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The Age (Australia)
August 19, 2007
Move over screen hog, we need choice
By Michelle Griffin
IMAGINE a bookstore where 80 per cent of the stock was Harry Potter, because that's the bestseller. Or a CD shop wherein four out of five racks were filled solely with this year's best-selling album, Pink's I'm Not Dead. That's what it's like going to the movies this year.
Ever since Spiderman 3 opened on 500 screens nationwide in the first week of May, our multiplexes have been dominated by one Hollywood behemoth after another. Not that there's anything wrong with big popcorn movies. They're just hogging all the screen time in our cinemas.
In the second week of June, Shrek 3 opened on 477 screens, Pirates 3 was on 600 screens, and Spiderman 3 was still on 229 screens. Between them, they occupied three out of five Australian screens and took 85 per cent of the total box office for the week. The story has repeated since with Oceans 13, The Simpsons Movie and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
The economics are easy to follow: less choice, greater return. Meanwhile, independent or Australian films show up on a handful of screens for a fortnight or so, then disappear.
We're not just talking about worthy films such as The Jammed, the Victorian film on the sex-slave trade that was getting only a few days' mercy screenings at the Nova before The Age's rave review last Thursday attracted distributors. We're also talking about Rogue, the $25-million Australian horror film directed by Greg McLean, who made Wolf Creek. His movie premiered in Darwin eight days ago, but its general release has been bumped from this week to the end of November, to avoid competition with the one film creature more deadly than Rogue's crocodile: The Bourne Ultimatum's Hollywood hype machine.
"This year is almost an anomaly with the amount of big tentpole films from all the major US studios," says Matt Hearn, producer of Wolf Creek and Rogue. "They seem to be lining up four against each other week in, week out at the moment, which obviously makes it extremely difficult for indie producers."
Hearn has been preparing for the worst-case scenario: "There is a chance you might go straight to DVD, so you have to make your DVD the best one you can."
Of the 15 films nominated for this year's AFI awards, only two or three will stay in cinemas for longer than the minimum time required to qualify for the awards: seven days in three cities. We're not saying people ought to see Australian films, but they should get the chance.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: nobody sees Australian films, so we don't screen them, so nobody sees Australian films. And we're not just talking about Australian films. International films with recognisable stars — Daniel Day-Lewis, Natalie Portman, Johnny Depp — are also going straight to DVD more frequently than they did when we had genuine independent cinemas, instead of chains.
And it isn't just the audience that misses out. In their chase of the box office winners, cinema chains are also the losers. Why? Because they're training us to give up the big screen for the plasma screen.
The most recent surveys by Roy Morgan show that while a handful of movies such as Spiderman 3 are breaking box office records, cinema attendance is still declining — only 45.7 per cent of those surveyed went to the movies in the 12 months to April this year, compared with 51.5 per cent in the 2001-02 financial year. In the same time frame, DVD-player ownership jumped from 16.3 per cent to more than 75 per cent.
Maybe, for the clued-in film buff, it doesn't matter that so many movies can only be found on DVD. Aficionados track down what they want to see. But most of us find out about movies from the marketing that attends a cinema release. And when we stare at the wall of new releases at Video Hard-to-Choose, we go with the title we remember from the movie reviews.
And in a movie monoculture, it's the audience that misses out.
Michelle Griffin is the editor of M magazine.
© 2007 The Age Company Ltd.
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