Quebec films continue to fade at box office despite successful run of Louis Cyr biopic.
WITH ONE POWERFUL EXCEPTION, Quebec films continued to stagnate at the box office in 2013
The power brokers in the Quebec film business remind me of the old boys club that runs the National Hockey League.
The suits who own and operate the NHL keep saying to anyone who will listen: “Hey, there’s no crisis, don’t worry about head shots, cheap shots, violence, we’ve got it all under control, boys will be boys.”
And the smarter critics wonder: What’s it going to take? Does someone have to die on the ice before you pay attention?
At least no one runs the risk of dying in the film business. The only casualty is going to be Quebec cinema.
For t wo years now, the brain trust that oversees the film milieu here has been repeating non-stop that there’s no crisis, that everything is just hunky dory, and, oh, by the way, please keep giving us all that public money to keep our companies afloat. Meanwhile, ticket sales for local films remain anemic, way down from the golden years of this century’s first decade.
But why worry, right? The provincial film-funding agency SODEC recently released its long-awaited report on how to fix the problems facing the local film community, and outgoing SODEC president François Macerola used the occasion to once again insist there was no crisis. So if there’s no crisis, M. Macerola, why did the government ask you guys to spend our money looking into this non-crisis?
Forget the rhetoric. Here are some facts. When the final count is in at the end of December, Quebec films will have nabbed around five per cent of all box-office action in the province this year, up just marginally from 4.8 per cent in 2012. This figure comes from Cinéac, the Montreal-based company that compiles the ticket-sales data in the province and is the definitive source for all matters related to the Quebec box office.
Just two years ago, Quebec had a market share of 10 per cent. Four years ago, it was just under 13 per cent. In 2005, it was 18 per cent.
The people who created this mess don’t like hearing it, but there are no two ways of looking at this: Quebec film is in deep trouble.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, listen to what Pascale Dubé has to say. Dubé, who runs Cinéac, figures the local film business should at least be able to muster a market share of around eight per cent.
“There are structural problems from the start of the process right to the end,” said Dubé. “I have no problem with the word ‘crisis.’ There’s a problem. If it was just one year, you could say there’s no crisis. But we’re just not going to get the market share that we had before.”
The only genuine commercial success story for Quebec film in 2013 was Louis Cyr. The biopic of the Quebec strongman made just over $4 million, and producers and funding-agency types should take a long, hard look at this case study. Louis Cyr worked because it was a good movie, an accessible crowd-pleaser that was also a smart one.
Dubé notes that there’s a huge drop once you go past Louis Cyr.
The second-highest local grosser is Oscar hopeful Gabrielle, which rang up $1.3 million at the ticket wicket. That’s a disappointing result for a moving film that benefited from great reviews and enormous pre-release buzz. The third film on the hit list is Amsterdam, which grossed just $535,000. Fourth is the animated feature The Legend of Sarila at $433,000, followed by Le Démantèlement at $379,000.
Hot Dog, one of the biggest releases of the year, didn’t even make the top five, grossing only $365,000 despite a massive marketing campaign. The gap between Louis Cyr and the other films is the reason Dubé says “this year was even more catastrophic” than 2012.
There just weren’t many commercial films this year, she says.
“We didn’t have as much of a variety of films,” Dubé said. “This year, there were more films targeted at festivals, and lots of dramas. It’s like we’ve abandoned the idea of ‘grand public’ films. Maybe it’s because people are seduced by the idea of going to the Oscars.”
It’s an interesting hypothesis. Quebec films have been nominated at the Academy Awards in the foreign-language category for three straight years, and Gabrielle could make it four this year.
But if that’s the case — that the business is now making films for festivals and international awards shows, not for the unwashed masses — the public funders should come right out and say so. Then the public should decide if we want to give our tax dollars to these producers to make those niche films.