'71 Distribution and Marketing

This overlaps with other posts, but as there are a lot of images, a new post makes sense.

OVERVIEW: KEY POINTS
This is a film with wider ambitions, and arguably a more commercial approach, than most of Warp's productions - as it should, with its ambitious £5m budget*, twice that of Four Lions. UPDATE, 2016: BUT...It flopped, despite the awards, critical acclaim, and gaining distribution in the US and 10 more territories (12 total including the UK) for a worldwide total of $3m: $1.6m UK,, $1.3m US and just $355k from 10 other territories. *According to this Screen article (cited in Wiki) it was £8.1m

According to IMDB, it is getting theatrical releases in France, Spain, Greece, Germany, Canada, USA, Australia, Middle East (eg UAE, see section below). However, we have seen past Warp films such as Tyrannosaur getting distribution in multiple territories, but not getting any marketing spend to give it a real chance (its specialist LGBT distributor didn't issue a trailer, and it limped to a mere $22k). The absence of any information on its US distributor does not augur well.

IMDB company list.

Boxofficemojo: Not every distributor took up the option for a theatrical release.

OPENING WEEKEND: This has become a key figure - if it is lower than expected a film is likely to be labelled a flop and the odds are high that the public will be deterred from seeing a 'flop', while distributors may hold back on further prints and marketing investment. What is significant about the table above is that almost all of '71's national releases saw most of the entire box office raised in the opening weekend - it failed to get a wider, longer release beyond then. The UK figure, in contrast, is just 21% - in this case it built well by word-of-mouth, as I saw first-hand at Bradfor's National Media Museum, where a low opening night (Friday) turnout would be hugely boosted by a review in that day's Guardian (UK broadsheet/quality) newspaper.

COMMERCIAL? COUNTER-TYPICAL FOR WARP? MAYBE NOT...
The 'commercial' element lies in pushing the action/thriller genre over the setting or any real exploration of the issues raised.

Working Title Warp 2015 Bafta success...Oscar to follow?

...Okay, the Warp 'success' is a little indirect - '71 lead Jack O'Connell (not his only film!) won a public vote for 'Rising Star', but lost out on Oustanding British Film ... won by Theory of Everything (multiple nominations - see this preview report), which WT and the NBC-Universal subsidiaries distributing it will hope may signal Academy success and that potentially lucrative Oscar bounce. Their lead, Eddie Redmayne, has won the Leading Actor Bafta, and it has also scooped up the Best Adapted Screenplay award. See full winners list here.

There are issues with the Baftas positioning themselves as a bellweather for and predictor of Oscars ... aren't these meant to celebrate and promote British success?

Many of Hollywood’s big names will be in attendance; it has become an article of faith that a paparazzi shot in London can be a key opinion-shifter for the all-important campaign to grab Oscar votes before polling finishes on 17 February.
The downside of this is that, over the past decade, critics have claimed that the Baftas have lost some of their cultural distinctiveness, and become a boiled-down version of the Oscars, with the same films and actors being nominated. This year, if awards go they way they are expected to, we are likely to have exactly the same winners in both.
“I think it’s a reflection of the ‘special relationship’,” says Leslie Felperin, film critic for the Hollywood Reporter. “There’s an inevitable overlap in zeitgeist that extends to politics and culture as well as film. It’s more than it ought to be, for sure. If you look at the Césars in France, for example, they are much more proudly French, and they fly the flag for their domestic industry in a more assertive way.” (Guardian report)

Theory got 10 Bafta nominations in total.

Duncan Jones' Moon: $5m UK sci-fi

DUNCAN JONES, 2009

$5m budget

$10m global box office (£700k UK, $3.3m USA)

Produced by Stage 6 Films

Distributed by Sony Picture Classics:

Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group acquired distribution rights to the film for English-speaking territories.^[3] Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group was considering making Moon a direct-to-DVD release; however, after Moon premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival in January 2009, Sony Pictures Classics decided to handle this film's theatrical release for Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group.^[12]

Rotten Tomatoes reports that 89% of critics gave the film a positive review based on 185 reviews, with an average score of 7.4/10 [Wiki]

KEY POINT: Like Monsters (Gareth Edwards, 2010, $800k), digitisation has opened up even sci-fi to low-budget Indie producers. Genres such as horror have always been accessible to Indies, but until CGI SFX became accessible to anyone with an Apple Mac convincing sci-fi hasn't been a realistic possibility for Indies. Both Moon and Monsters (which won director Edwards the director's seat on the big budget studio production Godzilla: $160m with a $0.5bn take!). Moon had a much larger crew than Monsters, and required extensive set-building, helping explain why its budget was around 10-times higher - but still in the low budget range of, say a Warp or a WT2 production. Strong word-of-mouth and various festival and other awards helped boost box office takings. A slick website further boosts its prospects of DVD/Blu-Ray sales (the long tail?)

A critical hit.

The official site launch page - its a slick production; see next shot

BASIC LINKS:
Wiki, IMDB, RottenTomatoes, Official site, YouTube vids. There is a longer list of articles etc further down.

See full list on the Wiki; despite its low budget, Moon was a multiple award-winner

Consider this from the amctv blog:

Next question:

Why do idiotic films like Transformers and Wolverine get put into thousands of theaters while really excellent science fiction movies like Moon don't show up anywhere?

The short answer is that Transformers and Wolverine are "tentpole" pictures -- i.e., the sort of movies that studios spend millions on in the hope of making millions from -- so naturally they're going to be screened far and wide as well as promoted in a screaming haze of advertising, while Moon -- starring Sam Rockwell as a schmoe on a 3-year moonbase stint -- is sort of the exact opposite: A small movie, made for roughly the cost of Transformer shoot's craft service budget and without the help of a major studio. Moon was never destined to get onto 4,000 screens on opening day.
Now, this avoids the implicit question, which is why studios choose to spend millions and millions on movies based on toys and comic books and not on movies that grownups might not be embarrassed to be seen coming out of in the first place. The answer to that is actually the solution, which is that if you want studios to make those sorts of movies, go out of your way to see them in the theater, rather than just waiting until they wash up on Starz or HBO. It's not that humans are getting stupider, it's that people interested in entertainment that doesn't EXPLODE aren't going into theaters. So, you know. Go.


If you haven't seen this I'd highly recommend it: you'll be astonished for one thing at its cinematographic quality, and the convincing nature of its set, when you're aware of its production budget: $5m (which would merely pay for a quarter of a Hollywood A-lister's basic fee for a movie!). There are some great behind-the-scenes features on the DVD too, showing you how this was achieved.
The one caveat to this is that it helps being the son of David Bowie, even if you have changed your name from Zowie Bowie.

This enterprising directorial debut, working wonders on a modest budget, consciously sets out to operate in the manner of psychological SF movies of the 60s and 70s about the experience of being in outer space: films such as 2001, Outland and Alien, where being on Jupiter or the Moon has become an accepted way of life. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the sole operator of a plant mining Helium-3 on the Moon to provide energy for Earth. His only company is a computer called Gerty (voiced with slyly condescending concern by Kevin Spacey), and he's nearing the end of his three-year stint. One day, Bell has an accident driving a motor vehicle, and after coming to he discovers he has a doppelganger. Is this figure a clone or his real self? Is he the victim of some conspiracy operated by his callous capitalist employers in league with Gerty? A gripping, thoughtful, extremely claustrophobic movie, its director Duncan Jones, is a onetime graduate student of philosophy. Moreover, he was once known as Zowie Bowie and is the son of David Bowie, no stranger to the world of outer space.

(Philip French for The Observer)

Some links for further reading: 

IMDB

Studio Daily interview

GalaxySailor feature

IndieWire feature

Interview vid on TalkTalk

EyeForEye feature from Edinburgh IFFest

Wiki

Sony microsite

Guardian previews Jones' 2011 thriller Source Code

Trailer on Gdn

Peter Bradshaw review (3/5) in Gdn
Gdn profile of DJones (2009)

US TRAILER [hq]