Charles Gant of the Guardian and first stop for all industry players looking for last weekends box office analysis just wrote in his piece on the UK box office figures…
‘Showing in a one-off screening the day before Valentine’s Day, 50 Kisses achieved a robust £9,435 at east London’s Genesis cinema. Billed as the world’s first crowd-sourced feature film, it emerged from a challenge presented at the 2012 London Screenwriters’ festival. The guideline for submissions was that they should be set on Valentine’s Day and feature at least one kiss’. FULL ARTICLE HERE
And so the 50 Kisses experiment enjoys a HUGE success! This is a BIG DEAL!
We set out to achieve a HUGE screen average (the screen average is how much a film takes per screen) and we did that by getting everyone into one venue for one screening. We called it a premiere, yes we had a red carpet too… BUT it was a theatrical release screening and any member of the public could have bought a ticket. And some did!
Amazingly we did more than half the business in ONE screening than ‘The Book Thief’ did in one screen for a whole week, and in it’s OPENING WEEKEND AT THAT!
So, all these films opened this week…
Her, £449,307 from 200 sites
Gunday, £206,741 from 59 sites
Jack Strong, £62,973 from 21 sites
Barbie in the Pearl Princess, £61,392 from 83 sites
Sleepless in Seattle, £19,462 from 75 sites (rerelease)
The Book Thief, £16,795 from 1 site
Idhu Kathirvelan Kadhal, £12,460 from 8 sites
Bastards, £11,574 from 10 sites
50 Kisses, £9,453 from 1 site
Love Is in the Air, £7,816 from 3 sites
1983, £7,715 from 21 sites
8 Minutes Idle, £2,412 from 4 sites
Perhaps the most telling and relevant numbers are for the films that we beat.
And remember, the films that we beat played in multiple sites too (between 3 and 21 screens).
Almost certainly, the theatrical runs for ‘Bastards’,‘Love Is In The Air’, ‘1983’ and ‘8 minutes Idle’ are over. They just failed to perform.
Looking at screen averages, ‘8 minutes idle’ did £603 and ‘1983’ did £367. 50 where ‘50 Kisses’ had a screen average of £9,453.
While it’s easy to get over analytical, ‘50 Kisses’ has proven that a tactical theatrical release can actually cover its costs.
How do the numbers break down?
So a back of the napkin calculation reads…
We took £9,453 form which the government takes 20% VAT (£1575.50) leaving £7877.50.
This was split between the distributor (Guerilla Films) and the Genesis Cinema 50/50, leaving £3,938.75 for us (a special deal as it’s usually 75/25 in the favour of the cinema – again thank you Genesis Cinema!).
Distributor David Wilkinson worked for free for this film as he believed in it so much (please note, he won’t do this for your film!)
So we had £3,938.75 to cover our HARD costs which included…
- Posters, design and print £1200
- BBFC Classification £800 (estimate)
- DCP drive £300
- Venue Staff £450
- Awards Trophies £900
Of course there is a huge mountain of softer costs and time spent by our paid staff, but we just kind of assimilated this along the way. And I simply wanted to illustrate that you CAN get a release for a film AND not lose money on it. Or not lose too much!
We are now looking at screenings in other venues in the country.
So a big congratulations to EVERYONE who attended, all filmmakers, all writers and a HUGE thank you to the Genesis Cinema, and of course David Wilkinson, the unsung hero of British Indie Cinema. What a fine beard he has too!
Chris Jones
www.50KissesFilm.com
PS – Our IMDb rating is still holding steady at 8.1 – can you vote?
