FRANCHISE Universal rev up £25m Fast Furious live show

Guardian feature

Disney are the kings of brand extension, with Disneyland a big business in its right and the Pirates of... franchise a neat reversal in being a movie spin-off from a Disneyland feature.

Universal are staking a claim as the barons of franchise extension though, with their own theme parks, multiple TV adaptations of movies (eg About a Boy by WTTV), theatrical adaptations (notably Billy Elliot, a big hit, and Bridget Jones, both spun off from Working Title productions).

FUNDING Baby Driver part of £415m tax relief benefit bill

For Indies such as Warp government finance through the BFI (previously the UK Film Council) and the still-operating regional arms of the old UKFC such as EM Media and Screen Yorkshire (significant distributors of EU finance which will soon disappear thanks to Brexit) are absolutely central to their ability to produce feature films. Without money in the form of non-repayable grants there would be no '71, This is England, Tyrannosaur and so forth.

The BBC and Film4, terrestrial public service broadcasters (with Sky, and its Sky Atlantic channel key to Warp's high-budget TV series The Last Panthers) are also crucial at this level of budget, very rarely exceeding £5m ('71 did, at £8m).

For the big six, and their subsidiary production arms, such as Working Title, just as crucial is tax relief, which will typically far exceed the entire budget of Indie films. 20 years after the Tory free market PM Thatcher scrapped the quota system that ensured cinemas screened a minimum proportion of British films (most European countries, notably france, still have such laws in place), the Labour government recognised the struggles of the industry with a range of tax relief measures, that the current Tory government has (reluctantly) kept in place.

The extent of this varies across the UK, with additional relief available in Northern Ireland (though even more is available in the Republic of Ireland), and indeed there is fierce international competition to attract film productions through tax deductions, including several US states offering high levels of relief.

The scale of this tax relief is clear from the report on 2016 payments, hitting £600m in 2016, including WT's Baby Driver. The tests for determining the 'Britishness' of productions are controversial, with minimal cultural consideration, more raw economic factors determining eligibility. If you read the BFI's annual reports (you should - an amazing source of learning) you'll find many clearly American films accordingly categorised as British.


Big-budget films receive increase in tax relief to almost £600m.

The government paid out almost £600m in tax relief last year to the makers of blockbusters including Baby Driver, Star Wars and T2: Trainspotting, as well as big-budget TV dramas including The Crown. 

The payouts were part of £751m that the Treasury awarded in tax relief to films, high-end dramas, video games, animations, children’s TV shows and theatre productions that passed a “cultural test” that qualified them as British. 

The government’s figures showed that the total awarded in tax relief in the creative sector rose by a third year-on-year from £564m in 2015. The test includes criteria such as the cultural content of a production, how much of it is shot in the UK and the proportion of stars and crew who are from Britain or Europe. 

The government’s tax credit system has proved hugely successful in stopping big-budget film and TV productions, as well as talent such as games makers and special effects workers, going to cheaper locations such as eastern Europe or to other countries offering bigger incentives.

It has also helped attract investment from the deep-pocketed newer arrivals on the film and TV scene, such as Netflix and Amazon, which have backed productions in the UK including The Crown, which had a total budget of £100m, and fashion drama series The Collection. 

Last year there were 175 films completed in the UK that claimed tax relief, with the Treasury paying out £415m, up from £339m the previous year. Relief payouts for high-end TV – dramas that cost £1m or more per episode – rose from £104m to £163m. 

Warp Films trailers and distributors

These are the trailers for each Warp Films/X/Australia movie; BBFC ratings are noted, so obviously use as appropriate. These are also accessible as a YT playlist.

Warp clearly has long-term relationships with a number of distributors, even if they continue to struggle to gain cinematic releases:

UK: Optimum Releasing (now renamed StudioCanal UK);
US (IFC Films, BUT did this temporarily end around 2010? Submarine was Weinstein Co, Four Lions Drafthouse Films, Tyranossaur Strand Releasing; 2011's Kill List and Snowtown and 2012's Berberian Sound Studio were IFC again);

BoxOfficeMojo listing for Tyrannosaur; just $22k in US, but approaching $0.5m worldwide

Belg, Neth (both Cinéart);
Fr (ARP Sélection);
M.East ‘all media’ deals (Front Row Filmed Entertainment)
Australia (Madman Entertainment)
Italy (P.F.A. Films).
Some of these are 'all media'.
There are additional UK relationships for DVD (Artificial Eye but also Optimum Home Entertainment) + TV (Film4).
I also spotted few specific Blu-Ray listings, eg for Kill List in Neth (Cinéart), and Tyrannosaur (UK, Optimum Home Entertainment). 
There are some VOD listings (in some cases, VOD only) for the US in particular - mainly IFC but also Sundance Selects (for A History of...).

IMDB distributors listing for Tyrannosaur, which managed a fairly wide release, tho' for limited runs

To learn more about film distribution, you could try this pithy guide, or the more detailed BFI guide, which tells us:

The key elements of Prints and Advertising (P&A) that a distributor must consider at this stage are:
The quantity and production of release prints and trailers:
Specialised films will often be released with fewer than 10 prints into key independent cinemas, with these prints subsequently 'toured' over a 6-month period to all parts of the UK. On the other hand, commercial mainstream films will often open on over 200 prints, simultaneously screening in all major UK towns and cities.

Each individual film print costs around £1000 (or $1500-2000), so any major release of, say, 500 prints is looking at a cost of £0.5m before advertising spend is also factored in (multiply by 10 for the tent-pole US releases). It should be clear why so few Warp movies manage a wide release, though some (notably Four Lions) bucked this trend, with additional prints being rushed out after initial demand proved much higher than expected! Digitisation will gradually remove this barrier, with the effective cost of hard-drives or streamed/downloaded films near-zero.

As you watch each of these trailers, try asking yourself some simple questions... 

• Who do I think was the (core/primary and/or secondary) audience/s for this?
• What are the selling factors? (awards? director? cast? genre? narrative? atypicality/difference from the norm?)
• Is it a successful trailer? (can you sum up the film in a sentence? remember, John Carter showed how a trailer and marketing, if misdirected, can ruin a film's prospects) 
• In what ways (if any) does this strike you as a British film? (you'll note that while there's hybridity, the aesthetic of social realism is often present)

2014: '71 (YANN DEMANGE)
(awaiting release)

2013: FOR THOSE IN PERIL [18] (PAUL WRIGHT)
[18]

Challenges facing UK directors

I've also linked to this in the post on women directors, which, like many others, I keep updating when I find useful new articles.

Good detail in this article on how the careers of British directors (Lynne Ramsey), and even the fate of one of our foremost film companies (Film4), can be turned upside down when Hollywood takes interest in a project which was all set to be directed by Ramsey for Film4:

[Ramsay] read [The Lovely Bones] when it was half an unpublished manuscript. Like many readers to come, Ramsay was gripped by the voice of a 14-year-old girl narrating her murder from beyond the grave. Film4 signed her up to adapt it.
But then several things happened: Sebold delivered the rest of the story, which departed into a gooey spirituality at odds with Ramsay's vision; the novel became a huge bestseller; and Hollywood heavyweights such as Steven Spielberg began to show an interest. Suddenly, The Lovely Bones was a potential blockbuster, and Ramsay's involvement started to look incongruous.
Meanwhile Film4 was downsized under new management. Its new head, Tessa Ross, was bemused to find herself courted by the most powerful players in Hollywood, all because of The Lovely Bones. Ross eventually bowed to the logic of the marketplace, and dropped Ramsay in favour of Peter Jackson. Jackson proceeded to make an utter mess of the film, but that's another story.

The article goes on to highlight the difficulties British directors face in building a career:

Next month sees the release of Philip Ridley's Heartless, his first film since The Passion of Darkly Noon in 1995. Richard Stanley is gearing up to shoot Vacation, his comeback after his career nosedived with his firing from The Island of Doctor Moreau, also in 1995. These two don't have the cachet of Ramsay or Pawlikowski, but they illustrate the general point that sustaining a career is much harder than starting one for many indie film-makers, particularly those with a distinctive vision. That's something the UK Film Council should bear in mind, as it concentrates its production funding on new directors.

As ever, there are some insightful comments following the article:

Does Ramsey make the sort of films that people want to watch these days?
I feel that stuff like Red Riding is far more relevant, look at its success in US. Made for TV, sold as movie in different markets - cool looking, genre movie deep in story, but routed in context (70s yorkshire in this case). I hope that '...Kevin' is like that, it certainly has the scope to be.
Ramsey's films have that 90s 'film council funded' feel to them, lot's of silence bookended with gritty and staring out of windows. Is that really going to put the British industry on the map right now? [jonaent, 22 Apr 2010, 1:13PM]