Delivering films to the biggest audience

The distribution strategy for UK film A Field in England offers Australian film-makers a revolutionary alternative, says Ed Gibbs, in a piece that first appeared in Encore. 

This year’s Melbourne International Film Festival gets underway in a fortnight. Among the impressive line-up is an intriguing film from the gloriously twisted minds behind underground hit Kill List and its darkly comic follow-up Sightseers. It’s called A Field in England and what makes it so fascinating beyond its barmy premise – a black-and-white surrealist period drama, set during the English Civil War, confined to a single field – is its roll-out strategy.

In a world-first, the film has been simultaneously released in cinemas, on DVD and Blu-Ray, on VOD and screened on free-to-air television in the UK, following a much-anticipated premiere at the 48th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic. Director Ben Wheatley, an affable Englishman with a strong core audience, will be off to Hollywood soon to develop the HBO series Freak Shift. Before he does, he had a brief window, he said, to do something completely out of the box with his writer-partner Amy Jump and very little money. A cross-platform, simultaneous release was swiftly developed to ensure he could become part of a wider domestic cinematic zeitgeist before he hits LA.

“With our other movies, we’d put them out in the traditional way – festival, theatrical, DVD and then finally you end up on telly,” he told me last week. “Each time the audience gets bigger by the power of 10. So this [festival] audience is a thousand, then your theatrical will be, say, 30 screens, then the DVD goes up – with our films, it’s 50,000 to 100,000 units. Then when Kill List got to TV [in the UK], it was a million people. The TV audience leads to a spike in DVD sales, but that spike is when the DVD is at rock bottom [price-wise], because it’s already been out. You have to sell it by the truckload before you make any money back. So the crux of it is, why go out to the general audience right at the end? Why not go to the general audience at the start?”