Brendan Cowell and Simon Curry in Save Your Legs!
As anyone who follows the Australian film industry knows by now, cricketing comedy Save Your Legs! did about as well in its first week at the local box office as the boys in baggy green did in Hyderabad – that is, it stank. It took just $250,860 in its first week, at an average of $1292 per screen, about one-sixth of the result its distributor would have hoped for.
The question is, why?
Why didn’t they turn up? Maybe the girls had the say last weekend.
Unlike many Australian films, Save Your Legs! had high visibility, thanks to an estimated $1 million spent on P&A (prints and advertising), a substantial investment for a film that reportedly cost about $5 million. It went wide, as they say in the trade, released on 176 screens. There was a social media campaign featuring video ”extensions”, a YouTube page that has had more than 80,000 views, ads on TV and trailers in the cinema. There was a friendly TV partner in the Nine network, powerful commercial partners (including the Commonwealth Bank), and extensive coverage in the media (including this paper). In short, people knew it was out there.
The reviews, while mixed, ran the gamut from ”don’t bother” to ”don’t miss it”. At any rate, as a self-deprecating mid-market comedy with likeable stars (Stephen Curry, Damon Gameau and Brendan Cowell), it should have been relatively critic-proof. So what happened?
”It’s very, very confusing,” says Paul Wiegard, co-director of the film’s distributor (and major investor) Madman. ”There’s always the argument that the publicity could have been timed even tighter to release, but I genuinely thought all the pre-news during January was timed well – there’s very little else competing then for space – and I suspect the awareness is good-to-high. We’re incredibly disappointed and somewhat flummoxed – I mean, we haven’t always got things right, but it’s not like we haven’t done this before.”
Some critics will no doubt say the film bombed simply because it isn’t very good, but even not very good movies often have strong opening weekends before adverse word of mouth kills them off. Save Your Legs! never got that chance.
One explanation might be that it suffered from a perception of blokiness: the emphasis on mateship and the game, and Curry’s character saying, ”I just vomited on my own poo”, may have turned off some women. That’s a point Wiegard concedes. ”We always knew it was going to be tricky to find the core audience of 30 to 45-year-old males. Why didn’t they turn up? Maybe the girls had the say last weekend. That has to be part of it.”
But maybe it has very little to do with marketing or reviews at all. It may just be that Australians don’t much like sports films.
According to the database of the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia, only one sport film has earned more than $10 million in Australia, the 2010 American football drama The Blind Side. The next highest foreign earner with $7.88 million is the Will Ferrell ice-skating comedy Blades of Glory. Does that even count as a sport film?
The most successful Australian film in which sport is a major plot element is Phar Lap, which took $9.25 million in 1983 (equivalent to more than $26 million today). But Simon Wincer’s film is almost as rare a beast as the horse it is about. Of the 997 Australian feature films released between 1966 and 2012, only 19 could reasonably be said to feature sport as a major plot element (another eight or so feature it as a background element). And only two of those – the Iron Man film The Coolangatta Gold and surfing drama Liquid Bridge – have squeaked past the $1 million mark.
Could it be that for all the talk of Australia as a great sporting nation we don’t much care to watch movies about that aspect of our lives? (TV, evidently, is a different matter if the success of Howzat! is any indication.)
Or maybe it’s just that the people who go to watch movies in the cinema are not the same as those who go to watch sport. As one industry figure put it this week, ”The sad irony there is that there appears to be a correlation between people with a passion for elite athleticism and the desire not to leave the couch for entertainment.”
Perhaps they’re just saving their legs for the gym.
kquinn@fairfaxmedia.com.au