Wasted drops 55% to $488 screen average
During its second weekend, Ben C. Lucas’ teenage thriller Wasted on the Young made $26,869 at the Australian box office.
The Paramount-distributed, Perth-made film experienced a drop of 51.55 percent from its opening week; it’s showing on 55 screens, with an average of $488.52 per screen.
These were the top 10 films in Australia for the March 10-13 weekend:
| 1 | Rango | Paramount | $2,709,558 |
| 2 | Hall Pass | Roadshow | $1,461,969 |
| 3 | The Adjustment Bureau | Universal | $1,404,600 |
| 4 | I Am Number Four | Disney | $764,517 |
| 5 | The King’s Speech | Paramount/Transmission | $744,688 |
| 6 | Gnomeo and Juliet | Disney | $556,838 |
| 7 | The Rite | Roadshow | $409,140 |
| 8 | Unknown | Roadshow | $402,480 |
| 9 | The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest | Rialto | $354,130 |
| 10 | Black Swan | Fox | $244,364 |
as far as i can tell WOTY has taken about $78K over 2 weekends
which is a terrible result from 55 screens
i thought the film was OK, so why did everyone avoid it?
@Dean as I have said a number of times now, even before the films release, nobody knows about it.
There is no buzz, almost no conversation and very little integrated marketing and advertising for the film – particularly in the core demographic. I asked almost 30 people in the core demographic and not one had heard about it or even seen and ad. I’ve used Social Media Monitoring tools and other sources I have and there’s simply no conversation and awareness and therefore no demand.
Outside of the quality and type of stories Australian films are focusing on, marketing for the majority* of our films is next to non-existent and or poorly targeted. Mao’s Last Dancer could have done another 10-15% at the box office & VOD and Animal Kingdom could have done at least another 25-30% BO and VOD. *There are always exceptions.
The marketing and distribution model for indie films has changed dramatically but Australia is still stuck with a 1990’s approach.
I’ve commented previously that not all stories scale to the big screen and that not all films should be a theatrical first / only release. Many indie films now do even better with VOD before and or simultaneously with the box office. Indie film ‘All Good Things’ made $4m VOD and $364k at the box office and even movies like Red Cliff made more money because they went with VOD before a theatrical release. Here’s a good article from WSJ – ‘or Indie Films, Video-on-Demand Fills in Revenue Gap’ http://on.wsj.com/ei663c
For the life of me I don’t understand why we have 100% emphasis and investment in making films and almost zero for marketing and distribution. We still have a mentality that as long as the film gets made and it get’s put on screens people will just come – and if they don’t we blame the audience! Absurd!
The days of simply releasing a trailer 1 or 2 months before a film release, putting up a website with a synopsis, cast list and some photos and then chasing traditional media critical reviews (publicity) are long gone. We presented a research report titled ‘Moviegoers 2010’ (Download http://bit.ly/dGKh9b) at the 2009 SPAA Conference outlining that if you are marketing to people under 50 then print and magazine critical reviews mean jack, nobody reads or listens to them and you need to do much more. Gordon Paddison developed this study and he was behind the marketing for District 9, Lord of The Rings and many other films.
There are exceptions like Mao’s Last Dancer which had a decent marketing and advertising budget (P&A) and a decent campaign – but it also had an existing audience through the book.
Anyway, I think more producers and the screen agencies should be pushing for more modern marketing and distribution strategies and appropriate levels of P&A commitments. Otherwise, why make the film?