Quebec film industry in shambles
2012 WAS A TERRIBLE YEAR at the box office for local movies, and 2013 looks prepared to be even worse
OK, it’s official: Quebec’s film industry is in a state of crisis. Last year, when news broke that Quebec movies were tanking at the box office, there was no shortage of people — producers, distributors, journalists — who used every media tribune to insist there was no reason to panic.
It’s just a blip, they said — things will soon be back to normal.
Well, it turns out it wasn’t a blip. In fact, poor box-office results for local cinema appear to be the new normal.
For the first half of 2013, Quebec films accounted for just 2.5 per cent of overall movie ticket sales in the province. For the first half of 2012, the market share for Quebec film was 3.5 per cent.
The year-end tally in 2012 was a market share of 4.8 per cent, down from 9.9 per cent a year earlier. It was the worst year at the ticket wicket for homegrown films since 2000.
Let’s not beat around the bush: 2012 was a terrible year at the cash register for Quebec film. And short of a miracle, it’s going to be even more pathetic this year.
It’s nice to see that Louis Cyr: L’Homme le plus fort du monde had a solid opening weekend, ringing up just under $400,000 following its release July 12. Pascale Dubé from box-office tracking firm Cinéac figures the period piece about the legendary Quebec strongman will likely end up grossing between $2 million and $3 million and there’s a good chance it’ll be the top performer of the year.
But in the glory days of the past decade, the top hits made chez nous grossed 8, 9 or 10 million bucks at the box office.
“There’s a sense of running out of steam, that we’ve tried to convince the public that these films are accessible when the films are actually more specialized,” said Dubé. “There are less local films that are targeting a wide audience, and when one comes along, it’s as if the public is no longer in the habit of going to Quebec films. When there were a bunch of wide-appeal movies every year, it created momentum. People liked going to see Quebec films, and they’d go see two or three a year.”
It’s hard to argue with Dubé’s logic when you realize that Louis Cyr is the first mass-appeal Quebec film to open this year. The box office is in the doldrums, but it’s not like there have been many major releases that flopped. They’ve all been smaller films, and none have done particularly well.
Sarah préfère la course is the perfect case study of all that’s wrong commercially with local film. Writer-director Chloé Robichaud’s debut feature couldn’t have nabbed more media attention, thanks to its selec- tion at May’s Cannes Film Festival, and most local journalists were overly kind to a slight drama that simply wasn’t that strong a piece of filmmaking.
And hardly anyone went to see it. It made $148,000. In spite of the media buzz, the public decided — as they have every right to — that they didn’t feel like seeing this movie.
The North American movie biz is built on the model of making movies for young people, particularly young males. And even that model is in rough shape, with recent highprofile bombs like The Lone Ranger and White House Down proving Hollywood isn’t immune from boxoffice misfires.
Teenagers keep Tinseltown in profit. But in Quebec, we don’t make movies for people under 30. When’s the last time a major homegrown release targeted teens?
“We don’t have the budgets to make movies for teenagers with lots of explosions,” Dubé said. “So we have films that attract an older audience, and that’s an audience that’s perfectly happy at home with their big screens.”
In short, the Quebec film model is broken, but no one wants to admit it. The producers certainly don’t, because if they did, they’d risk losing the fat production fees — largely publicly subsidized — that keep them living the high-roller lifestyle.
None of this would really matter to your average Joe if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s virtually no real private money invested in any Quebec film. So when no one goes to see the film — as has been the case for nearly every local movie over the past two years — and the producer still goes home with his or her hefty bag of loot, you have every right to ask some tough questions.