A VERY GOOD YEAR FOR QUEBEC’S BOOMING FILM SCENE
X-Men, Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 among productions that boosted local industry
It’s been a great year for the film scene in Quebec, on both the international and local fronts.
There has been a slew of highprofile foreign film shoots in and around Montreal, and it looks like the amount of Hollywood filming in town will be up from 2016 — and that was a good year. At the same time, it’s been a blockbuster 12 months for local French-language films at the box office, and that year-end tally is certain to be way, way up compared to a year earlier.
I spoke to Daniel Bissonnette, director of cinema and festivals for the city of Montreal, and he was super enthused about the foreign film-shoot activity in 2017. The Quebec Film and Television Council will release official year-end figures for Hollywood film shoots on Monday, but early indications are that the total will be up from 2016’s tally of $298 million. Bissonnette hasn’t seen the final numbers, but said it could be around $325 million.
“2017 is a good example of the variety of films that shoot in Montreal,” he said.
Bissonnette noted that the films being made here range from a movie like Zoe, written and directed by relatively littleknown filmmaker Drake Doremus, to a mega-blockbuster like the latest X-Men film.
The biggest Hollywood production by far to touch down in Montreal this year was X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which began shooting in late June and wrapped in mid- October. It was the third X-Men film to be made in Montreal, following 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past and 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse. The studio, 20th Century Fox, doesn’t release budget information, but you can assume the latest instalment in the superhero series sports a budget in the range of $200 million.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Sophie Turner, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters and Jessica Chastain. It is written and directed by Simon Kinberg.
Zoe stars French actress Léa Seydoux and Ewan McGregor. It’s about two colleagues who work on a revolutionary research project designed to make romantic relationships work better.
Montreal also hosted the sci-fi thriller Chaos Walking, which stars Tom Holland, Daisy Ridley and Mads Mikkelsen and is directed by Doug Liman and produced by Robert Zemeckis. As I mentioned last week in this column, Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron were also in town recently to work on Flarsky, a comedy about a guy trying to reconnect with his childhood babysitter.
Then there was On the Basis of Sex, a biopic about the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, directed by Mimi Leder and starring Felicity Jones and Armie Hammer.
One of the highest-profile Quebec productions to shoot around these parts this year was The Hummingbird Project, the latest from Montreal writer-director Kim Nguyen. It features Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgard and Salma Hayek, and is a drama about two cousins trying to build a fibre-optic cable between Kansas and New Jersey.
HOMEGROWN FILM BOOMING
After years of dwindling boxoffice results for locally produced films, Québécois movies bounced back big-time in 2017. Montrealbased box-office tracking firm Cinéac has yet to unveil its yearend statistics, but all signs point to a major turn-around in the fortunes of homegrown productions.
In September, Cinéac reported that the market share for Quebec film in the summer of 2017 was 17.9 per cent, with a box-office haul of $12.4 million — up dramatically from a market share of 4.8 per cent and a box-office total of $3.4 million in the summer of 2016.
That huge surge was almost entirely thanks to two sequels: De père en flic 2 and Bon Cop Bad Cop 2, both of which performed wonders at the ticket wicket. De père en flic 2, a laugher about a father-and-son cop duo, ended its run with a gross of just under $7 million. The bilingual buddy-cop comedy-thriller Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 rang up $6.3 million. By way of comparison, only one Quebec film made more than $2 million in 2016: the lowbrow comedy Les 3 p’tits cochons 2, which grossed $2.8 million.
A number of Quebec films have done well since the end of the summer, most notably Junior Majeur, a drama about junior hockey players, which so far has made $1.5 million at the box office. Better yet, there’s another major Quebec film coming out for the holiday season, and there’s a good chance Le trip à trois will click with audiences. It stars two popular vedettes, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and comic Martin Matte, and is a comedy about a 34-year-old who decides she needs to spice up her life with a threesome.