Neil Calloway begins his new weekly column looking at the state of ‘British’ cinema in 2014…
*high pitched voice* British cinema friends.According to a report in The Sunday Times, UK cinema audiences were down 8% on last year this summer, with only The Inbetweeners 2 and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (both sequels AND based on material from elsewhere) performing well. Apparently the reason for this is the good weather, and big sporting events kept people out of the cinema. Given England’s World Cup performance, I’m surprised more people didn’t decide to shut themselves away in dark theatres away from the action, or lack of it, from Roy Hodgson’s team.
Still, it’s not all bad, according to the BFI statistical yearbook for 2014, which looks at the UK film industry in 2013, the film industry has doubled its GDP in the past twenty years, contributing £2.9 billion to the economy in 2012. It’s no surprise that it was George Osborne, not George Lucas, who announced that the new Star Wars film would be shot in Britain; he may be a fan of the films, but he also likes the money they bring in (you can bet tax breaks were arranged for the filmmakers, too).
The statistical yearbook also says that in 2013 British films accounted for 11% of worldwide box office receipts, which is pretty good considering we’re less than 1% of the world’s population. The biggest British film worldwide last year grossed $788 million, which is pretty impressive.
It becomes less impressive when you find out that film was Fast and Furious 6. What? The biggest British film was a car racing franchise starring Vin Diesel and The Rock, produced by Universal and directed by a Japanese bloke? I happened to stumble across them filming it in London (with Lambeth bridge standing in for Russia), but can anyone with a straight face, claim it is British?
Still, let’s look at the independent sector, where the highest grossing British indie made $142 million around the world. Now, neither Ken Loach nor Mike Leigh released feature films last year, so you might be wondering what small film that showed a different side of Britain made that sort of money. The answer? Red 2, an eighty million dollar comic book adaptation starring Bruce Willis.
To be fair, it was partly shot over here, it is based on a comic written by a Brit, Warren Ellis and it does star Helen Mirren, but if someone asked you on a date to see an independent British film and you ended up seeing Red 2, you’d be disappointed.
Of the top twenty films at the UK box office of 2013, 6 of them were UK productions. Every one of those six was a UK/US co production. They were Les Misérables, Gravity, Fast and Furious 6, Thor: The Dark World, Captain Phillips and World War Z.
So Les Mis and Captain Phillips were shot by British directors, but it wasn’t the SAS that were the heroes of Captain Phillips; it was the Navy SEALs. Les Mis doesn’t tell the story of the English Civil war. World War Z’s title doesn’t even work when you say it in British English (World War Zed?).
The highest grossing solely UK production, according to the BFI, is Philomena, a film about a woman from Limerick, which last time I checked wasn’t part of the UK. It seems like any film shot over here is considered British, or if a is film produced by a British company it doesn’t have to tell a British story. That doesn’t sit well with me.
It’s not all doom and gloom; some kid who worked as third assistant cameraman on some huge comic book film shot over here will eventually make their own British film. 13 of the top twenty films of all time at the UK box office are based on works by British writers (JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling and Ian Fleming basically sew that one up for us).
I don’t mind any (and really like some) of the British-but-not-British films I’ve mentioned, but if the British Hospitality Association had claimed that the British food industry was doing well because more people were eating at branches of McDonald’s over here, you’d raise a sceptical eyebrow. If they then claimed we should be proud because so much food was originally based on an English recipe, you’d laugh at them. That’s what the people at the top of the British film industry are doing. If when the new Star Wars film comes out, and breaks box office records, as I’m sure it will, let’s hope nobody claims it as one of ours. Tatooine is in the Outer Rim Territories, not the Home Counties.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future installments.
Originally published October 5, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
