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Hollywood was great for 100 years But Now It Is All About The Global Box Office and Not The USA Consumer.

Jonathan Stuart-Brown for Save The British Film Industry.

They still will not get it and so you can still expect more and more inaccurate box office reports on opening weekends in the USA that a film has flopped only to find it smashes records because the global box office is now the daddy.

Time was in the 90s that the US box office was the daddy and expected to take 80% of a movie’s cinema revenue worldwide. The daddy of the daddy was the opening weekend in the USA which expected to take 30-35% of the US box office. A great opening weekend or poor opening weekend in the US used to be really decisive. Not anymore.

“Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows” or if you prefer “Sherlock Holmes 2″ was described as a disappointment after its opening US weekend. Yet it has recovered huge ground even in the USA where the film did over $185 million, with 80% coming after the opening weekend. This in itself has made a profit on budget and print and advertising/marketing  costs.

But this is dwarfed by the foreign/global box office which has produced so far $320 million and it has not yet even opened in Japan. It will beat $350 million, maybe $400 million outside the USA.  This all came after the publicity of a “poor opening US weekend”.

Even the US consumer attitude to a movie used to count big.

So ‘The Tourist’ with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie was panned by critics and consumers earning just  $67 million. But then it did  $210 million outside the USA. This is now typical. 75% of the cinema run is coming from outside the USA and getting a bigger percentage every year.

‘The Three Musketeers’ in 2011 was considered a certain box office flop in the USA, indeed the UK box office agreed, but Japan, Russia, China, Brazil, South Korea did not. It took $20 million in the USA and yet its global take has reached $132 million. Here nearly six times the US revenue total came from emerging box offices. It is now a box office success with a sequel very viable, yet still talked of by out of touch US-UK reviewers as a flop.  Producers Paul W.S. Andersonand Jeremy Bolt stars Matthew MacFayden, Ray Stevenson, and Orlando Bloom have delivered the box office goods where the coming action is.

Ridley Scott got unjustly tagged with box office failure with ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ (Orlando Bloom)  and ‘Robin Hood’ (Russell Crowe) because the US box office did not cover production budget. Yet in both cases foreign sales were far far in excess of US consumer revenue easily putting the films in profit with the US money just a cherry on the cake.

Even a huge monster US hit like ‘Avatar’ did 73% of its business outside the USA.

Mission Impossible 4 was thrilled to beat $200 million in the USA but still did 70% of its business outside the USA and may beat $500 million outside of the American market.

At this speed of knots, the US consumer in four years will be under 10% of the global revenue and thus the logic of the decision-makers being based in LA will get steamrolled. By 2020 living in Hollywood will be considered quaint.

In fact this takes in the optimistic hope that the US is still a player in 2020 given its $64 trillion debt which it can never repay (by the way it takes 32 000 years to count to a trillion and only 12 days to count to a million).

The film industry financial and decision-making centre is moving. We pray it moves to the UK and does not bypass us.

We will never have year round sun. But London is a Financial Centre and we can attain state of the art sound stages and sets to give us an edge to go with the creative hot house which is the UK….and we do have Sir Ridley Scott.

Jonathan Stuart-Brown

www.savethebritishfilmindustry.com