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TDuring his time last summer, British cinemas held their collective breath, eagerly anticipating the biggest box office weekend of the year. “Barbenheimer” came to the rescue, with the blockbuster double-header raking in a total of £30m when it was released in mid-July.
This is summer different story. It may not be profitable Barbie or Oppenheimer at hand, but the holiday months at the cinema look potentially more interesting, if not downright weird – at least as far as Sasquatch Sunsetthis weekend, a new, grumbling, silent retelling of the mythical Big Step people, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough.
As the impact of last year’s Hollywood talent blitz combined with streaming habits formed during the Covid lockdown, a window of opportunity was created for filmmakers’ wilder imaginations; for smaller scale, arthouse fare. The franchise machine slowed down and more original, risqué features emerged. “I feel pretty positive about the moment we’re in,” said Isabel Stevens, managing editor of the film magazine Vision and sound“although I appreciate it’s still very difficult for cinemas.”
So far, 2024 has seen a box office slump, but it’s been buoyed by groundbreaking independent productions that eschew commercial templates and are often in foreign (non-Sasquatch) languages. Among them, Italian cinema is in first place La Chimera starring British actor Josh O’Connor. Now out for more than a month, it’s still attracting audiences and has grossed over £700,000 at the UK and Irish box office. Director Alice Rohrwacher’s film pulls a trick with this big-budget title The Fall Guy couldn’t handle it: it became a hit beyond its own ambitions. It must have come as quite a surprise to Rohrwacher herself, as her last film, Happy as Lazarobrought only a fifth of that.
Stevens said: “It’s amazing that anything that isn’t a big-budget mainstream vehicle can pull through when everything out there is demanding our attention.” She believes the film industry strikes were “the big factor that opened up some space”.
Phil Clapp, head of the British Film Association, said recently Screen International that a “slightly thinner roster of familiar franchises” has created an intriguing opportunity. “Stories that are something audiences haven’t seen before and that make them want to come back to the cinema are vital to us,” he said.
In the relatively quiet period before the next action juggernauts, British cinephiles can celebrate the joy of a film like Wim Wenders’ Perfect days, the tale of a toilet cleaner from Tokyo that has taken in more than £1.3m in receipts. Or The taste of thingsa quiet, kitchen French love story starring Juliette Binoche that took just under £700,000. And now it has the sentimental appeal of There’s still tomorrowa black and white melodrama that struck a chord Barbie at the box office in its native Italy and is distributed here by Vue Cinemas. It took more than £300,000.
The trend should be a comfort to Wenders, who told the Observer last year that the string of action franchises and remakes that dominate studio output make it “nasty”. Speaking ahead of the Cannes premiere of Perfect daysthe German director of arthouse landmarks such as Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire added darkly: “All imagination now has gone only to ‘How do I change it?’ and not ‘How do I invent something new?’ To me, that’s not storytelling.”
An early sign of a new thirst for originality came with the foreign-language hits of the last awards season, Anatomy of a Fall and The area of interestthe latter made in German by British director Jonathan Glazer.
Charles Gantt, box office editor at Screen International, points out that these apparently niche films attract a wide audience. Glazer’s film took in £3.4m – a good figure compared to his 2013 cult horror film. Under the skin, despite that film’s A-list star, Scarlett Johansson. “When I watched the premiere of Area of interest in Cannes, I thought it would be difficult to sell, but it subsequently took quite a bit of money,” he said. “And you really should see it at the movies.”
Even more encouraging for Britain is the success of homegrown films After sun, How to have sex, Rye Lane and We are all strangers, especially amid reports that independent production in the UK is falling off a cliff. Just in February, Mike Goodridge, producer of the recent Palme d’Or-winning satire Triangle of sadnesssaid the BBC’s Today program that it is “essentially on its knees,” with skilled actors and crews all working for major American companies.
Since then, the impact of increased tax relief for British productions has been felt. It’s a measure that could encourage the kind of shake-up described to the Oscars crowd in March by award-winning screenwriter Cord Jefferson, when he urged the film’s backers to think less. “Instead of making one $200 million movie, try making 20 $10 million movies. Or 50 movies for $4 million,” he urged.
As far as Gantt can tell, not much has changed yet in Hollywood, where franchises still rule. “But the studios now understand that they need a mix. Just look at a surprise, smaller hit like a romcom Everyone but youwhich has cut through.’
Indie cinema thrives on ebbs and flows. The heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s of stylish, daring films such as Midnight Cowboy, The long goodbye and Five easy pieces soon became a distant dream until a brief flirtation with European cinema took hold in the 1980s with films such as Au Revoir Les Enfants and Cinema Paradiso. Things changed again, perhaps more permanently, with the debut of Quentin Tarantino Reservoir dogs in 1992: a big financial triumph with a small budget.
So what makes the difference this time, besides the strikes? Well, the availability of foreign TV dramas helped by acclimatizing viewers to subtitles. But it was probably 2019 A parasitethe dark Korean comedy that won both the Palme d’Or and the Oscar for best picture that really opened things up.
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For Gantt, the question is whether we are witnessing a sustained trend or a series of coincidences. “Area of interest it was really a one-off,” he said. “It had a challenging content and a challenging form, but somehow the stars aligned and it really went mainstream.”
He suspects La Chimera could have done quite well even without the industrial action of Hollywood. British independent cinemas would see it do well, although he believes the film was helped by a change in policy at both the Picturehouse and Curzon chains, which gave it a full theatrical window.
Talking to Gantt about Screen International, the Curzon’s managing director, Damien Spandley, said much of the recent appeal of independent films could be attributed to newly committed, younger customers enticed by discount and cheap ticket schemes. “We’re excited about the growth in our under-25 membership and hearing similar stories from independent operators,” Spandley said.
“Movies like Saltburn, The poor things and We are all strangers are attracting a younger audience and that’s very exciting for us in terms of the future of our business. People under 25 are embracing arthouse cinema in a way we haven’t seen before.”
Young audiences are crucial, believes Gantt: “I didn’t become a fan of world cinema and independent cinema overnight. I started liking a few independent American films and I was hooked. Not everyone comes out of the womb wanting to watch a three-hour Portuguese epic.”
Film writer Geoffrey McNab has highlighted the importance of the young cinemagoer in a new piece about Screen International. David Sinn, head of cinemas at the Independent Cinema Office, tells him that “some of the highest-grossing films in this [arthouse] space in the post-pandemic era have been films that target a younger audience than traditional arthouse cinema”.
Sin cites titles such as Korean crime drama Decision to leave, Triangle of Sadness and “several British independent films such as Scrapper and St. Maudeaimed primarily at a millennial and Gen Z audience”.
These features, along with others including The area of interest, La Chimera and tennis romance Contendershas played very well in college towns, he said.
Blockbusters to come, of course. Many are children’s features, such as Pixar’s second From the inside out outing, or Paddington’s $40 million trip to Peru. And on Gladiator the sequel arrives in November. But Stevens’ advice for the discerning moviegoer is the hit of Cannes in Mumbai Everything we imagine as light. It is the first Indian film selected to compete at the festival in 30 years and is likely to arrive in the UK later this year.
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