There are any number of ways to spin the box-office success of Bon Cop, Bad Cop, as today’s Toronto Star demonstrates:
On the face of it, the numbers tell the story.
Bon Cop, Bad Cop has taken in $11.3 million. That piggy movie of yesteryear took in $11.2 million. Declaring victory, Vivafilm, the Montreal distribution arm of Alliance Atlantis, has issued its own feel-good statement: “The goal was to be the first completely bilingual production to entertain audiences from coast to coast. We are proud to say we have achieved that goal.”
Maybe, but to compare 2006 grosses with 1981 grosses is at best naïve — at worst grossly misleading. As one film industry veteran put it, “That’s like comparing apples to crabapples.”
Adjusted for inflation, the box office take for Porky’s equals about $22 million in 2006 dollars.
And by the way, unlike most Canadian movies that do well at home, Porky’s took in close to $100 million in the U.S.
Still, the relative success of Bon Cop, Bad Cop is a hopeful sign in the eyes of Telefilm CEO Wayne Clarkson. . . .
As for going head to head with Porky’s, Clarkson says: “The English language market is so much more competitive now than it was in 1981 that a comparison is almost meaningless. Because of DVDs and 500 TV channels and the Internet, it’s much harder now to break through and find a big audience.”
Got that? On the one hand, dollars were worth a lot more back in the era of Porky’s than they do now. On the other hand, dollars were easier to rake in at the box office in the era of Porky’s than they are now. So I guess it all kind of balances out.
Plus, one can always argue that Porky’s owes its Canadian success to the fact that everyone here assumed it was just another American blockbuster, whereas Bon Cop, Bad Cop could never be mistaken for anything other than Canadian cheese.
Oh, and then there are the confusing questions of currency exchanges and of whether or not the North American box-office take for Porky’s includes the Canadian revenues.
Ordinarily, I would assume it does — and based on a story that ran in Variety eight years ago (see below, in the comments to this post), I believe Canadian dollars are normally counted as equivalent to American dollars, for the purposes of much-hyped box-office stats such as these. (What the accounting departments at the various studios do is an altogether separate matter.)
So it’s confusing when the Hollywood Reporter, via Reuters, opts to convert the currencies in this one film’s case:
Erik Canuel’s bilingual buddy picture, which bowed August 4, was within a whisker of the C$11.2 million ($10.2 million) in gross receipts reached by Porky’s,” according to distributor Alliance Atlantis Motion Picture Distribution LP.
Who knows, this may explain the discrepancy between the Variety and Canadian Press stories that I noted earlier.
The Star also makes the ludicrous claim that Bon Cop, Bad Cop “is a crowd-pleaser that lets nationalists rally round the flag.”
Um, no. Quite frankly, it is more than a little problematic that the advertising for this movie juxtaposed the maple leaf with the fleur-de-lis, as though the maple leaf represented only anglophones; and it’s hard to get excited about any film in which the Ontario cop’s sister, made up like the tart in some Denys Arcand film from the 1980s, finds her ultimate sexual satisfaction while loudly exclaiming a separatist Quebecois slogan.
Again, check out what Steve Burgess had to say about this film.
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