Sometimes Australian filmmakers look at their box office returns and feel exactly like this. Quite a lot really. Actually it comes from Unfriended and everyone wants the figures it is getting. In the US. Not here.
Indiewire is exploring the growth of horror in the US market through the Stanley Film Festival – a hard core event held in the very town where Steven King wrote The Shining.
It turns out that the price paid for the North American rights to It Follows was US$550,000, which is the cash that Radius TWC bet as an advance. After a cinema box office of US$14.2m and rising, that figure is now history and everyone is romping in fields of joy. If that was an Australian pic in our market, it would be returning about $1.8m to investors on the cinema tickets alone, minus an unknown amount for P&A.
I am a bit confused by the theory that genre has to be resold to young audiences – genre has been the bread and butter for cinema for generations, long beyond the days of B features, which were essentially specialist pics. Comic book movies are genre, frat-house comedies are genre, Star Wars is genre etc etc. And so are ALL of those TV series creating the golden age of the small screen. The question is not what is, but what is not genre.
So the issue really is whether those audiences can be tempted back into the collective cinema experience for pictures which are not hugely spectacular.
The article cleverly cites the NZ vampire flick What We Do In The Shadows. US$3.28m so far after a launch in five theatres which averaged US$117,800/location, grew to 154 theatres and lasted for 88 days. It is advertised as a comedy, not a vampire comedy. From the rest of the world it has taken US$3.3m, including US$2m in New Zealand, US$700,000 here and just over US$200,000 in the UK. Bad form on their part, I reckon. However, the Australian figure is wrong – the US$700,000 is AU$900,000 and true figure is close to $1.12m.
Of the wide releases this week here, only The Avengers: Age of Ultron is doing really well. 751 screens, $29m in two weeks with a screen average of $10,388. Cinderella after six weeks is doing all of $1702/screen but is still on 205 screens, which testifies to the power of Disney in inducing exhibitors to ring the last drops of possibility from the title.
Unfriended is doing okay at $6,850/screen but only on 185 screens; has been out in the US for seventeen days and munched through US$28.6m. It is a found footage horror film which launched at Fantasia Festival in July last year, surfaced at SXSW two months ago and then went on 2739 cinema in the US.
The vast herd-like mass of the US audience has responded to The Water Diviner has responded in week two by doubling its returns to US$2.33m.
There is nothing Australian even in the boutique list.
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The WSJ provides a fascinating portrait of the power struggle between exhibitors and studios about box office returns. Disney is claiming 60% of the ticket price up from 50%. This fight has gone on since the dawn of cinema; Disney is using an average national ticket price to calculate its return, which suggests it doesn’t have access to the exhibitors’ computers.
