2011 Global Box Office News

The closing figures for annual box office returns are starting to come in and very interesting they are. We’ve compiled an overview gleaned mainly from Cineuropa and Screen International. It’s an uneven picture with records being set in some territories and worrying falls in others.

The winners in Europe appear to be Norway, France and the Netherlands, all three experiencing their best returns for a very long time. Norway’s admissions are the highest since 1976 and this is good news for the world’s first ‘digital only’ territory. Local films (40 of them) are driving the Norwegian market. The French admissions total is the highest since 1966 at 215.6 million with 20 local films attracting over 1 million admissions each and the top two films of the year were both French – Intouchables and Rien à déclarer. In the Netherlands admissions were up to 30.4 millions – the highest figure since 1978 – with local films taking nearly 22%. It’s worth noting that these three territories are amongst the leaders in the switch to digital distribution and projection. Cineuropa also reports that the Netherlands has benefited from an expansion in screens and seats over the last 5 years. Norway is perhaps in the strongest position re the current recession but there are concerns that because local production depends on public sector funding to a large extent, the current austerity programmes may have an impact in 2012/3.

French films did well in their local market – as did Italian films (though the overall Italian market was down). In both cases American films suffered and the domestic market is down in the US to its lowest level since 1995 with admissions at 1,276 million. Box office is also down 4% and with anxiety about the decline in the DVD market, Hollywood is looking down the barrel. The studies must hope that VOD grows quickly in the next couple of years. 3D has not proved to be the magic bullet though production totals are keeping up and 3D market share is holding.

In Spain, local films increased their market share to 15% and the overall box office was up.

In Denmark, overall admissions fell slightly to 12.6 million but local films, especially comedies took 28% of box office.

Czech Republic admissions 20% down with local films and other European films suffering most. Multiplexes have digitised projection faster than single screens and Hollywood blockbusters are benefiting. Romania is another territory where the audience is ignoring local productions in favour of Hollywood. Although Romanian productions continue to earn plaudits from film festival juries, the domestic audience for some of these films is only a few thousand.

Portuguese admissions fell by nearly 900,000 to 15.7 million with a 3% fall in takings. US films took 80% of the market, European films only 5%.

In Finland the fall was from 7.6 million to 7.1 million with local films suffering most, losing 10% of market share.

The biggest film across Europe appears to have been the final instalment in the Harry Potter franchise. This is good news for the UK film industry (which makes the films even if Hollywood takes the major profits) with The King’s Speech also doing well. Overall it’s been a good year for British film in both commercial and critical terms. Admissions rose slightly  to 171 million and British films (including co-productions) took nearly a third (£295 million) of total box office. Besides The King’s Speech, the biggest winner and biggest surprise was The Inbetweeners, a TV sitcom adaptation about a group of ‘lads’ on holiday between school and university which took £70 million. The film has now been sold to an American independent but otherwise has hardly been seen outside the UK. Is this the UK equivalent of those blockbusting French hits that don’t seem to travel?

Meanwhile, Australian box office revenue is down by 3% and admissions fell by nearly 8% to 85 million (still a strong figure on a per capita basis). Screen International suggests that this fall is due to the lack of a big Hollywood box office driver like Avatar during 2011. Harry Potter was again the No 1 film. A rare Australian local success, Red Dog, took over Aus$20 million, but overall local films won less than 5% market share. In New Zealand box office revenue was down 9% in 2011.

Early reports from Japan suggest that box office will be significantly down in 2011. Mark Schilling in The Japan Times forecasts a fall of as much as 20%. Only part of this can be attributed to the tsunami and nuclear power disaster. Once again, the lack of a blockbuster title like Avatar is mentioned. Local productions have also fallen back . (But it’s worth noting that anime took the top two local slots with the latest Studio Ghibli and a new Pokemon title.) Hollywood must worry though. Japan, like Australia, is a major market and if audiences are getting fed up with sequels, the future doesn’t look good.

I’ll cover news of the other major territories in the next few weeks.

The Celluloid Ceiling – Women in Hollywood

Screen International reported today on the findings of the Center for Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego University. The centre’s survey of employment on the Top 250 domestic films at the US Box Office in 2011. Although the survey found that there were marginal increases in the overall employment of women – a 2% increase in total employment since 2010, but only 1% since 1998 – the striking figure is that only 5% of the directing roles on the 250 films went to women. Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar success is still likely to be an isolated incident for American films unless something changes dramatically in the mind-set of studio executives. As it is, the report comments on women’s opportunities thus:

“Women were most likely to work in the documentary, drama, and comedy genres. They were least likely to work in the horror, action, and animated genres.”

Teachers and researchers can download an executive summary of the findings from the link above. The same website has a useful list of links and books/articles on women in the film and TV industries here.

Haywire (US 2012)

Room Service – Soderbergh Style

I’ve been made aware recently that not everyone regards Steven Soderbergh as a genius. Before I argue the case, and using Haywire, I will admit that flicking onto Ocean’s Thirteen a couple of nights ago did make me acknowledge the other side of the argument – even when this was the film that recouped the franchise after the bastard middle child that was Ocean’s Twelve had been let loose on an indulgent public. O13 has all those elements of slick plotting and Rat Pack glamour without quite the soul of a good movie. This from the man who was the instigator of the 1990s independent cinema boom with his debut feature sex, lies and videotape and therefore perenially associated with a form of filmmaking that is all about soul on minimal budgets. Soderbergh is a master of the ‘one for them, one for me’ system of making films – after he experienced several years in the wilderness after his second and subsequent features failed to hit the mark as that elusive quality of ‘indie’ yet ‘commercial’ – the monster he was involved in creating. Schizopolisis the love letter to audiences that means Soderbergh (for me) never has to say he’s sorry.

On first glance, Haywire might appear as the ‘one for them’ option. It’s in a mainstream genre; it stars Gina Carano as a ‘kick-ass’ female action star – a popular generic twist already well established by Angeline Jolie. so Carano should be Matrix-kicking at an open door. She does – with aplomb – but within a far classier product that recalls Soderbergh’s capacity with reinvention of genre (as in his comeback crime thriller Out of Sight) and his cineaste love of those late 60s and early 70s complexities. Reviews have discussed the ‘real’ violence on screen – performers visibly hurt/winded during fight sequences or stunts – and the opening scene suggests this kind of action is going to be relentless. In fact, what Soderbergh constructs (as his own cinematographer and editor – check out the regular pseudonyms) is a series of raids or attacks, long set pieces that spend more time crafting tension than releasing it spectacularly. It recalls some of the ambience of The Limey – setting, music and the camerawork which, despite its very phycsical action, instinctively sends me back to the great 60s heist movies rather than more obvious models. Of these, Carano’s character is immediately reminiscent of Jason Bourne – but we are not in the situation of the agent gone rogue/on the run to discover that the government structure is not to be trusted. We are already in post-belief world of sub-contracted, privatised assassinations – the issue of whether Michael Douglas’s American official is to be trusted never seems to be in play.

It’s a great genre piece – a modern action flick. As ever, Soderbergh’s handling of it means that it’s The Thomas Crown Affair, perhaps even Rififi (albeit cinematographically so different) I want to return to (as well as the obvious references to Point Blank and Get Carter that have featured in review). Perhaps if only to work out whether it’s Ewan McGregor or Michael Fassbender who best captures Faye Dunaway’s indeterminate duplicity(!). Gina Carano has already convinced me that she might be a reasonable replacement, more generally, for Steve McQueen’s relatively silent and unreconstructed brand of hero.

Asphalt (Germany 1929)

This UFA film came at the end of the silent era: it premiered only three months before the arrival of sound film in Berlin with Hollywood’s The Jazz Singer (1927). It is a fine example of the high production values, controlled style and narrative economy of the late silents. Ufa was the technical and stylistic centre of European film. Filmed almost entirely in the great Neubabelsberg studio, even the impressive street and traffic scenes are interior sets.

The opening sequence of the film introduces a scene that sets out the title: “The smooth and shiny asphalt serves in this film as a metaphor for a metropolitan “surface culture” that stressed exteriorly and sparkling facades, but also implied pretence and deception.” [Anton Kaes, Catalogue of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto]. This feature shows the influence of the ‘Street film’ Straßenfilm [‘street film’] and Kammerspielfilm [‘chamber film’]. The characters are mainly ‘little people’ and their experiences emphasise the clash of the public and the private.

Asphalt also displays the stylistic and technical virtuosity at Ufa and in German film generally. The sets and décor are impressive; the film plays with the contrast between light and shadow: and there are spectacular shot using the entfesselte camera [‘unchained’ camera’]. The Producer Erich Pommer was a key player in the German studio: director Joe May had produced some of the impressive early Fritz Lang films: and the craftsmen like Günter Rittau and Erich Kettelhut had worked on Lang’s Metropolis (1926).

The actual story involves a young policeman Holk (Gustav Frölich, star of Metropolis), whose father is a retired policeman and whose mother is a stereotypical doting hausfrau. He becomes involved with a young woman, Else Kramer, [played by Betty Amann]. She, however, is already involved with a con artist [Hans Adalbert Schlettow, one of the stars of Lang’s Dr. Mabuse (1922)].The complications that evolve are worked out with both style and panache.

The screening of the film at this years Le Giornate del Cinema Muto was accompanied by Gabriel Thibaudeau. Now Bradford’s National Media Museum is screening the film on Sunday January 29th with Darius Battiwalla accompanying the film on piano.

Asphalt

Ufa, 1929, black and white, silent with Intertitles.
2574 metres, running time 93 minutes at 24 fps.

Director: Joe May. Producer: Erich Pommer. Scenario: Fred Majo [Joe May], Hans Székely, Rolf E. Vanloo [also story]. Cinematography: Günter Rittau. Production Design: Erich Kettelhut, [Robert Herith, Walter Röhrig].

Nanban (Friend, India 2012)

The three college students played by (from left) Jeeva, Srikanth and Vijay

Remakes are a way of life in the popular Indian film industries. Hollywood is always a source of ideas as well as films from other major industries – ‘unofficial remakes’ – but the main traffic in remakes is between the different language cinemas. Many titles are made in one language and then simply dubbed into one or more others. Sometimes films are made in two languages almost simultaneously by the same director – most famously by Mani Ratnam with Raavan/Raavanan (2010) and Yuva/Ayitha Ezhuthu 2004 – in each case a Hindi and a Tamil production with different casting. Most common , however, is the simple remake of say a Malayalam film as a Tamil production or a Telugu film as a Hindi production.

Nanban is one of the major Tamil films of the year, a blockbuster aiming at the religious festival period which includes Pongal and lasts from 13-16 January. Nanban is a remake, but not just any remake. It is the official Tamil remake of one of the biggest-selling Bollywood titles of all time, 3 Idiots (2009) starring Amir Khan. To meet this challenge the producers Gemini Film Circuit hired Shankar, the successful director of the last two blockbusters from Superstar Rajnikanth, Sivaji and Endhiran.

In my posting on 3 Idiots I expressed my disappointment in the failure of screenwriter Abhijat Joshi and director Rajkumar Hirani to properly represent the satire on the education system offered by the novel Five Point Someone by Chetan Bhagat. The bad news is that Nanban uses the Joshi/Hirani script almost to the letter and therefore suffers from the same problems associated with changes in character roles and insertion of comedy routines at the expense of satire and observation about higher education in India. The good news, from my perspective, is that Nanban is even more enjoyable on its own terms and is arguably a ‘better’ film – whatever that means.

I’m prejudiced because I tend to prefer Tamil films to Bollywood. It isn’t a fair comparison I know because I’ve only seen the best of Tamil Cinema and I suspect that the routine mainstream Tamil features are not quite the same. The problem has been that we simply don’t get the UK Tamil releases up here in West Yorkshire. But for some reason, Cineworld decided this year to screen two Tamil films in their original language during the January festival season in Bradford. Usually we have to make do with a Hindi version (e.g. of Raavan and Robot – the Hindi dub of Endhiran). I’m guessing that there are very few Tamil speakers in Leeds/Bradford – a few hundred at most – whereas there are many thousands of Urdu/Hindi speakers. The question is, how many of the Urdu/Hindi speakers in the South Asian diaspora want to read English subtitles in order to access a Tamil film? I don’t know, but in the afternoon showing of Nanban there were just three people in the audience, one of whom might have been a Tamil speaker. I should stress that Nanban has done very well in the UK. Over the opening weekend it took £113,000 from just 24 prints (across the UK – see locations here) with a screen average of over £4,700 for No. 13 in the chart – and all this from a new independent distributor ‘RJ Overseas’. I wonder what they will make of the experiment? I hope it continues.

So why do I prefer Nanban to 3 Idiots? I think that there are three reasons:

1. The casting offers four younger actors for the ’3 idiots’ and the principal’s daughter. It’s interesting that the production used two Tamil actors, Srikanth and Jeeva, who closely resemble Madhavan (once himself a Tamil star) and Sharman Joshi. Vijay, very much a rising star in Tamil Nadu, takes the Aamir Khan role and  Ileana D’Cruz takes the Kareena Kapoor role. All four were believable as both students in their early twenties and successful young thirty somethings. I was amazed to discover that Vijay was actually 36 when he made the film – even so, he’s eight years younger than Aamir Khan. The problem with the Bollywood version is not just that the stars are too old but that they are also so identifiable with a specific star persona. This is probably true of the Tamil stars too. I don’t know the Tamil star image, but the actors seemed to give performances less marked in this way.

2. Although the script sticks closely to 3 Idiots, the songs and their ‘picturisation’ are quite different. Shankar pulls out all the stops with shoots in Europe and the Andaman Islands. The songs themselves by Harris Jayaraj weren’t particularly memorable for me – but some of the lyrics (all of which were translated in the English subs) are extraordinary. One song includes the word ‘love’ sung in several different languages. Costumes, settings and camerawork work well together and the other feature of the film’s presentation is the use of animated inserts and visual effects – from companies in Hyderabad and Shanghai.

3. This is a bit more tricky. As a broad generalisation I would say that Nanban offers something closer to a representation of a ‘real India’. This is partly achieved through location shooting (the main location is a college in Tamil Nadu and Simla in the earlier film is replaced by Ootacamund and Coimbatore) and partly through casting. The minor characters root the film in the South. Many characters are darker-skinned and Dravidian in appearance. But . . . there seems to be an aversion to using darker-skinned young women for the dance sequences and on reflection I do think Shankar could be charged with a potentially racist portrayal of the sister of one of the three (i.e. the young man from a poor background). Both my viewing colleague and I winced at the portrayal of this young woman (the ‘joke’ is that no-one will marry her because she is ‘ugly’ – and ‘too dark’?). See a local response, arguing this point strongly. I’m reminded of the similar wince-inducing representations in the UK production, East is East (UK 2002).

On the whole, I enjoyed the film very much despite its failure to develop a strong satire and I was particularly impressed with Vijay. Even though I could predict every scene, I was entertained for the whole three hours and towards the end I was ridiculously moved by the very sentimental take on friendship – but then, I find it hard not to cry in Hollywood films sometimes.

Much of my initial interest in 3 Idiots was focused on how the film would perform internationally. Nanban hasn’t got quite the same level of initial international exposure, though it is out in North America, UK and Australia as well as Singapore and Malaysia. It may eventually find its way to South Korea and other parts of East Asia. Unfortunately it has already suffered quite badly from piracy – though most cinemas in Chennai were completely sold out for the first five days before the film actually opened. A Telugu dubbed version opens in Andhra Pradesh on 26 January (some of the Tamil stars have a following in Telugu Cinema).

Gemini HD Trailer (no English subs):