Gross Behaviour - by Leonard Klady

My Humongously Obese Kiwi Orca

At the premiere of IDP's Passionada, I bumped into a marketing maven and during a snatch of conversation she referenced without bias the fact that the company hoped the film might be the next My Big Fat Greek Wedding. She didn't quite roll her eyes as she made the comparison and I offered that the film reminded me in spirit and commercial appeal of Mystic Pizza.

Nia Vardolos's shockingly successful ($370 million worldwide box office) romantic comedy isn't really the sort of yardstick any film (mainstream or otherwise) should be using as a measuring stick. Yet, I've heard its name cited each season for the likes of Real Women Have Curves, Bend It Like Beckham and Whale Rider. In the case of Beckham - a film that will attain a global gross close to $100 million - it seems inane to begrudge a genuine success by positioning it as good but no Greek Wedding.

Yet in the absence of a thunderous commercial anomaly, some pundits have actually reviewed the landscape of summer film going and declared it a disappointing year for independent and niche movies. The hard figures for films outside the mainstream indeed indicate that ticket sales declined roughly 17% from 2002. At the same time, such films as Whale Rider, Swimming Pool, Winged Migration, Spellbound and Dirty Pretty Things have proved themselves popular successes in the confines of limited and specialized release. Is there a disconnect that's being misunderstood or ill defined?

There's no question that definitions and boundaries between mass appeal movies and films that play in the margins bleed worse than newsprint. Some publications continue to view companies such as New Line and Miramax as independents though each has spent the better part of a decade under the umbrella of a major and earn their respective bread and butter with the likes of Scary Movie, Austin Powers, Spy Kids and Freddy and Jason. New Lines has its specialized division and Miramax continues to acquire foreign and independent films as do the studios whether those films are distributed by Searchlight and Focus or the venerable parent.

Any film that's reliant on sub-titles has to be considered outside the mainstream unless it's playing in Quebec. Otherwise, the acid test is the number of theaters a film can play in simultaneously. A film that opens in more than 1,000 theaters has a different commercial strategy than one that bows on two screens in New York and three in Los Angeles. Now, the latter example could be Chicago or it might be Party Monster. One film has a company behind it and a production with the heft to build on exclusive engagements. The other will have to earn its playdates on commercial merit.

The past summer was rife with movies that had big commercial imperatives. Seventeen films generated individual box offices of more than $100 million - about one-third of all movies releases by major companies. In that particular environment, one could easily place Seabiscuit as one of the summer's alternative titles. Its primary audience was not teenaged or even in its early 20s. However, there's no question that a significant sized younger crowd went to see the equine Rocky because any film that grosses more than $100 million has to attract that group.

Wildly popular films command several thousand screens while off-Hollywood fare can hold its own with a few hundred theaters. The past weekend is indicative of what occurred during the summer. On the September 5-7 weekend, mainstream movies accounted for approximately 90% of all playdates. By my account, they tallied up 38,274 playdates compared with the 3,815 that played such films as American Splendor, Masked and Anonymous, The Secret Lives of Dentists and Where's the Party Yaar? Playdates, by the way, refer to theaters rather than screens, so while a national release may open in 3,100 theaters, it could easily be playing on more than 5,000 screens.

The box office gross for the period was slightly more than $67 million with about $59.6 million of those tickets bought for Dickie Roberts, Pirates of the Caribbean, Uptown Girls and their ilk. They dominated the market with 88.5% of the gross. However, pound for pound, the alternative fare was stronger. On average they had better per screens and higher auditorium capacities. The difference is that they rarely appeal to the frequent movie goer and generally play in smaller venues that specifically target mature audiences.

As with playdates, it's difficult to assess the exact number of theaters with a year round policy of showing specialized pictures. There may be as many as 500 screens available on that basis which means that all the summer niche successes managed to earn some crossover engagements. And herein lies why summer 2002 was a banner year for movies without numbers in their titles, super stars or special effects. The quick succession of bMatrix Reloaded, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and The Hulk pretty much signaled that summer movies from the studios would be full of sound and fury and little else with rare exception. There was a degree of predictability to the movies that even die hard fans ultimately found numbing.

So, when someone at the cooler started to talk about Capturing the Friedmans or Thirteen, a chain reaction was set off. Much has been written about the unexpected popularity of non-fiction movies this past summer. However, it's not simply a segue from reality TV to big screen documentaries that account for the rage. There is no commonality to Spellbound, Winged Migration and Step Into Liquid other than the fact that each has respective protagonists and stories culled from everyday life. The true yarns also happen to be dramatic, compelling, accessible and entertaining.

The hunger for something different from cookie cutter entertainment has always been the strength of the broadly described alternative cinema. Whale Rider was unlike similarly themed family films from the majors and Swimming Pool had the sort of keep you guessing quality of The Sixth Sense without that film's slickness or marquee value and a healthy dollop of sex and Kafka. At any point during the summer one could see a handful of such films in any major city in North America and the combination of options, availability and playability was unprecedented.

In the past, the emergence of one or two indie hits during the summer was the norm but this year had at least a dozen such films. My sense is that alternative programming will be forever changed as a result of the business and response in 2002 much in the way that the summer of 1989 altered studio habits and attitudes about movie going from that point forward.

There's no question that the quality and volume of movies being made outside studio walls is impressive. In fact, it's not too much to say that there simply are enough quality screens to sustain the audiences for these pictures.