Image: Strictly Ballroom, all flair and determination.
The American Film Market’s series of artlcles on the most profitable films at different budget ranges has now finished with the $3-10m category. Analysts Stephen Follows and Brush Nash can now draw some general conclusions.
In addition, Antony I Ginnane analysed the earlier articles from an Australian perspective, so producers could maximise their chances of a return out of the deals.
Read more: Spend it to make it – but just how much?
Into the mix we can also place Sandy George and Bernadette Rheinberger’s analysis of the most successful Australian films internationally, part of their excellent four part series auspiced by Screen Australia.
We can read this data from many different perspectives because producers deploy such different advantages. Coproduction? Star power? Adaptation? Franchise? Multinational ownership? The business is unnervingly chancy with any advantages, but playing without a loaded dice is still much tougher.
The Australian information is dominated by the simple fact that Screen Australia is in so many of the respectable productions, so they are the best understood. In this context, true success, in which everyone including the producers, directors and writers get a decent payout, nearly always depends on international returns. According to the series, NO films studied have reached that point. BUT, others have – producer Steve Kearney claims that Oddball is in profit, for instance.
Beyond this is a wild world of often low budget genre pictures which may do much better than we think without ever having an international theatrical release.
The mismatched data sets from these three studies provokes a few reflections from the point of view of the indy Australian producer, the group which is closest to the ScreenHub heart. The most sensible strategy for a kitchen table(ish) production company, or an entity based pretty well on the brand of its producer(s) is to do business with larger companies. But from a larger industry or cultural perspective that has many problems, including the brute fact that there are so few opportunities to do this on terms that reward the indy.
Among the ten highest grossing Australian films that Screen Australia identifies, Bait, The Dressmaker, The Babadook, A Few Best Men, Predestination and The Sapphires probably fit the indy category (and I know this is trickier than it seems.)
The key market is the US, at least at the moment. The top ten films by sale price in North America made from an indy perspective include
The Babadook – psychological horror
Backtrack – drama, horror, mystery
The Dressmaker – comedy melodrama
Kill Me Three Times – comedy crime action
The Rover – post apocalyptic action thriller
Son of a Gun – jail break
Strangerland – drama mystery thriller
In the UK and Europe, Animal Kingdom and Beneath Hill Sixty enter the mix.
The AFM’s $3-10m list is around $4-13m in our currency. There are four categories – character study dramas, high concept horror, breakout documentaries and crowd pleasers.
According to the article,
Today’s budget range has the highest percentage of films that stray outside the mainstream. 35% were not produced in the United States, compared to just 5% of the most profitable films made on between $20 million and $50 million. In addition, these films are also much darker in tone than the most profitable films in other budget ranges. This is best illustrated by the MPAA rating, with 67% receiving an R rating.
Those character driven films are the largest category of successful films, offering ‘an insight into the minds of interesting characters’ – a phrase that could easily be stencilled onto the walls of Australian development executives. After all, we make a lot of them. What is more, the successful pictures of this type are ‘often dark.’
Sheesh, you say, the Australian cinema has been hounded for doing this for twenty years. However, the US versions also benefit from high profile casts. Pictures on the list include Memento, Volver, City of God, Good Night and Good Luck, Dallas Buyers Club, Billy Elliott, Crash, The Last King of Scotland, Whale Rider, Whiplash, As it is in Heaven and Bend it like Beckham.
We have also been trying hard to make crowd pleasers, which tend not to do well outside Australia. Another way of saying this, though, is that an Australian crowd pleaser which jumps off the page is likely to be absorbed into a larger production company like See-Saw and turn into a co-pro.
The American list in this category is My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Santa Buddies, High School Musical, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, The Inbetweeners, Magic Mike, Bring it On and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. There’s some good casts in that list.
It’s a blunt fact that Australian films have a tough time in the US. Our dialect is different from theirs, the sense of humour is different and we probably have a harder time recruiting stars. On the other hand, we at least speak English and US niche markets are huge compared to ours. That is one reason why films can quietly do well off the radar.
We can make a salutary comparison out of these lists, which is really the point of the exercise. The Australian films are all indy films (depending on your definition) while I haven’t put that filter on the US list. But it is instructive to ask ourselves whether the pictures on that North American honour roll are better on average to the Screen Australia list.
Are they fresher? More ambitious? More startling? More emotionally intelligent? Do they have a stronger sense of cinema history?
The answers vary project by project, but this is surely the value system to which we should aspire. As Steve Kearney said on the phone, ‘You’ve got to be really brilliant these days.’
Of course this helps to explain why Netflix and Amazon can be such game changers. No theatrical, a much more international set of audiences, and an affinity for smaller screen ambitions.
