Australian Films Tank At Box Office

Our Own Market Still Hates Us

It's not a laughing matter that the trend continues. The top 4 Australian films combined have grossed less at the box office than a mediocre offering from Hollywood.

In a sign of how Australia's independent film industry is struggling, the best film nominees at this year's AFI Awards - The Black Balloon, The Jammed, The Square and Unfinished Sky - took a combined $3.9 million at the box office. In comparison, American-made films romped in at the Australian box office - even those universally panned by critics.

Step Brothers, the Will Ferrell gross-out comedy that scored 3/10 from The Sun-Herald film reviewer Rob Lowing, took in $8.7million from Australian audiences, while Alvin And The Chipmunks earned $17.63million. The highest-earning US film was The Dark Knight with $45.6million in Australian takings alone.

"We had a number of small films this year but, let's face it, that's what we have the budgets for," said Elissa Down, director of The Black Balloon, which scored 11 AFI Award nominations this year. It was made for just over $4 million but took in just $2,265,000 at the box office.

"We had a great screen average and we were told by a number of exhibitors at art-house cinemas that they were seeing teenagers in there for the first time, which was great," Down said.

The comparison with big-budget American films is often painful for independent filmmakers because it is not an even playing-field financially. But some filmmakers believe it is important for the industry to become more aware of what Australian audiences want to see.

"It is a shame because we're competing against American, big-star, $100 million films," said Dee McLachlan, director of The Jammed. "But I think it's up to us to get Australian audiences engaged back in Australian stories."

Australian films have been competing against bigger budget American films for a long time, and have continued production in spite of losses for over 3 decades. It's nothing new. The result we are seeing comes directly from the funding bodies' collective disregard for the Australian audience for that 30 years span.

There's been much confusion as to what form an Australian Film Industry should take, but that discussion alone is fraught with ideological culture wars. There is an old Doug Mulray joke that went, you could easily get funding from the AFC if you pitched 'Pitch Black and the Seven Pygmies' provided you had a one-legged wheelchair-ridden Aborigine woman playing the main character. Yes, it's highly racist and inflammatory, but it wouldn't be so funny if it didn't have a modicum of truth. I was on my way driving to AFTRS in North Ryde when I heard the joke on-air and burst into laughter at the bitter truth of it, feeling paralysed by the poisonous wit.
I was surrounded by the very ideological adjustments (and cognitive dissonance I might add) that these things are important.
Well, yes, they are important, but not to the market. Not even to an Australiasn market, whose culture we are allegedly trying to preserve by making these government funded films from their tax-payers' money. Get that. We're taxing people to make these loser films to preserve an Australian identity on the screen, even if the people stay away in droves not to watch it.

The simple fact is, the various funding bodies have hardly cared about Australian audiences since inception. It's only when in the late 1990s under the Howard government that film bureaucrats were asked to explain their successive years of losses that the notion of market returns crept into the discussion - which leads us to today's article above. It's a bit hard to ask Australian audiences to suddenly take notice of Australian films after 30 years of being served the film equivalent of the Coogee Bay Hotel Gelato.
They don't trust us to tell a story that they might find interesting or satisfying or worth consuming on a Friday night or a Saturday with a date or with buddies.