latest notices
Careless Love Opening Night + Q&A
With director John Duigan ('The Year My Voice Broke') and cast Nammi Le and Peter O’Brien. THU 17 MAY – 7pm RITZ CINEMA, 45 St Pauls Street, Randwick NSW 2031 TICKETS ON-SALE – book now www.ritzcinema.com.au “Careless Love” tells the story of...
Film Producing with Metro Screen
Metro Screen, Paddington Town Hall, Sydney(NSW)
Winners of Australian Directors' Guild Awards Announced
(Nationwide)
Gold Coast Indie Film & Television Network Presents 'Getting Behind The News'
Gold Coast(QSL)
latest news
The Sapphires To Open Melbourne International Film Festival
The feel-good feature is set to kick off the Melbourne film festivities.
Screen Australia Invests in 16 Features
An eclectic set of projects have been granted funding...
De Niro & Douglas To Headline ‘Last Vegas’
The two legendary gents look to be starring in this comedy centred around a Las Vegas bachelor party.
‘Housos’ Get Big Screen Outing
Writer/director/comedian Paul Fenech is set to make his debut feature.
search the site
newsletter
Enter your email address below to receive the weekly Filmink newsletter
Bums On Seats
Yumi Stynes has found the key to box office success: appeal to kids, pitch to adults.
Box office takings offer an amazing insight into the population at large and their kooky taste in movies. Star Trek is massive right now, and looks set to keep the bucks rolling in for another four solid weeks at least. There are moments in the film when you get an eerie sense of a classic moment having just passed, maybe similar to the first time you watched The Empire Strikes Back.
Will it top the end of year box office tally? Possibly. It fits neatly into that genre of films appealing to kids that are pitched at adults. Previous winners - The Dark Knight (2008), Spiderman 3 (2007) and Pirates of the Caribbean 2 (2006).
In 2006 Night At the Museum was the second-highest grossing film in America and took more than $250 million at the US box office alone.
It was huge here as well. The main reason it did so well was because it managed to appeal to whole families. Anyone with kids knows that children will see films multiple times, particularly during the school holidays (mine have seen Monsters VS Aliens 3 times). Kids always attend with accompanying, paying adults. In other words, one bum-on-seat at a kids' movie translates in reality to two-or-three-bums-on-seats. Family movies pay in spades. Why do you think Baz Lurhmann pitched Australia as family entertainment?
"Kids always attend with accompanying, paying adults. In other words, one bum-on-seat at a kids' movie translates in reality to two-or-three-bums-on-seats."
Night At the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian will deliver the all-round appeal of Ben Stiller while the credibility of Ricky Gervais, Amy Adams, Jonah Hill and Steve Coogan will keep the eye-rollers at bay. With special effects for excitement and a dash of American history thrown in to counteract any guilt, it's going to shift big bucks.
Much smaller fry is a new little English movie called Lesbian Vampire Killers. Sadly the best thing about this movie is the title. Everything else is a wasted opportunity. If it's going to be smutty, bring on the smut. Right? Wrong: a group of over-styled pommy slappers wearing too much make-up look like they got lost on the way to a page 3 shoot. And then they forgot to get their tits out! And if it's going so boldly to mention lesbianism in its title, how can it ignore so many of the potential thrills therein? Witless knob jokes and two thoroughly charmless male leads (James Corden and Mathew Horne) are putting this near the top of my list of Worst of 2009. Disappointing!
Also out May 21 is a Barry Levinson film called What Just Happened? that wants to be the 2009 version of Robert Altman's The Player. Robert de Niro plays the central character, a producer called Ben, who is struggling to get his director to compromise on the final cut of his film for the sake of his relationship with the studio and yep, the box office. If you remember the reaction of critics to the dog/shark scene in last year's Australian film The Square, this is going to be immensely enjoyable. It's full of movie industry inside jokes and star cameos from Sean Penn, Bruce Willis, and John Turturro.
