Market Report - Australia and New Zealand

The core audience demographic for UK films in Australia and New Zealand is aged 40-plus and is conservative in its tastes. This year, Stephan Elliott’s Noel Coward adaptation Easy Virtue has performed well in both territories but the whimsical New Zealand-UK co-production Dean Spanley has not proved a success in either.

UK films comprised 26 of the 301 films released in Australia and New Zealand last year. A further 35 came from elsewhere in Europe, with more than half from France.

Of all non-English language films, French cinema performs best. Pierre Morel’s Taken, distributed by Twentieth Century Fox, has done particularly well in Australia but the English-language action thriller starring Liam Neeson is not a typical French film and has not been marketed to Australian or New Zealand audiences as a French title.

More Asian films than ever are being released - 40 in 2008 with the growth sector being Bollywood - but they do not translate into high box office. Few foreign-language films do: the highest grossing title of 2008 was Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol, distributed by Hopscotch, which took $1.8m (a$2.5m).

With critical support and good word of mouth, Australian audiences in particular will embrace edgy or risky films, especially if they come with a festival pedigree. The high profile of such films is not generally reflected in the box-office results, however: Mongol may have been a festival success but only just squeezed into the top 100.

TOP 100, 2008

2% - Aus - Percentage of local films (including co-prods) in the top 100

6% - Aus - Percentage of foreign films (non-Australian/NZ and non-US films) in the top 100