UK film at home and away

Shortly I’ll be off on holiday so there’ll be a break in the usual service until I surface again.

But before heading out the door there’s time for a quick post about UK film.

A couple of weeks back I flagged up publication of the UK Film Council’s latest Statistical Yearbook, and promised to return with my take on the highlights. The challenge is deciding where to begin, but I’ll plump for a chapter dealing with UK film performance for starters.

Chapter 8 addresses the theatrical release history of UK films. It reports that fewer than half (44%) of UK films shot between 2003 and 2006 secured a UK release within two years of principal photography. The films that made it onto the big screen accounted for 71% of the total UK film production budget over this period.

Which means that most UK films made in the period, accounting for 29% of total production spend, failed to secure a home distribution deal within two years, although in fairness some of these films did get released overseas (62% of UK films shot between 2003 and 2006 were released in at least one of 12 international territories for which the UKFC has data).

The chapter also looks at the financial success of UK films, drawing tentative conclusions about profitability based on a proxy measure (the ratio of international box office to budget). The UKFC reasons that if a low- to medium-budget UK film generates international box office revenues over twice the size of its production budget then there’s a good chance it’ll be in profit after returns from ancillary revenues are taken into account and costs are deducted. Anything less than this and the film is likely to make a loss.

The chastening news is that only 35 (11%) of the 333 UK films made between  2003 and 2006 and released internationally scored a box office to budget ratio of two (or more) to one. As the Yearbook concludes,

‘this suggests that only a small number of internationally-released UK feature films are likely to have made profits for their producers and investors and underlines the highly risky nature of film investment.’

On the bright(ish) side, time series data suggest the proportion of films made in each year between  2003 and 2006 that achieve a box office to budget ratio of two or more has increased year-on-year (it stood at 6.8% in 2003, and 17.1% in 2006).

I hate to end my pre-holiday post on a low note. So here’s a bit of cheery news from the US. A number of UK films on release over the pond have been very warmly received by the critical establishment. And courtesy of MovieReviewIntelligence.com we can put numbers to this. Thus the latest Harry Potter is going great guns at the US box office ($238 million to date) and scored a highly impressive 82.3% positive reviews.

Not far behind, Franny Armstrong’s climate change docudrama The Age of Stupid has garnered 80.5% positive reviews (albeit in only a handful of respected organs).

And there’s more: In the Loop (77.2% positive reviews), Duncan Jones’s Moon (74.1% positive) and Shane Meadows’s Somers Town (69.0%) all scored well above the average across all movies in the database (currently running at 52.5% positive reviews. Figures correct at the time of writing).

Whether or not this critical acclaim will translate into box office success in every case remains to be seen. But it’s heartening nonetheless.

And on that note, I’m off. Back in two weeks.