Bigger Picture Research

Lords and superheroes: saviours of British film?

Having waited diligently for nearly a year, there’s a certain irony in the fact that, now it has finally been published, I’m too busy to write a decent post about the Lords Communications Committee report into the British film and television industries.

Fortunately there’s not a great deal to say. It’s a perfectly respectable report of its kind, full of facts and opinion, plus the familiar spectacle of well-intentioned hand wringing and exhortation. Just the sort of narrative one would expect.

Trouble is, it’s all so familiar. In cinematic terms, the Lords report is not so much a sequel to previous Parliamentary enquiries (like the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee report on The British Film Industry 2002/03). It’s actually closer in spirit to a remake.

Not a slavish shot-for-shot copy, like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998), or a pointless transposition like Stephen T. Kay’s Get Carter (2000). It’s more like James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma (2007) when held up against Delmer Dave’s 1957 original. Different, and not without merit, but the same.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Evidence was heard from many of the same witnesses, and the challenges besetting our home industry are well known and, it would appear, largely unchanging.

But I can’t help feeling an opportunity has been missed. The Lords Committee took nearly a year to arrive at its conclusions, and commendable though they are (extend the tax credit, outlaw camcording in cinemas, encourage more private investment in film production, invest more in training, secure greater support for British film by broadcasters etc.) I’d like to have seen evidence of more innovative thinking and some fresh voices in the public policy debate.

In short, I’d like to have seen a ‘reimagining’, not a remake; a report resembling the 21st Century Battlestar Galactica, not The Thomas Crown Affair (1999).

The Lords report is subtitled ‘Decline or opportunity?’, but there’s very little in it of real substance about future opportunities. The ‘coming of digital distribution could offer opportunities for a different distribution model’, states one of the report’s conclusions, but without any concrete detail about the form this might take, or how the British industry, as opposed to the US studios, might benefit. The Lords report simply echoes the earlier Commons report observation that digital technology will have a transformative effect on the business. And…?

On another tack, there’s an example of alternative thinking in the latest issue of Screen International, where Slingshot CEO Arvind Ethan David speculates on the lessons the British film industry might learn from Marvel Entertainment’s strategy of superhero franchise-building.

I don’t know whether the case has genuine merit (when I read the article, Stormbreaker [2006] came to mind, a British property made and distributed by UK indies that failed to take off as a franchise). But it’s surely worth considering within the public policy mix, along with other more radical perspectives that would benefit from an airing once in a while.

2009 box office and admissions round up: Australia, Denmark, Hungary, Romania

Screen Australia recently released its analysis of Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia data, with news that the Australian box office totalled AUS$1.09 billion in 2009, the highest on record and an increase of 16% on 2008’s haul. (The press release doesn’t give an annual admissions total).

Of the 418 films released in Australia during the year, 50 were local productions which shared 5% of the market (AUS$54.8 million). Bruce Beresford’s Mao’s Last Dancer was the top performing Australian title, grossing $15 million.

Screen Australia reports that the 34 British films on release secured 9% of the market in 2009 (AUS$98.2 million), and US films shared 83% (AUS$899.4 million).

The press release also sheds some interesting light on the way Screen Australia is developing its approach to measuring and reporting audiences for Australian film.

“Our Research Unit has been analysing case studies of films over their entire first-release life cycle”, notes Dr Ruth Harley, Screen Australia CEO.

“Kokoda, for example, which took $3.2 million at the box office in 2006, recorded approximately 316,000 admissions. The film went on to achieve in excess of 1.3 million viewings in the two and a half years from cinema release to first free-to-air television broadcast. Cinema admissions accounted for just 24 per cent of these viewings […] It’s a high priority for Screen Australia in 2010 to better understand downstream viewings as we refine a new range of measures to reflect audience engagement with Australian screen production.”

Hopefully these new measures will also factor in audiences for Australian films viewed on digital platforms, including online and mobile devices. (An aside: just imagine if a public agency had the courage to publish data about the incidence of file sharing of its national films, not as an indicator of illegal or unethical activity but as another metric for audience engagement...)

Back to reality, and over in Denmark cinema admissions increased slightly in 2009, rising from 13.1 million in 2008 to 13.9 million. Disappointingly, Danish films achieved a market share of 17% (2.4 million admissions), the lowest level since 2000 and a fall from 33% in 2008 (when local blockbuster Flame and Citron performed strongly). The top performing Danish title, Anders Matthesen’s What Goes Around, garnered 402,000 admissions, while Lars von Trier’s Antichrist mustered only 83,000 (was it something the fox said?).

Hungary saw cinema admissions total 9.3 million in 2009, pretty much on a par with 2008, and Hungarian films shared around 10% of ticket sales. Meanwhile box office gross for the year rose by just over 10%, although no total is given in the report carried by Film New Europe.

Another report by Film New Europe puts Romanian admissions at 4.6 million in 2009, a rise of 43% on the previous year. Box office gross totalled 78.2 million RON, up by 60% on 2008’s total. No market share for local films is given.

All these numbers, and those of previous posts, are summarised in the table below.

Table 1: Selected 2009 admissions, box office gross and national market shares

Numbers above 1 have been rounded to nearest whole integer
* UK and Republic of Ireland box office gross = £1.05 billion.
** This total is for all UK-qualifying films, including inward investment features made with US studio involvement. UK films produced independently of US studios shared 8.5% of the home market.

'-' data unavailable

Sources:
Screen Australia, China Film Group, CNC, Cinetel, Cineuropa.org, Film New Europe, Nielsen EDI, UK Film Council, Adams Media Research.

UK film production in 2009, and US tax incentives in passing

In addition to publication last week of the UK’s annual box office and admissions totals, the UK Film Council released a slew of production data for 2009.

The press release accompanying the report (Film production in the UK – Full Year 2009 Report) carries the words ‘mixed’ and ‘fortunes’ in the title, which seems about right.

For while the UK benefited from £752.7 million of inward investment feature spend in 2009, pushing total spend for the year to £956.9 million (up 56% on 2008’s total), domestic feature and co-production activity was far less impressive.

The production of domestic features contributed £169.2 million to the total spend for the year, down from £207.2 million in 2008 (Figure 1). Meanwhile spend on UK co-productions amounted to a miserly £35 million, barely enough to pay for half an hour of Avatar’s runtime. UK 'co-producers', a species under threat, must surely know how the Na’vi feel.

Figure 1: UK spend of features produced in the UK, 2003 - 2009, £ millions

Source: UK Film Council

The overall number of UK productions has been remarkably consistent over the last three years. 125 features with budgets over £500k were made in 2009, compared with 126 in 2008 and 127 in 2007. But it’s a far cry from the heady days on 2003, when cameras rolled on 196 productions, over half of which were co-productions (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Number of features produced in the UK, 2003 - 2009

Source: UK Film Council

Although the number of co-productions held steady at 22 in 2009, the level remains at a historic low, ‘a function of the one flaw in the otherwise excellent film tax credit’, according to the UK Film Council, ‘which disincentivises UK participation in co-productions by focusing tax relief on production spend made on the ground in the UK.’

This idea of the unintended (and unwelcome) consequences of fiscal policy also surfaces in a ‘Special Report’ on US movie production incentives (MPIs) issued earlier this month by the Tax Foundation, a US-based ‘nonpartisan educational organization’.

The Foundation favours broad-based, low level taxation and is firmly opposed to tax credits and incentives for particular industries. So the report’s indictment of MPIs (described in the title as ‘Blockbuster Support for Lackluster Policy’) is hardly surprising. ‘While broad-based tax competition often benefits consumers and spurs economic growth and development’, writes report author William Luther, ‘industry-specific tax competition transfers wealth from the many to the few. Movie production incentives are costly and fail to live up to their promises’.

For me, the more startling realisation is that MPIs are now so widespread in the US. In Europe, and in many other parts of the world where home markets are dominated by US studio product, we’re quite used to public money supporting the local industry. But I had no idea of the number of US states offering tax and other incentives for feature production. Back in 2002 only five states offered MPIs. Since then, 39 other states have joined the party (in what Luther terms the ‘arms race of incentives’), including Hollywood’s home state of California.

Interestingly enough, FilmLA has recently credited the California Film and Television Tax Credit with easing the annual rate of decline in location shoots in the state. According to numbers released last week, on-location feature film production in Los Angeles fell by 29.9% in 2009, ‘the steepest year- over-year decline since tracking began in 1993’, although production activity rose in the final quarter of the year thanks to ‘incentive-driven production’ (the film incentive scheme came on stream in July 2009). In light of data such as these, the scrabble for production dollars is only likely to intensify and MPIs are bound to figure prominently for some time to come.

2009 box office and admissions round up: Estonia, Finland, Greece and UK update

Here’s another batch of 2009 box office and admissions data reported in recent days by Cineuropa.org and Film New Europe.

The 161 titles released theatrically in Estonia clocked up 1.78 million admissions, a rise of 11% on 2008 (Ice Age 3, the top placed film of the year, sold 186,000 tickets). Local films fared less well, sharing only 2% of the market, and no Estonian picture made it into the top ten performers for the first time in seven years.

Finland saw annual admissions fall by 2.4% to 6.7 million, and Finnish films shared 15% of the local market (down from 23% in 2008). Four local titles surpassed 100,000 ticket sales:  Aleksi Mäkelä's Hellsinki (256,000 admissions), Dome Karukoski’s Forbidden Fruit (115,147 admissions) and Timo Koivusalo’s Under the North Star (101,152 admissions).

Greece followed a similar pattern to Estonia in 2009, with annual admissions rising 30% to 13.5 million, while local films’ market share fell to 12.6% (down from 19.2% the previous year). 2012 was the biggest selling film (477,500 admissions), followed by Angels and Demons (414,000) and Quantum of Solace (391,000). Bang Bang was the highest placed Greek film, pulling in 382,000 admissions.

Figures released by the UK Film Council earlier this week confirm the annual box office and admissions totals reported previously. The new report (The UK box office in 2009) also reveals UK films achieved a market share of 16.5% in 2009, down from 31.1% in 2008 (when The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia! led the rankings) and the lowest share figure since 2003 (when it stood at 15.9%).

On the plus side, the UK Film Council has been good to its word by drawing a clearer distinction between the market performance of all UK-qualifying films (including those backed by US studios, like the Harry Potter franchise) and those UK films produced independently of the studios. This latter category actually saw a rise in market share in 2009, increasing from 5.7% in 2008 to 8.5% in 2009 (the average for the period 2000 to 2009 is 5.4%).

Table 1: Selected 2009 admissions, box office revenues and national market shares

Numbers above 1 have been rounded to nearest whole integer.
* UK and Republic of Ireland box office gross = £1.05 billion.
** This total is for all UK-qualifying films, including inward investment features made with US studio involvement. UK films produced independently of US studios shared 8.5% of the home market.

'-' = data unavailable

Sources:
China Film Group, CNC, Cinetel, Cineuropa.org, Film New Europe, Nielsen EDI, UK Film Council, Adams Media Research.

UK cinema admissions in 2009: best year since 2002

The Cinema Advertising Association has just released the admissions tally for December, enabling us to arrive at a grand total for the year.

December saw ticket sales of 16,265,080, the highest number for the month since 2005.

This brings the annual total to 173,461,334, marking an increase of 5.6% over 2008 and making 2009 the best performing year since 2002 (see Figure 1).

The Pearl and Dean web site lists the top ten performing titles in December 2009, led by Avatar (which took nearly £27 million in the month), Alvin and the Chipmunks: the Squeakuel (£10 million) and Sherlock Holmes (£9 million).

Figure 1: UK cinema admissions, 2002 to 2009

Source: Cinema Advertising Association/ Nielsen EDI

2009 box office and admissions round up: China, France, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Spain and the US

As expected, various trade bodies, film agencies and commercial data providers have released year-end box office and admissions numbers over the last couple of weeks, and the picture is a positive one for theatrical exhibition around the world. Here's the first tranche:

China saw its annual box office gross rise 44% above the level recorded in 2008, totalling 6.2 billion yuan ($910 million).

Numbers issued by the China Film Group also include the fact that China produced 456 domestic films in 2009. Nonetheless, the two top grossing movies of 2009 were US studio pictures: 2012 ($67.5 million), and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ($63 million). Chinese films shared 56% of the home market, and the best performing local title,  The Founding of a Republic, grossed $61 million.

France also witnessed an impressive year at the box office. Admissions totalled 200.85 million according to estimates by the Centre national de la cinématographie (CNC). This marks a rise of 5.7% over 2008, and the annual total is the second highest in forty years.

French films shared 37.1% of total admissions, which is lower than 2008’s market share (45.3%, largely down to the success of Welcome to the Sticks). US features shared 48.8% of total admissions.

Italy saw box office revenues grow in 2009 (by nearly 5%, to €623 million), but total admissions fell slightly, down 0.3% to 99 million, according to data released by Cinetel.

The Netherlands (whose main public film bodies have recently merged into a new film institute known ominously as eye) fared much better, with a 15.2% increase in ticket sales in 2009 (totalling 27.2 million). Dutch films recorded a market share of 17.4%, pretty much unchanged from 2008.

Poland scored a record high with 38 million admissions in 2009, up from 34 million in 2008 (+11.7%). According to  Dorota Hartwic, writing for Cineuropa.org, the 29 Polish features on release garnered 8.7 million admissions, a market share of 22.9%.

Staying with Eastern Europe, Slovenia saw annual admissions rise 8% to over 2.6 million, according to Matevz Rudolf writing for Film New Europe. Over 140 films were distributed in the country, of which five features and two documentaries were made in Slovenia. These local pictures shared less than 2% of total admissions, and the most successful local title, Slovenian Girl, sold 18,000 tickets.

Provisional data from Nielsen EDI indicates a successful year at the Spanish box office. The territory saw 110 million admissions, with box office grosses totalling around €675 million, the ‘highest  figure in the history of Spanish cinema’, according to Cineuropa.org’s Sergio Ríos Pérez. Local film market share is expected to be around 15%.

And finally, news broke last week that the US box office out-performed sales of feature films on DVD and Blu-ray for the first time since 2002.

Figures compiled by Adams Media Research show that US box office receipts stood at $9.87 billion in 2009, compared with DVD and Blu-ray feature film sales of $8.73 billion (sales of all works on DVD and Blu-ray, including TV shows, stood at $13 billion). Film DVD and Blu-ray revenues fell by 13%, while box office gross rose by 10%.

The table below summarises these numbers, including the UK’s provisional box office total published last week, which the UK Film Council will confirm on Tuesday along with UK films' share of the home market.

Table 1: Selected 2009 admissions, box office revenues and national market shares

Sources: China Film Group, CNC, Cinetel, Cineuropa.org, Film New Europe, Nielsen EDI, UK Film Council, Adams Media Research.

'-' = data unavailable

Video Business closes, sneak peak UK boffo 2009, UKFC research in the spotlight

This year’s first post is something of a hodgepodge. A sudden flurry of blogworthy stories has settled like the first dusting of snow, doubtless a precursor to the blizzard of year-end box office and admissions announcements we can expect over the coming days.

I’ll begin on a sombre note, with news that Video Business ceased publication last week, as owner Reed Business Information (which also owns Variety) offloads its US business-to-business titles. Video Business has been covering the home entertainment market for nearly thirty years, charting every up and down and shake of the dice. It will be missed chiefly because home entertainment market data are not as ubiquitous as box office numbers, and informed commentary carries a premium in such circumstances (though clearly not one that pays in the long-run...).

Onto more uplifting news, and last week The Independent profiled Tim Richards, CEO of Vue Entertainment in the UK. The article makes for interesting reading, touching as it does a range of topics including the company's digital cinema plans, 3D's gathering momentum and the lack of brand awareness among multiplex visitors ("It pains me to say this," admits Richards, "but 65% to 75% of people leaving the cinema can't tell you the name of it. They can tell you about the services but not the name").

We also learn, in passing, that the UK box office totalled £1.05 billion in 2009, up 11% on 2008. That’s according to UK Film Council figures due for ‘official’ publication on 19 January. The blizzard starts here.

While on the subject of the UK Film Council, the Research & Statistics Unit has just published findings of a user survey it ran last autumn. The timing couldn’t be better, because just before Christmas the organisation was criticised by Colin McCabe for publishing statistics that ‘tend to reflect rather too well on the Council’.

In an ‘anti-New Labour polemic’ published by Prospect magazine (and reproduced in full on McCabe’s blog), the academic and former Head of the BFI Production Board calls, among other things, for the UKFC to hand over its research function to the BFI.

Yet there’s little evidence in the survey report to suggest that users consider the UKFC’s research activity to be self-serving. If anything, the 400+ users who responded to the survey are, by and large, satisfied (and in many cases very satisfied) with the RSU’s work and publications. Self-serving or not, the RSU provides a service that others value. And that is as it should be.

2009: a year in rear view

So how was it for you? As 2010 gambols into view, like a newly minted foal, it seems only polite to ask.

For my part, I’ve been wondering these last few days whether 2009 was especially significant for the film business. It’s probably too early to say, and in any case every year is one of highs and lows, winners and losers. The one just past is no different.

On the strength of available evidence, it’s probably fair to say 2009 was not a singularly momentous year for the film biz. But it did bear witness to a number of watershed moments, and the question of its lasting significance will only be answerable in years to come.

We can say with certainty that theatrical exhibition in many parts of the world has fared well in 2009, further evidence that cinemagoing can be remarkably resilient even in the teeth of a recession (a point made in a paper published by the UK Film Council back in September 2008).

What role did 3D play in all of this? There’s an interesting study to be done to find out the answer (any takers?). 2009 saw the long-heralded relaunch of 3D courtesy of the digital cinema roll out across the globe, and the extra dimension gave movie theatres an added advantage over home entertainment (which makes it my Watershed Moment #1). It’s difficult to predict how long this advantage will last (3D TVs are in development, we’re told) and it remains to be seen whether the premium ticket prices charged to 3D goggle wearers will be sustainable once the novelty wears off.

While we’re on the subject of exhibition, I must mention the Splendor Cinema blog (my Find of the Year #1), which is dedicated to the exhibition business and written by Jon Barrenchea, General Manager of the Duke of York's Picturehouse in Brighton.

With cinema cash registers ringing fulsomely throughout 2009, there’s a certain irony in the fact that the year also saw more concerted experimentation with release windows by the major studios. Exhibitors have resisted any encroachment on the theatrical window, and the studios have contented themselves by playing around with various combinations of home entertainment windows, shuffling VoD and DVD releases on certain titles (Watershed Moment #2). But as trade journalist Diane Garrett reports in her Consumed by Media blog (Find of the Year #2), it may be only a matter of time before the theatrical window comes under renewed pressure.

Online piracy continued to loom large in 2009, despite the high-profile prosecution of Pirate Bay. But faced with dwindling finance from traditional sources and a theatrical market place dominated by expensively marketed studio pictures, independent filmmakers turned in increasing numbers to the digital sphere for production funding and DIY distribution opportunities.

To paraphrase Churchill, 2009 did not mark the end of old way of making and distributing films, and it was not even the beginning of the end. But it was, perhaps, the end of the beginning (a Watershed Moment #3 of sorts; Mark Anderson, writing recently in Wired, certainly thinks so).

The global banking crisis, the explosion of social networking, audience fragmentation, digital media convergence, the rise of multi-platform story-telling, the profusion of free online content and rampant file sharing: individually and collectively they pose a challenge to the status quo, as well as untold opportunities for those less wedded to the Twentieth Century way of doing things.

So much for the bigger picture. Here’s a quick run down of my highlights from the year’s posts:

January, February and March
At the top of the year some video game suit claimed ‘video games are poised to eclipse all other forms of entertainment in the decade ahead’. According to figures published only last week, it looks like he might have a point, at least in revenue terms. But it’s patent nonsense to suggest this makes video games more popular than film, a line some hacks have been touting in recent days.

It’s not only this kind of spurious logic we need to guard against in media coverage of the film business. As LA Times columnist Patrick Goldstein reminded us in January, feature film budget numbers quoted in the media should always be taken with a pinch of salt. Or in Avatar’s case, perhaps a good handful.

The start of the year also saw the launch of a House of Lords enquiry into the British film and TV industries. The Lords Communications Committee took written and oral evidence throughout most of 2009, but there’s still no sign of their final report. Let's hope it's worth the wait.

2009 was a pleasingly fertile year for film business research sources, with the launch of several new web sites including Film New Europe in March, followed in June by Movie Review Intelligence and Marqeestars.com in September (Finds of the Year #3, #4 and #5). Be sure to check them out, if you’ve not done so already.

April, May and June
As previously noted, in 2009 it seemed we were never very far away from a piracy-related story, and in May an independent study by an academic research institute claimed to have established the size and impact of film and music piracy in the UK. Problem was the original press release included a wildly inaccurate figure, as pointed out by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian’s ‘Bad Science’ column. But that didn’t stop The Daily Mail, and others, running with the story.

In terms of the number of page views, by far the year’s most popular post concerned publication by the UK Film Council of Peter Bloore’s paper re-evaluating the independent film value chain (Find of the Year #6).

And around this time the UK Film Council also published a report into the cultural impact of UK film during the period 1946 to 2006 (the report can be downloaded as a PDF here) (a seminar was held to discuss the findings in November- presentations can be found on the UK Film Council web site).

July, August and September
July began encouragingly enough with publication by a couple of US academics of a paper about the use of film data to teach students basic business statistics.

But the big news in this period, certainly from a UK perspective, was of the proposed merger between the UK Film Council and the British Film Institute. I posted my initial thoughts on hearing the news, and was rewarded with an honourable mention in a Sight and Sound editorial. I duly renewed my subscription.

Critic and film writer Jason Solomons tried to kick off a debate about British films with his verdict that most of them are ‘crap’ (in a feature article for The Observer). Such is the lacklustre state of public discourse about film culture in this country that the article sparked nary a whimper in response. Did all of Solomons's readers simply shrug in resigned agreement? Where were the dissenting voices? Maybe he has has a point, after all.

October, November and December
Autumn greeted a new study of the European video on demand market, published by the European Audiovisual Observatory. The Observatory came up trumps again later in the year with publication of a detailed report into the Russian film business, prepared by Nevafilm and Rfilms (my Find of the Year #7)

A little late in the year, perhaps, for a silly season story, but news broke in November of a study estimating Kate Winslet’s financial value to the UK economy. We learned the actress is worth roughly £60 million to UK plc. If push comes to shove and the recession bites any deeper, I wonder how much we’d get for her on Ebay?

Better late than never, in December I finally found time to write up details of my favourite film-related infographics, an area of endeavour I plan to return to again in the coming year. There are many talented and generous people producing and freely sharing these fine works, and collectively they make my Find of the Year #8.

So there you have it, 2009 done and dusted. I look forward to welcoming you back in 2010.

UK cinema admissions, November 2009

As the year races towards its inevitable conclusion, the latest set of numbers from the Cinema Advertising Association shows 2009's admissions continued to out perform every other year since 2002.

November saw ticket sales totalling 14,913,425, 10% higher than the previous year's tally for the same month.

That puts the year to date (1 January to 30 November 2009) total at 157,196,254 (Figure 1).

The year end total for 2009 looks highly unlikely to top 2002's record, but this year will almost certainly be the best placed runner-up, above 2004 (my money's on 173 million). We'll find out soon enough: expect December's numbers to appear early in the new year, along with a figure for the annual box office gross total.

Figure 1: UK cinema admissions, January - November 2002 to 2009

Source: Cinema Advertising Association/Nielsen EDI

***'tis the season***

Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, here's wishing you the warmest compliments of the season and my heartfelt thanks for stopping by.

Jim