Bigger Picture Research

Oz production figures, 2007/08

With the recent debut of Baz Luhrman’s epic Australia the spotlight has turned on Australian cinema. Which makes the publication earlier this week of Screen Australia’s latest digest of production stats all the more timely.

The 2007/08 Drama Production Survey covers all Australian and co-production titles (TV and film), plus foreign titles that were shot in Australia or did post, digital or visual effects (abbreviated to PDV) there.

41 features started shooting or PDV work during the year, along with 700 hours of TV drama and 14 foreign PDV-only projects.

The value of production spend in Australia totalled $675 million, up 7% on last year. This increase was largely due to foreign production activity, which accounted for 37% of the total local spend.

Of the 41 features, 29 were Australian and they had a total budget of $128 million. This falls short of the five-year average ($147 million), but as the press release notes ‘this is the highest recorded result for local features if large-budget foreign-financed titles are removed from the equation (most recently, Happy Feet in 2003/04 and Australia in 2006/07)’.

Commenting on the data, Screen Australia’s new CEO, Dr Ruth Harley (recently of the New Zealand Film Commission) said, "This is a solid result for the industry, particularly in television drama. It marks a good base from which to measure the future impact on production levels of the Federal Government’s new incentives.”

The new tax offsets became available in 2007/08 and it is too early to say whether they have stimulated production activity as intended. Given the international financial crisis this may not be a very good test year for the new scheme. But I guess we’ll find out this time next year.

NB all figures quoted are in Australian dollars.

Italian boffo update, 2008

Figures released last week by Italy’s motion picture association, Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche Audiovisive e Multimediali (ANICA), report a 4% fall in box office between January and November 2008 compared with the same period in 2007, to Euro 497 million ($649 million). Admissions over the period fell by the same proportion, from 87.3 million to 83.7 million.

And as reported by Variety, the market share of local pictures fell from 31% to 27%, although this is expected to rise by year end on the back of a strong showing by Italian titles over Christmas.

Covering the same story for Cineuropa, Camillo de Marco points to the effect of the festival log jam between September and October, with Venice, Rome and Turin all taking place.  “There are too many arthouse films concentrated in the same period”, Riccardo Tozzi, president of ANICA, is quoted as saying. “Whereas in November there is then a return to more commercial titles. This penalises both the market and arthouse cinema."

UK cinema admissions, October 2008

The Cinema Advertising Association has published UK cinema admissions data for October.

The month saw 13,038,645 admissions, compared with 12,155,575 in October 2007, which means cinemas sold a total of 138,390,384 tickets between January and October 2008, up by 0.1% over the same period last year (see chart, below).

That’s not bad considering the wider travails affecting the economy. It is commonly held that cinema going is largely recession proof, because, the argument runs, people continue to visit the picture palace in search of relatively cheap entertainment while reining in other types of expenditure.

But the evidence is far from clear on this point. And in any case, there are good reasons to assume the present recession may be different. Unparalleled leisure opportunities compete for our attention inside and outside the home, and the ready availability of pleasing diversions online may give us pause before heading out the door. In this context, a modest rise in admissions is actually rather heartening.

October’s tally was driven by the starry-eyed popularity of High School Musical 3 (a half-term opener that amassed £15.9 million during the month), plus Quantum of Solace’s record-breaking debut on Halloween.

Long running Mamma Mia! continued to play its part, clocking up £4.2 million during October, although it has yet to top Titanic’s record box office gross (£69.03 million, unadjusted for inflation).

Last weekend (21-23 November) the film grossed £87,646 from 291 screens, taking its cumulative total to £68,116,092. If we estimate an average ticket price in the UK of £5.00 (last year it was £5.05, so this is an underestimate) that would put Mamma Mia’s admissions around the 13.6 million mark. The average ticket price in 1998 was £3.83 (according to the bfi Film and Television Handbook 2000), so Mamma Mia! still falls well short of Titanic’s titanic admissions total of 18 million.

But Abba fans can take heart. Variety reports the film shifted a record 1.7 million DVD units on its first day of sale in the UK (24 November), putting Titanic’s first day total (1.1 million) in the shade (although the overall DVD market was much smaller in those days).

International communications market

Last week the Office of Communications (Ofcom) published its third annual statistical overview of the £876 billion global communications market in 12 established industrial economies (UK, France, Germany, Italy, US, Canada, Japan, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and the Republic of Ireland) plus the fast growing economies of Brazil, India, Russia and China.

The publication (International Communications Market Report) coincided with an international conference hosted by the regulator (Next Generation - Net Generation: Managing competitive communications in a digital age).

I can't do justice to the full breadth of material presented in the report (which weighs in at over 300 pages), so here’s a taster quoted from the press release:

Montage: Converging media; Danish admissions; BFI research guide

This week law firm Olswang published the results of its annual ‘convergence’ survey, examining UK attitudes to different media platforms. Taken together the findings indicate that viewer choice and control are important drivers of consumer satisfaction, which suggests anything impeding easy access to content, like Digital Rights Management or release windows, is a demand-side no-no.

The research is based on a survey of 1,162 respondents (235 children aged 13-15 and 927 adults) conducted by YouGov between 25 September and 3 October 2008. YouGov also hosted a number of focus groups, designed ‘to explore in more detail the effects of convergence on the activities of distinct types of consumer’. These groups include ‘kids’, ‘mainstream’ adults, ‘tech vanguard’ and ‘laggards’. This last category comprises late adopters, rather than Luddites; the survey and focus groups were conducted online, so all respondents had access to the Internet.

Taking solace from quanta

According to enigmax, writing for TorrentFreak, Mr Bond’s 22nd big screen outing (Quantum of Solace) leaked onto the Internet before it bowed in the US last weekend.

That’s despite a massive counter-piracy campaign in the UK (where the film opened two weeks ago) involving cinema staff donning night vision goggles (supplied by Q?) to catch camcorder users in the act.

This news came in the same week that Detica, a business and technology consultancy, urged the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) ‘to shift the focus of its consultation process away from enforcement when considering legislative options for addressing illicit peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing.’

Detica reckons enforcement is too costly and time-consuming so efforts should instead be directed towards giving consumers access to reasonably (and flexibly) priced legal downloads. This sounds like a sensible option given that an army of begoggled cinema ushers still failed to prevent the camcordering of everyone's favourite spy. 

So has peer-to-peer filesharing had any material impact on Bond’s theatrical performance? Yes, probably. But we’ll never know for certain the order of magnitude involved.

Yet the film’s distributors and producers can take some comfort from the early box office results. QoS had a record-breaking opening day in the UK, and went on to amass £15.4 million by the end of the first weekend.

And despite its online availability, QoS had the highest US opening of any previous film in the franchise, grossing around $70 million according to early estimates (Casino Royale managed around $40 million in its opening weekend at about the same time of year).

Which just goes to prove that in times of financial uncertainty, some bonds are a much safer bet than others.

Taxonomy of film II

The movie business likes sequels, so here’s one of my own. The previous post about UK film tax relief carried the word ‘taxonomy’ in the title because in a playful way it sounded appropriate late last night when I typed it. On reflection I’m not so sure (a case of antics over semantics?). But that’s blogging for you: thinking and keying on the hoof.

By way of atonement this supplementary post does warrant the word ‘taxonomy’ in the title. I want to correct a misleading impression conveyed in my post about the UK Film Council’s film production statistics, and it concerns the way UK films are tracked and classified.

The list of UK films published last week by the UK Film Council includes all films with a production budget of £500k+ and shot wholly or in part in the UK during the period from January 2003 to September 2008. This list includes films that qualified for UK tax relief (under the old and new schemes), but it is not confined to them. It also includes films that did not qualify for tax relief but nonetheless involved some UK production elements (i.e. non-UK films shot in the UK). The UK Film Council tracks such activity to give as fully rounded a picture of UK production as possible.

This list, and the corresponding figures presented in the accompanying spreadsheet, does not, therefore, directly match the information used to generate the tax relief analysis released by the Treasury. There will be a significant overlap, but the two datasets are in fact different.

Sorry for any confusion...

Taxonomy of film

For some reason I missed the statement on UK film tax relief issued by the Treasury a couple of weeks ago. I must have been distracted by news of impending recession or some other frippery.

Anyhow, if (like me) you didn’t catch it, Stephen Timms (Financial Secretary to the Treasury) published the first figures since the ‘new’ film tax relief scheme began in January 2007. They show that up until the end of March 2008, £104 million of tax relief was pumped into the production of around 100 UK qualifying films.

The Government seems content with this level of support. “These figures reinforce the role film tax relief is playing in strengthening the British film industry and encouraging the production of high quality home-grown films”, Timms said in a statement. Hurrah for our home-grown heroes (like Jason Bourne). “This is a dynamic industry that has continued to be resilient in the face of difficult economic times. The UK’s share of the global theatrical market was $3.3 billion in 2007, with the top 10 performing UK films worldwide grossing around $2.5 million, up 26 percent on the previous year.”

UK film production 2003 to 2008

The UK Film Council has just published two spreadsheets jam packed with data about UK film production in the period from January 2003 to September 2008.

In the notes accompanying the spreadsheets the Research & Statistics Unit promises to keep them regularly updated (presumably every quarter), making these datasets about the state of UK production by far the most useful and timely.

The first (‘UK film production by quarter, Q1 2003 to Q3 2008’) presents figures showing:

• The aggregate number, UK spend and total budget of all UK-qualifying films split by production type (inward investment feature, co-production, and domestic production);
• Rolling annual totals of the same (helpful for keeping track of trends over time);
• Rolling annual totals of average spend and average budget of films split by production type;
• Plus four charts displaying the data graphically.

The second spreadsheet (‘UK film production - list of films Q1 2003 to Q3 2008’) gives additional background by listing all the qualifying film titles over this period as well as their production type, shoot year, director, country of origin, the country of shoot, and their genre. There’s no title-by-title budget information, of course, as that’s supplied to the UKFC in strict confidence. You have to rely on Screen Finance or IMDb for such numbers (although any budget information in the public domain comes with a stern health warning).

So there you have it: the output of the British film industry over the last five years laid bare in numbers. And because it’s available in a spreadsheet you can run off your own analyses and charts and cut the data any way you wish.

p.s. So what does the data reveal about production levels in the first nine months of 2008? The headline figures show a fall in overall output: 89 films were made between January and September 2008 compared with 99 over the same period in 2007. Total UK spend in 2008 (January to September) stood at £436.1 million, down from £696.0 million in 2007, while the total budget fell from £1,121.4 in 2007 million to £733.2 million in 2008.

But although there were fewer co-productions and inward investment features in the first nine months of 2008 there was an increase in the number of domestic productions (continuing a trend evident over the last five years). There are a geat deal more nuances I could report, but you can check those out for yourself.

Cinema advertising

One of the very many newsworthy elements of the US Presidential election was the enormous sum lavished on advertising.

In the closing stages of the campaign, Team Obama fielded a TV advertisement reputedly costing $6 million, and the Campaign Media Analysis Group estimates the President-elect spent somewhere north of $180 million on local and national TV spots in the course of his campaign.

Did this gargantuan outlay help secure victory? It’s hard to say for sure: as John Wanamaker once noted rather ruefully, ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half’. But it probably did no harm.

Advertising obviously plays a big part in the film business. Distributors are significant advertisers in their own right: last year in the UK alone around £180 million was spent advertising new film releases, according to figures published by Nielsen Media Research and reported in the UK Film Council 2008 Statistical Yearbook.

But advertising revenue, rather than expenditure, also helps to keep exhibitors in the black. A new study published by Nielsen Preview throws welcome light on this oft-neglected corner of the film business.

UK admissions update

The Cinema Advertising Association has just published the UK's admissions tally for September (which can be found on the Pearl and Dean web site).

The month of mists and mellow fruitfulness (and global financial cataclysm) saw respectable ticket sales of 10.6 million, the second highest number for September since 2002, and over 10% higher than the same month in 2007.

This takes the year total (January to September) to 125,351,739, down just 0.6% on last year (and still higher than 2003, 2005 and 2006, when the economy was in ruder health than it is now).

With Quantum of Solace's record-breaking opening day last Friday (£4.9 million) auguring well for cinema attendances through October and November (plus other new releases like High School Musical 3) the year could still out perform 2007.

 

DIY filmmaking: a Halloween special

Listening to filmmaker Arin Crumley (Four Eyed Monsters) at last week’s Digital Distribution and Film Innovation Forum put me in mind of Peter Jackson, whose birthday it is today.

Arin gave some fascinating insights into his filmmaking approach, and waxed lyrical about the 4k Red digital camera, which Jackson used to shoot a short WWI-set film last year.

But it’s not just a shared interest in revolutionary kit that unites these two filmmakers. Although Jackson had his first break with Bad Taste in the analogue age, his style of DIY filmmaking is very much on a par with today’s generation of digital content innovators who find ingenious ways to get their creative vision on the screen.

Montage: MySpace and movies; Forecasting Blu-ray in Europe; Mamma Mia! update

If you want to reach the 15-24 age group your best bet is to do it via MySpace according to new research by Nielsen NRG. Marc Graser, writing in Variety, reports MySpace ‘is the top online destination for 15- to 24-year-olds looking for information about new film releases’.

Nielsen NRG surveyed 11,000 15-24 year olds and found that 29% use MySpace first to search for film information. Yahoo and Google were used first by 23% and 14% went to AOL.

Furthermore, just under half (46%) of 15- to 24-year-olds who viewed film information or advertisements online saw the material on MySpace compared with 26% on Yahoo, 18% on Fandango and 12% on AOL’s Moviefone. Nearly 70% of respondents in this age group have an active profile on MySpace.

Here’s a little something for the forecast watchers among you. Home Media Magazine reports Futursesource Consulting’s prediction for shipments of Blu-ray players in Western Europe. Futuresource puts the number at 1.8 million units by the end of 2009, excluding Sony Playstation 3s. This is despite the deepening economic downturn, which the forecasters are confident will help home entertainment markets as consumers invest in longer term durables offering cost-effective diversions. As reported in Home Media Magazine:

'The report cited economic slumps between 1980 and 1983, and in 2001, which revealed that sales of VCRs in the United Kingdom rocketed 440% in the early ’80s, while sales of digital cameras and DVD players continued to grow sharply after 2000.'

And finally… another week goes by and I feel it’s my continued duty to report the latest tally for Mamma Mia! (always finish what you begin…). In its 16th week on release the film took £257,705 from 284 screens. This brings the cumulative box office haul to £66,827,983, still just shy of Titanic’s 1998 total although it is now the highest grossing UK film of all time (judged on box office figures unadjusted for inflation). Now the film faces stiff competition from High School Musical 3, which opened in the number one spot with £8,409,375. And then this weekend the Bondwagon rolls into town with Quantum of Solace so Mamma Mia! may struggle to top £68 million all in. We shall see.

Everything you always wanted to know about the film production workforce*

* But were afraid to ask.

Have you ever wondered who actually makes British films? Questions like how did they first get started in the business and what qualifications do they have? How much do they earn on average, and how do earnings compare across departments and job categories? How many projects do they work on in a year and what kind of contracts do they have? What training have they received and what do they need in future? And, of course, the big question: how diverse is the workforce in terms of age, gender, ethnicity and disability?

If you have wondered about any of these things then help is at hand: answers can be found in the Feature Film Production Workforce Survey Report 2008, published last week by Skillset, the Sector Skills Council for Creative Media (and co-funded with the UK Film Council).

The research, part of the regular programme of studies undertaken by Skillset, provides a uniquely detailed window onto film production working patterns and skills development in the UK. It deserves to be read widely.

(Before going further I have an interest to declare: I’m the report author [although I didn't conduct the actual research]. But don’t let that put you off).

DIY distribution: the emperor’s virtual clothes?

Yesterday I was pleased to attend Power to the Pixel’s Digital Distribution and Film Innovation Forum in London. It was an excellent event: lively, engaging and informative. The line-up was varied and the speakers came across as articulate, intelligent and very, very capable individuals who have managed, by hook or by crook, to bring their creative vision to the masses, or help others to do so.

But…there’s always a but (the proctologists’ motto). As I mentioned in my last post, I went to the event in the hope of finding evidence (i.e. concrete, tangible, bite-me-on-the-bum, QED hard data) of a self-distribution business model capable of creating sustainable enterprises. And I have to say, though it pains me to do so, I came away disappointed.

Digital technology has definitely delivered on its promise of democratising production. No doubt about it. But so far it has fallen short of enabling filmmakers to generate sufficient amounts of cold, hard cash to develop businesses that can thrive in the medium to long-term.

Montage: UK boffo news; Tory film policy; US DVD trade; Slovenia update; Power to the Pixel!

Rather belatedly I stumbled across Charles Gant’s first UK box office post on the Guardian Film blog (posted on 13 October), and it’s worth drawing attention to. Gant is Heat’s Film Editor and a Sight and Sound contributor, and his post provides an elegant and informed thumbnail sketch of the weekend’s top box office performers in the UK.

Significantly, the post came out on Monday afternoon, making it by far the timeliest publication of UK weekend grosses. The equivalent figures in the US appear all over the place as soon as they are available, but in the UK Nielsen EDI keeps a tight rein on publication. For example, the UK Film Council is not allowed to publish its table of the top 15 performers until Wednesday, which is deeply frustrating for all concerned (as blurredvision commented on Gant’s blog post).

By the time you read this, Gant’s second post may already be up (assuming he’s planning to post every Monday). Make the most of it- timely data is a precious resource. The only caveat is that Gant's box office ranking only goes as far as the top ten, plus other new releases.

Before taking a look at the latest DVD retail and rental figures from the US, I’d like to stick with the UK theme a moment longer to bring news of the Conservative’s film policy ideas.

God Save the Cream and Never Mind the Bullocks

The other night I was paying only half attention to the telly and thought I saw John Lydon trying to sell me some butter. Must be a mistake. Too much screen time and I’m beginning to see things.

And then a few days later it happened again. Gadding about the countryside and looking for all the world like one of Ron Weasley’s eccentric relatives, the ex-Pistols front man was definitely trying to influence my choice of slippery bread spread.

Fair enough, the man has to earn a crust. But what a turn up for the books! If there was a list of things I thought I’d never see in my lifetime, that would have to be on it somewhere.

And here’s another entry: Mamma Mia! storming the UK box office to become one of the biggest grossing films of the last decade. Say what? No one could've anticipated success on this scale for a theatre land property starring Oscar® winner Meryl Streep alongside Pierce Brosnan dueting 'S.O.S' with all the tuneful feeling of a man with his knackers caught in his flies.

Regular readers will be aware I've been tracking the film's progress for some time. It's a fascinating example of box office idiosyncrasy, as intriguing as it is admirable. The ABBA musical has now passed the £65 million mark according to the latest UK weekend box office figures. The chart below shows how the cumulative box office has grown since the film’s release 14 weeks ago (with data sourced from Nielsen EDI).

Economic uncertainties

Last week’s volatility in the financial markets (is volatility the right word to describe a rout?) prompted a slew of stories about how recession-proof the movie industry is/is not (delete as applicable). I thought we’d dealt with the matter at the beginning of September, but apparently not. It keeps surfacing in one form or another.

Take, for example, a story prompted by a press release from US-based research outfit SNL Kagan. The release is entitled SNL Kagan Study Confirms That Hollywood Movies Still Thrive during Tough Times, and it’d be reasonable to assume this refers to the Tough Times we’re currently experiencing.

But the study looks at 2007, not 2008. So when analyst Derek Baine says, ‘When the going gets tough, consumers go to the movies. Historically, theaters have been fairly recession proof, and this year looks to be no exception’, it’s not exactly clear whether he’s talking about the situation in 2007, or projecting from his 2007 data to make a prediction about 2008.

Montage: Boffo updates for Finland and Germany; Netflix slowdown; film studies for free!

The Finnish Film Foundation has just published a box office update for 2008, and it’s good news for local films. They have so far attracted more than 1.1 million Finnish cinemagoers. This puts the market share of Finnish films at around 20%, and, as Cineuropa’s correspondent reports, there is every chance the final tally for local films will exceed last year’s total of 1.3 million admissions.

Meanwhile, German box office results for the third quarter (July to September) are decidedly mixed. Martin Blaney, writing in Screen Daily, reports figures published by Nielsen EDI showing a 7% fall in admissions against the same period last year, although box office gross remained on par for the quarter. Year to date totals (January to September) are down 2.4% for admissions (at 87.7 million) and 1.3% for box office gross (Euros 544.4 million).

Over the pond, Dawn C. Chmielewski, blogging for the LA Times, reports that Netflix, a US based DVD-by-mail and online film download company, suffered a lousy August and only a tepid September due in part to the wider problems afflicting the US economy. 

"Net subscriber growth in July was in line with expectations, but August was unusually weak," Chief Financial Officer Barry McCarthy said in a statement. "In September, the business regained momentum with results slightly below original expectations, likely due to the economic climate."

Michael Pachter, of Wedbush Morgan Securities, told the LA Times:

"The average consumer couldn't help but be scared in the month of September, with all that’s going on," Pachter said. "Even though Netflix is a very low-cost way to watch movies, it’s still hard to commit (to a monthly subscription) if you’re not absolutely secure you're going to have an income, have a job."

Netflix currently has around 8.7 million subscribers, up 23% from the same time last year. So it’s not all bad news.

And finally, here’s a great link. Catherine Grant, writing in her Film Studies for Free blog, has posted a list of Film and Media Studies e-journals available online for free. ‘Free’ is a great draw at times like these (with the free market in freefall), but Dr Grant’s mission goes beyond simple parsimony. Her blog is part of the growing movement towards ‘open access’, promoting ‘free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals’ (that's according to Wikipedia’s entry on ‘open access’). In other words, Freedom of Information in the truest sense. Bravo.

Short film update

Here are a couple of items in follow up to my earlier post about the lack of hard data on short film making and distribution in the UK.

First up, Adrian Hope (Web and Information Officer, Arts Group, British Council) has kindly provided details about how the British Council collects the short film information published in the British Films Catalogue, which forms the basis of the Edinburgh International Film Festival’s Film UK Guide to British Film.

Adrian writes:

'We agree to send the info to EIFF that we have collected for our own catalogue. We have an online form to collect the information on our site at www.britfilms.com. Each year we publish it as our British Film Catalogue, which we distribute to our offices around the world and at the events we attend (for example at the UK Film Centre at Cannes).

We get a lot of shorts submitted this way but for features we often have to contact production and distribution companies directly to get them to provide us with the information. Generally we do this annually (around this time of the year) as part of getting the print publication ready, although we also do this at other times, for example if there are British films showing at festivals which are not on our site. The content of the catalogue is replicated online (although the online version is more up to date as films go onto it immediately).
 
The online submission form explains more how we deal with verification and there is a legal statement at the bottom. Basically we trust whoever submits the form to provide us with the right information, and if there is a problem (every couple of months we get people saying they should be credited or that other information is wrong) we contact whoever gave us the information originally for clarification. We generally get information from either a film maker or producer themselves, or representatives in production or distribution companies. If someone completes a form and they are clearly unconnected with the film, we would at least check and probably reject the listing (although, this situation rarely happens.)

We also have a ‘films in progress’ section where we put up information on films we know of that are at least at the principal photography stage. Here we are less stringent with where the information comes from and add info about films our film advisors know about as well as ones submitted directly by film makers.
 
Once the submission form is sent we check it, for issues as above and spelling, standardising the contact details and general tidying up, and then we post it on the site.'

There's no doubt the British Films Catalogue offers a valuable listings service for UK films, helping to promote them internationally. But because the underlying database is not directly accessible to users it’s impossible to drill down into the information or to run even basic analyses.  For example, each short film profile contains information about what format the