More audiences, sure, but where is the money?
At the Beyond the Box Office forum in Sydney Mark Gooder, CEO of Icon, questioned the financial value of television viewings of Australian films to the industry.
“You can get more audiences today, sure, but what can you get out of them financially? Television is the least contributing financial element of our industry model. What am I getting out of it? Not a lot,” he said.
The Beyond the Box Office study, released yesterday by Screen Australia, found that Australian cinema releases for 2007-2009 had achieved total audience viewings of 100.8m across cinema, DVD/Blu-ray, television and online distribution. It emphasises how screen content reporting is focused on revenue, not in the number of people viewing it, and how television delivers new audiences for Australian films – even those that ‘failed’ at the box office during their cinema run.
The report said that “below-average” grossing films perform “far better on television than their theatrical release would indicate”, and the bottom 80 performers had reached 10.48m viewings on their FTA screening, compared to 5.23m for the top 20 films.
