Montage: Spain and China box office, H1 2009; UK DVD and Blu-ray, H1 2009; digital cinema; state of the UK film industry

Spain is the first of two more territories for which box office data are now available for the first half of 2009. John Hopewell, writing in Variety, reports numbers released by the Federation of Spanish Cinemas (FECE) that show Spanish box office gross rose 13% in the first six months of 2009 over the same period in 2008, the first such rise in five years. Takings totalled Euros 296 million ($414.4 million), and cinema admissions were also up by 8%, to 48.8 million.

These are certainly encouraging figures, but as nothing compared to the growth seen in China since the start of the year. Box office there grew by 43%, to stand at $330.16 million (RMB 2.26 billion), according to figures published by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT). ScreenDaily.com’s coverage reports that local cinema managers and analysts predict the year-end total ‘should be between $732 million and $805 million (RMB5-5.5 billion).’

Now for news closer to home. Earlier this month the British Video Association (BVA) released home entertainment figures based on data from the Official Charts Company, which reveal that over 3 million Blu-ray Discs have sold in the first half of 2009, a rise of 231% on the same period last year.

The BVA’s press release quotes Hannah Conduct, BVA Marketing Manager, as saying:

“There are now almost 1500 Blu-ray releases in the market covering a breadth of titles […] Older releases such as Trainspotting (4DVD), Bladerunner (Warner Home Video) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment), have all experienced sales success on this exciting format, years after their initial DVD release.  Many more Blu-ray titles are anticipated in the latter part of this year so consumers will have plenty of opportunities to add to their home entertainment collections.”

The BVA points to evidence that the shift to Blu-ray may be displacing DVD sales, which recorded a fall of 9.5% year-on-year (I assume this is the decline in unit sales numbers rather than sales value).

Other, less positive, factors are also felt to have played a role. Lavinia Carey, BVA Director General, is quoted as saying:

“The home entertainment industry has weathered the recession extremely well during the last year but, sadly, with the loss of around 900 high street stores at the start of the year, following the demise of Woolworths and Zavvi, the sales generated from impulse purchases have been hit.  This changing retail landscape has had a huge impact on our half year result. We hope as the year progresses that new retailers will fill the gap by stocking home entertainment products to give consumers a wider choice.”

Turning from home entertainment to exhibition, the good folks at Dodona Research have recently launched a report into digital cinema roll out across the globe, and Digitalcinemainfo.com offers the following taster:

Dodona say there are currently close to 12,000 screens converted to digital projection worldwide, with 5,000 of these 3D enabled, numbers which will rise to 18,000 and 10,000 respectively by the end of this year – in time for the release of James Cameron’s Avatar. Further out, Dodona see scope for the number of 3D screens to continue to climb over the next few years, perhaps representing 20% of the 110,000 cinema screens worldwide by 2012. But beyond this the company is more sceptical, pointing to the fact that a wholesale shift to 3D on the part of the film production industry seems unlikely in such a short timescale, and to the apparent absence of an alternative driver of conversion.

The full report, Digital Cinema Briefing, is available to purchase direct from Dodona.

And finally, a piece by Vanessa Thorpe caught my attention in yesterday’s Observer. Headlined ‘Why the British film revival is in danger of being killed off’, the article rakes over the smoldering embers of the debate about the state of the British film industry, which usually flares up around Oscar-time, Cannes or whenever somebody in officialdom casts their eye over public policy for film.

Thus, taking her cue from the ongoing Lords Communications Committee enquiry into British film and TV, Thorpe runs through various bits of contradictory evidence of awards and box office success on the one hand, and a local production sector that some claim is in ‘terminal decline’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the piece is short on any definitive remedies, but this is in part due to the lack of a clear diagnosis of the problem. If nothing else, the article confirms that if you ask half a dozen industry luminaries what they make of the current situation you’re likely to get as many different answers in reply. Tim Bevan, co-founder of Working Title and soon-to-be ensconced as Chair of the UK Film Council, identified piracy as the key threat in his evidence to the Lords committee, whereas producer Andrew Eaton (formerly Deputy Chair of the UK Film Council), sees this as "a bit of a smokescreen".

Instead, he and screenwriter Jonathan Gems seem to share the view that we “are in thrall to the American industry”, and this is the seat of the problem. What’s needed, according to Eaton, is a “discussion about how you make the economy of the British film industry work.”

Gems goes further, offering the view that while we have plenty of talent in this country, 

“our industry is just an adjunct of the American film industry. Hollywood dominates. Of course, at the moment Hollywood has the best overall product, but we invented cinema in many respects and yet we don't have our own cinema."

His solution? Convince the European Commission to pass legislation imposing a quota on the proportion of films shown in European cinemas that are made in Europe (50% is the figure quoted). "Then we would get our own industry pretty quickly," Gems says- although quite how this will deliver a more robust British industry remains unclear.

The debate, as framed in this way, is hamstrung both by the lack of a coherent vision of what’s happening on the ground (and it is a complicated picture- there is no single, homogeneous industry), and consensus about what the key issues are. How do you measure the strength and vitality of the film industry (especially given its heterogeneity)? Which indicators might we turn to, and how should we interpret them?

Big questions, indeed. We’ll have to wait until later this year to see whether the Lords Communications Committee can shed any light on the matter. In the meantime we can at least look forward to publication of the Q2 UK production statistics by the UK Film Council’s Research & Statistics Unit (due to appear this Thursday).