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.