Major American studios like Fox are threatening to withhold their movies from Canadian theatres — but now the Globe and Mail reports that Canadians aren’t going to the movies all that much nowadays anyway, at least not compared to Americans:
Canadian admissions have been edging downward for close to five years. The trend was brought home most recently by Telefilm Canada‘s release of data for 2006. Overall box office last year was $831-million. While not a dramatic dip from 2005’s $831.3-million, it was enough to register as the fifth consecutive decline since 2002. Indeed, that 2006 total represents a 14.2-per-cent drop from the $968.9-million generated in 2002.
By contrast, box-office numbers in the United States have been moving upward, albeit modestly. According to industry analyst Leonard Klady, ticket receipts there (not including Canada) came in at $8.34-billion (U.S.) in 2006, an increase of just over $7-million from the 2003 gross — and a hike of more than $300-million, or almost 5 per cent, from 2005’s total (which, admittedly, came on the heels of a somewhat dismal year for ticket sales).
This discrepancy doesn’t surprise me. I have been charting Canadian box-office stats for the past few years, and colour-coding them red, orange and green based on whether a film’s performance is noticeably better in Canada than it is in the States, about the same, or noticeably worse — and suffice to say, there is a lot more green in my lists than there is either red or orange. I have also noticed that films that cater to a black or religious market tend to do noticeably better in the States, whereas films that cater to a British or Asian market tend to do better in Canada. So it’s good to see my amateur analysis confirmed by the professionals:
Among the factors both Lichtman and Klady believe do play a major role? Race and ethnicity. In the United States, African-Americans and Hispanic Americans make up close to 30 per cent of the population. Not surprisingly, U.S. studios have often vigorously keyed into that demographic — which numbers more than 80 million people, a hefty 2 times Canada’s total population — in green-lighting many pictures. And the results have often proved profitable: 2002’s Barbershop, starring Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer, grossed more than $75-million in the States, but barely made a blip in Canada.
Klady thinks Canada’s lower (and progressively declining) birth rate has an impact as well. In 2004, the American birth rate was 14 per 1,000 persons while in Canada it was a mere 10.5. A decade earlier it had been roughly 13 here, and 15 in the States. The bottom line: South of the border, there’s a bigger, and faster-growing, supply of potential customers for the line-up at the ticket wicket.
One notable corollary of that stat: While about 30 per cent of Canada’s population is aged 24 and under, in the States the figure is 35 per cent. That adds up to roughly 103 million men and women — a demographic American studios have courted with one inane Epic Movie after one sophomoric Step Up after another. And for 21-year-olds, nothing beats a movie as a relatively cheap “pretext for social interaction” and as a precursor to sex, James Schamus, the head of Focus Features, told The New Yorker recently. “You want to have sex with someone? You say, ‘Do you want to go to the movies with me Friday night?’ ”
Which is not to say there aren’t at least some factors that work in favour of theatres here. Canadians, for instance, respond more positively to British culture than do Americans. “Brit films,” says Lichtman, “generally do better here on a per-capita basis than in the U.S.” Canadians are also “more voracious readers” than their U.S. counterparts, he adds. The result: A film like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King did better here; it was the fifth-highest-grossing film in Canada in 2003-04, whereas in the U.S. it ranked 18th.
But while anglophilia may give a minor boost to the box office here, it’s nothing beside the tidal wave of ticket sales that can ensue when the religious right decides to head to the movies. That may explain why 2005’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, based on the novel by the very British Clive Staples Lewis, grossed more than $290-million in America, making it that country’s second-most successful commercial release of the year — while in Canada, Chronicles reached only No. 11 by year’s end.
The chief reason, according to Lichtman: Chronicles was co-produced by Walden Media, which is owned by the Christian Republican Philip Anschutz, and he in turn sold the adaptation as “a quasi-religious film” to the American religious right and its leaders — successfully, as it turned out. It goes without saying that religion in Canada is just not the big organizing principle it is among Americans.
One tiny nit-pick: Step Up may or may not be “inane” — I wouldn’t know, as I haven’t seen it — but it actually did slightly better in Canada than in the States, on a per-capita basis.
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