of realistic sex scenes:

Whatever happens, Fifty Shades looks absolutely certain to overtake The Wolf of Wall Street (£22.7m lifetime) to become the biggest ever 18-certificate title in this market. This is a movie where the 18 certificate can be considered in no way a hindrance – in fact, audiences would have been rightly suspicious of a Fifty Shades film that won a 15 rating. Usually, film distributors push for the lowest possible rating, but it’s easy to envision Universal asking the question of the UK censor: what exactly do we need to include to secure an 18?
(Charles Gant, Feb 2015)

There are very few 18-rated Working Title films; contrarily, there are very few PG or 12 Warp films. Working Title generally aim for a mass, mainstream market, and thus mostly avoid 18-ratings. They sacrifice realism to do so, something Warp are less willing to do. If WT present an idealised representation of the UK, Warp tend to present a grittier, rougher representation, with the very title of Meadows' This is England arguably a direct riposte to the Notting Hill, Bridget Jones (etc) depiction of a twee middle-class Britain, as viewed by Richard Curtis (and savagely satirised in the Curtisland animation).

WT: The Theory of Everything

Working Title's latest could be taken as a 'chick flick' - the marketing heavily centres on the romantic narrative - but, even if it's hardly a four quadrant movie (youth appeal?!), the biopic format and the science sub-plot should help boost male appeal too (being stereotypical in the manner that distributors are).

THE TRAILER

You don't need to have viewed a film in full to get to grips with analysing, the trailer generally reveals a lot you can utilise: good examples of mise-en-scene and key information on characters and setting; genre/s and which are being emphasised - title font and soundtrack also contribute to possible semiotic analysis here; target audience/s; intertextuality; distinctive (or uniform) marketing for different territories. You may also spot age ratings (MPAA and BBFC); occasionally there will be a sharp contrast between the US (which tends to heavily penalise sexual content but go very lenient on violence) and UK (which tends to be more liberal on sexual content but stricter on violence - so, the BBFC passed Baise Moi with an 18 despite its unsimulated sex scenes, but sought to ban The Human Centipede; Meadows and Warp were disgusted when TisEng got hit with an 18 which sharply undermined its box office prospects).

TRAILER SCREENSHOTS

1: We open on a grand historic building in the South of England - a world away from TisEng's Shaun and the council estate he resides in

Tyrannosaur: archetypal Warp/UK Indie movie?

See this additional post focused on the distribution of Tyrannosaur.

Tyrannosaur [Wiki]

dir. Paddy Considine [Wiki]
Principal producer: Warp X [Wiki]
Budget: £750k
Box Office: UK £243k, US $22k
Guardian microsite with multiple features, interviews etc

BOXOFFICEMOJO; IMDB; THE NUMBERS.

Warp Films trailers and distributors (my guide post)

Its a superbly crafted film (they didn't struggle to find rave reviews to feature on the poster + other promotional materials), typically enough for Warp Films/X, the Sheffield-based UK Indie launched by the ambitious record label Warp, home of dance acts such as Aphex Twin plus Indie rockers Arctic Monkeys.*