The UK Film Council has just released the latest UK feature film production data, offering a mixed bag of positives and negatives in these straitened times.
During the first nine months of the year, the total spent on feature production in the UK stood at £857.2 million, an increase of 67% on the total UK spend for the same period last year (£512.3 million), and 15% up on the first nine months of 2007 (£742.8 million).
In fact, as the UK Film Council briefing note (1) points out, 2009 witnessed the ‘best first nine months since 2003’ (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: UK film production, Jan-Sept 2003 to Jan-Sept 2009
Source: UK Film Council
As usual the increase in UK spend was driven by inward investment feature production, which accounted for 80% of the total UK spend between January and September 2009. That’s the highest proportion since before 2003 (when accurate records began- see Figure 2), reflecting the effect of the weak Pound and the UK’s generous tax incentives in attracting big-budget studio films to shoot here.
Figure 2: % of total UK spend by production type, Jan-Sept 2003 to Jan-Sept 2009
Source: UK Film Council
The number of inward investment features also rose (to 28, from 22 in 2008). 2009 titles include Clash of the Titans, Get Him to the Greek, Gulliver’s Travels, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I, Inception, London Boulevard, Never Let Me Go, The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Untitled Robin Hood Adventure and Your Highness. The average budget of an inward investment feature stood at £52.8 million in the first nine months of 2009, compared with £30.7 million in 2008 and £31.2 million in 2007 (figures for 2008 and 2007 are for the full year).
The number of UK domestic productions shot in the first nine months of 2009 (62) remained at much the same level as in the previous year (61), but the value of UK spend on domestic features fell from £182.8 million in 2008 to £154.2 million this year.
The briefing paper notes that average and median budgets of UK domestic features have fallen over the last six years, reflecting ‘market and financing pressures to make films at lower budget levels than a few years ago’. In 2003 the average domestic feature budget stood at £5.6 million, compared with £3.1 million in 2009. The median domestic feature budget (the calculation of which is not skewed by extreme values at either end of the budget scale) has fallen from £2.9 million in 2003 to £1.4 million in 2009.
The outlook for co-productions is altogether gloomier. Only eight co-pros started shooting between January and September 2009, compared with 18 during the same period in 2008, and 23 in 2007. This decline in activity is matched by a fall in the value of UK spend on co-productions, which stood at a mere £16.6 million in 2009 as against £45.8 million in 2008 and £54.7 million in 2007.
'The one ongoing concern', UK Film Council’s CEO John Woodward reflects in the press release, 'is in relation to the continued drop in UK independent co-productions. This is largely a function of the one flaw in the otherwise excellent film tax credit which disincentivises UK participation in co-productions by focusing tax relief only on production spend made on the ground in the UK.'
In this context it is worth noting that Ed Vaizey, Shadow Arts minister, told delegates at this week's Screen International Film Summit that the tax credit system would be safe under the Conservatives, and that he remains open-minded about changes to assist co-productions. Let's hope so.
(1) The briefing note (available to download as a PDF here) contains a description of the data collection methods and definitions employed by UK Film Council production tracking.
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