DB7

No contest
by Daniel Rosenthal
Hollywood came, we saw � and were conquered. Our critic on why Tinseltown took the spoils
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/

IT IS inconceivable that only a handful of British authors or pop acts would feature in an annual list of the UK’s 100 best-selling novels or albums, and yet of the 100 most popular films released here in 2003 only four were British. The US chalked up a massive 88.
This is one of the revelations of the Film Distributors’ Association (FDA) Yearbook for 2003 (free copies available through www.launchingfilms.com), published today, which offers the most detailed portrait available of moviegoers’ likes and dislikes in Britain and Ireland.



The yearbook is the closest thing we have to a cinemagoing census. The Times has been given exclusive access to the FDA statistics, which confirm that Hollywood’s dominance of our cinemas far exceeds America’s impact on any other field of cultural life.

The UK presence in the chart is worryingly top-heavy. Three homegrown comedies � Love Actually, Johnny English and Calendar Girls � all made it into the year’s Top Ten and between them accounted for almost one in ten of all tickets sold. How- ever, there is a breath- taking drop to No 71 before you encounter the next local entry, the S Club Seven vehicle S Club: Seeing Double.

Go outside the top 100 and you find a string of British pictures whose producers and distributors would have hoped for better results, notably the bowls comedy Blackball, Stephen Fry’s much-hyped Evelyn Waugh adaptation, Bright Young Things, and the turgid English Civil War drama To Kill a King, starring Tim Roth and Rupert Everett, which cost more than £10 million to make and grossed a disastrous £256,000.

Should we blame such poor performances on the comparatively dour content of British films which most cinemagoers, particularly the core audience of under-30s, find less appealing than even third-rate Hollywood genre movies like The Core or Dumb and Dumberer?

Or, as organisations such as Pact, the UK producers’ trade body, insist, is distribution the fundamental problem? Their argument is that accomplished British pictures are denied the chance to reach the audience they deserve because they often open on fewer than 50 screens, whereas American studio releases go out on at least 300.

The Government-funded UK Film Council is addressing the distribution question, notably through its £13 million plan to establish 250 digital screens that should make it easier and cheaper for cinema managers to programme mid-scale British pictures.

But for now, here’s the most chilling distribution statistic of 2003: independently released British movies claimed about 0.5 per cent of the total box-office gross � less even than foreign-language films.

There’s some consolation, perhaps, in the fact that the year’s most derided release wasn’t British. The Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez “comedy� Gigli took £24,000 at cinemas, which was probably enough to cover the expenses for the stars’ entourages. For one day.

But even flops like this and Charlotte Church’s film debut, I’ll Be There, which made just £28,000, could not prevent 2003’s total expenditure on cinema-going and film distribution from passing the £1 billion mark. Some 439 new films were released and we spent £809.5 million buying 167.3 million tickets to see them.

The admissions total was down by 4.9 per cent compared with 2002 (the best year for cinema-going since 1971), but “2003 was another terrific year for cinemagoing,� says Mark Batey, chief executive of the FDA. “Britain still ranks as the third-largest cinema market by box-office, behind only the United States and Japan.�

The members of Batey’s organisation, led by the Hollywood companies that control almost 80 per cent of the market, spent £120 million on making and circulating tens of thousands of release prints in 2003, and a further £148 million on advertising their movies (including £61 million on TV commercials alone). Their huge marketing campaigns can lure us into cinemas and deliver the big opening weekend that enables executives to trumpet a No 1 hit, but only positive word-of-mouth can generate sustained success � a rule illustrated by two of last summer’s blockbusters.

The comic-book spin-off Hulk took an impressive £3.52 million in its first three days of release. Then, as word spread that the muscle-bound green superhero was a bit of a turkey, the film’s receipts plummeted and the opening weekend ultimately accounted for 42 per cent of its final gross of £8.36 million.

By contrast, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl yielded £3.76 million from its opening weekend and then, thanks to word-of-mouth, its takings held steady for week after week. Its opening weekend represented just 13 per cent of the £28.17 million it eventually pulled in.

Both Pirates and Hulk cost more than £100 million to produce and market, and these astronomical, ever-increasing sums are making Hollywood executives less and less willing to take a chance on untested, original material, rather than scripts offering built-in “product awareness�. The proof? Of the top 45 titles in last year’s box-office chart, no fewer than 14 were sequels, twice as many as in 2002.

Away from the mainstream, 2003 was a record-breaking year for documentaries, which sold almost one million tickets, more than double the 2002 total. The most popular was James Cameron’s 3-D IMAX exploration of the Titanic wreck, Ghosts of the Abyss, which took £1.6 million, followed by Kevin Macdonald’s mountaineering tale, Touching the Void, which was released last December and has gone on to eclipse Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine as the highest-grossing documentary in British history.

The most surprising hits in this category were ÃÅ*tre et avoir, Nicolas Philibert’s charming account of a year in the life of a rural French school, and Jeffrey Blitz’s look at American spelling contests, Spellbound. The imminent release of the Oscar-winning The Fog of War, about the former US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, and Capturing the Friedmans, the Oscar-nominated tale of a dysfunctional family, should indicate whether audiences’ appetite for non-fiction film has been sated.

The success of ÃÅ*tre et avoir contributed to an exceptionally good year for foreign-language features, which built on the success of Y tu mamá también and Talk to Her in 2002 and confirmed that subtitles are becoming less of a deterrent to young, urban audiences than they were in the 1990s.

The eight Top 100 finishers that were neither American nor British were spread around the world, the electrifying Brazilian gang drama City of God leading the way, taking more than £2.3 million and drawing larger audiences than the Hollywood action-comedies Shanghai Knights and I-Spy. At No 2 on the foreign-language chart, Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! became the UK’s most popular German comedy ever (admittedly not much of a contest), with the Oscar-winning Japanese animation of Spirited Away in third place.

This remains a niche market, accounting for a little more than 1 per cent of tickets sold. However, with this week’s Oscar triumph sure to boost attendance for Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions, and a May release likely for Bad Education, the new film from the most popular foreign-language director of the past decade, Pedro Almodóvar, it’s a niche that has every chance of expanding further in 2004.