Irish Film vs
The Irish Film Fan
nce again the Irish have been named the biggest cinema fans in Europe,
following the release of the European Audiovisual Observatory's roundup of the cinema attendance and box office receipts for 2017.
Irish people's attendance in 2017 was up 2.1% meaning that on average every Irish person went to see 3.48 films last year. France comes second with 3.21 visits, while our near neighbours in the UK recorded 2.62 visits per person.
Year on year box office receipts for Ireland rose 4.6% from €108.9 to €114 (not adjusted for inflation), bucking the European trend which saw figures drop by 0.3%.
All this is good news of cinema exhibitors in Ireland, but it less good for domestic Irish-produced films. Unfortunately when it comes to supporting our own the figures are quite bleak as only 2.4% of box-office receipts were for Irish films, down from 4.3% in 2016. This trend has continued into 2018 with the box-office figures available showing Irish films below 2% of box-office receipts.
There are of course many reasons for this to be the case. Our market is closely tied to the UK, to the point where for box-office reporting purposes worldwide Irish figures are included in those published for the UK. We also have to deal with the fact that we share a common language with them and with the U.S., making it easier for their films to dominate as they can offer a wider selection and bigger budget titles.
With the bigger film budgets comes bigger marketing budgets, with most Irish films being distributed by one of three local distributors rather than the bigger global distributors who have the luxury of coordinating massive campaigns across this increasingly connected world.
For a long time Irish audiences were reluctant to engage with Irish films, believing them to be of inferior quality. This is clearly untrue as the recent success of Irish films on the world stage can attest. However this perception has caused the general watching public to be wary of domestic films that come with marketing praise as there is a genuine belief that this is ingenious or that the films are receiving the local bias star bump. A casual conversation with a person unconnected to the industry will quickly tell you that they tend to wait until they receive word of mouth about an Irish film before engaging. This is one of the reason that The Young Offenders did well for a sustained period art the box-office, and why the better Irish films that go to streaming platforms like Netflix tend to generate positive buzz on social media.
So how then do we get Irish people to see more Irish films? Is it a case that the Irish Film Board needs to do more in allocating funding for marketing and distribution? Do the distributors need to do more to get word-of-mouth campaigns started earlier? Do the cinemas need to do more or be encouraged to do more to promote Irish films? It’s a mixture of all of these, but mostly it’s up to us as acolytes for Irish film to tell the truth about them, good or bad, and to encourage or friends and relations to give them a chance.
Niall Murphy
Managing Editor
O
CinÉireann / May 2018 5
EDITORIAL