On Halloween 1997, two estranged teen skaters embark on a surreal journey through their memories, dreams and fears: Boys in the Trees opens on October 20.

When he was at school in Melbourne, film director Nicholas Verso was almost expelled for being a goth. “I blackened everything,” he says. “Lashes, eyebrows: it was a big commitment.” While he thought his friends looked pretty cool in the pipe at the skate park, he was much too unco-ordinated to join in.

“I was more an observer than a participant, more of a goth wearing dark clothes and trying not to move much in the summer.”

He laughs from behind what is now long, all-natural fair hair. We are at the Venice Film Festival; the sun roars like a furnace while we scurry with plastic chairs to find a spot under trees. At 36, Verso’s style has morphed into ragged ’70s hippiedom, but his skin is still porcelain pale. It seems a bit of a shame to waste such a perfect canvas.

Skating looms large and slow-mo in Boys in the Trees, his first feature. The film is set among a group of teenagers in their final year at high school in the ’90s, when Verso himself was at school in Kew, with torrents of music to match. Corey, played by Toby Wallace, is an aspiring photographer who dreams of living in New York, although probably anywhere that wasn’t an Australian suburb would do.

He can’t say too much about that to the other dudes in the gang. For Jango (Justin Holborow), his ostensible best mate and the pack leader, everything anyone could want – “weed to smoke, bitches to f—, fags to bash” – is right here. Those things

include the much brighter Corey; he needs him to want the life they have. Way across the gender divide, however, their classmate Romany (Mitzi Ruhlmann) gets it; her own hope is to escape to a dreamland Canada, with its extreme weather, pine-clad mountains and bears.

This clash of aspirations reaches crisis point on Halloween, when Corey finds himself alone in his wolf costume with Jonah (Gulliver McGrath). He is the runt of the class, the routine punching bag for Jango and his thicker mates and – as is soon revealed – he was Corey’s best friend when they were in primary school. Feeling guilty about having stood by while Jonah was abused, Corey agrees to walk him home through the dark of All Hallows’ Eve.

Revellers in full carnival dress emerge from the mist; their walk becomes increasingly surreal as they slip from the present into their shared past. A “memory tree” in the forest, illuminated apparently from within, is hung with hundreds of objects culled from childhood, now as magic and faraway as any land in the clouds.

Demons – called “darklings” – emerge from the ground. An Indigenous man appears in the gloaming, wearing a funereal black suit: some kind of harbinger of death, perhaps?

Everything in Boys in the Trees, says Verso, reflects his own life somehow. “They all came from things I felt; I sometimes looked at people together and thought they were like animals, like wolves. The darklings came from listening to what people say when they crush each other’s dreams, just quietly over a drink,” he says.

“I was very inspired by [sci-fi novelist] Ray Bradbury, who said [in Zen and the Art of Writing] you should write about things that enthuse you, so I really tried to write things I had experienced and felt strongly. I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time. I didn’t want to make a first film I wasn’t willing to die for, to be honest. So I had to pour my blood into it.”

You can see the blood. Along with the ghoulies and ghosties and hallucinatory spectacle, Boys in the Trees deals with the stuff of current headlines: bullying at school, teenage depression and modern confusions about what being a man should mean.

When Verso started writing it, he intended to set it in the present, but technology got in the way: no modern Corey could wander off on a party night without being pursued by a shower of texts. Even his determination to be a photographer seemed dated.

“That was a strange thing to be in the ’90s – it took some effort – whereas everyone thinks they are a photographer now because technology enables that. So I think there was a real innocence in that respect.”

What hasn’t changed – or, in Verso’s opinion, has worsened – is the entrenchment of a vengeful version of thwarted masculinity. It’s unlikely, he agrees, that even a gang led by someone as knuckled-headed as Jango would be so automatically homophobic now; teenagers have moved on. At the same time, he remembers “so many cool female role models”, from his childhood television favourite Roseanne to Sigourney Weaver in Alien to P.J. Harvey and Courtney Love in the music world. “And at a certain point, it felt like that just went away.”

Now we live in a cultural era dominated by the anxious sensibilities of “scared little men” that he thinks probably has its grounding in the world he explored in Boys in the Trees. “I mean, you look at violence against women now. That comes from male fears, from deeply uncivilised men who haven’t learned how to be themselves and who were teenagers at this time. So it’s interesting looking at them in the ’90s and going, ‘Well, this was their last moment of being kids. What were they like, what message weren’t they getting, to know how to be men?’ ”

Not enough attention, he says, is paid to rites of passage. Toby Wallace, who plays Corey, is 21 and grew up in Wheelers Hill; he recognises a lot of the real-life elements in the film. “I had to go through separating myself from group situations or the part of town I was from and say, ‘I am my own person, I can lead my own life’.”

He started acting when he was 13, but it was moving into the city after school that changed him. By the time he was Corey’s age there was, of course, a new kind of bullying afoot, the cyber form. “We are in an age that is more open to talking about those things – depression, anxiety, the stages of people’s lives, bullying – but then the other side of it is that we are in such instant communication with each other.”

Which makes the ’90s, which hardly seem very long ago at all, a different time, even a prelapsarian time. “Kids now are absorbing stuff constantly through their phones and the internet,” says Verso. “I think in the ’90s you had romantic notions that could be shattered.” Romany’s idea of Canada, for example, probably comes from a Joni Mitchell song; these days she could just google everything she wanted to know.

“And I can’t imagine now people talking as much as those two boys talk in the film without looking at their phones or Instagramming along the way. I think people were more in the moment. And you could live out your little teen mistakes without having a camera in your face.” Not much chance of that now; the packs may have loosened, but there’s a lone wolf around every corner.

Stephanie Bunbury – SMH – October 14 2016

Early Winter director, Michael Rowe, the Australian-born filmmaker talks about what he sees as the problems with the Australian film industry: “I’ve watched creative workshops there for directors and writers that are terrifying.”

“At 23-years-old, I felt that Australia was a bit boring and a bit staid and set in its ways,” writer/director, Michael Rowe tells FilmInk. “The dizzying heights of cultural creation were a little bit far away and a little bit unreachable. There are certain cultural sacred cows that are highly valued. They’re up high like gods. And as a 23-year-old, I felt it impossible to aspire to. I feel like the cinematic world is way too dominated by people who have nothing to do with the creative processes.”

It was partly that sense of disconnection that drove Michael Rowe on what has been a continuing journey around the world, and continuing separation from his home country. Born in Ballarat, Michael Rowe now lives in Mexico, which is where he made his first big splash with the shot-in-Mexico, Spanish-language 2010 drama, Leap Year, which won the coveted Golden Camera Award at The Cannes Film Festival. Still to make a film on Aussie soil, Rowe’s latest film is the controlled, finely nuanced Early Winter, an Australian/Canadian co-production about a seemingly typical marriage in Quebec that is slowly coming apart at the seams.

Tellingly, Rowe has embraced outside filmmaking communities, while maintaining a more distant one with Australia. “I’ve watched creative workshops there for directors and writers that are terrifying,” he continues about Australia’s filmmaking scene.

“They give them all these workshops about funding bodies, about distribution, and about how to reach and appeal to certain audiences. So you get all these poor bloody kids who are in their twenties or thirties, with all this shit in front of them, and they’re trying to make a film. You can’t start out with that. You can’t have the cart before the horse. If you’re thinking about audiences, and worse than that, producers, and worse than that, distributors, and worse than that, funding bodies…,” his voice trails off.

“If you’re thinking about pleasing these people before you’re thinking about what kind of story you want to tell, then it’s destined to failure and absolute mediocrity.

There’s a saying, ‘A camel is a horse designed by a committee.’ And that’s what happens when you have funding bodies and distributors in the mix. It’s not their fault, but they know nothing about creative processes. They do their best to give helpful advice, but since they don’t know how it works, they get it all wrong. And the poor creators are beaten over the head with ideas that are completely irrelevant, and it makes it a very difficult environment for creating. I feel very sorry for them, and this vision needs to change.”

Michael Rowe, however, doesn’t want to just stand by and watch it continue.

“Whatever I have in terms merit and achievement, I hope that I can help change things at least a little bit,” he says. “There’s a massive amount of talent in Australia, and it’s usually hamstrung by the fear of funding bodies and distributors, and this ridiculous idea that somebody is going to be able to make a film that is going to make everybody rich. You’ve got 20 million people, and you’re not going to make any film that’s going to make anyone rich even if everyone in the country sees it. Stop it! Make a film that’s about something honest. Animal Kingdom, for instance, is an honest film. It’s a good film. And I know that there’s a lot of David Michod in that film; his suffering, his struggles, it’s all there. It’d be very difficult for anyone else to have made that film. And that’s why it resonates, because it’s true. You cannot hide honesty on screen. If you’ve got the balls to put it out there, it’ll work. Even if you have to dress it up as a film about bank robbers. The other thing is the politically correct police. Let’s make a film about indigenous transsexual lesbians because that’s going to get funding. That’s not the way either. You can’t be thinking about funding, you can’t be thinking about distribution, and above all, box office, when you’re creating something. It’s going to turn out bad.”

And what about Michael Rowe’s relationship with the funding bodies? Can he see himself working with them in order to shoot a film in the country where he was born? “Early Winter is an Australian co-production, and I have got an upcoming project in Australia that I’m working on for 2018,” the director replies. “I am interested in working in Australia. I think that the Australian funding bodies will have no problems in letting me work on my terms and my kind of film. I have a track record now with a couple of decent prizes that will allow them to justify that. I am enthused about that.”

FilmInk Presents will be hosting a series of Q&A screenings of Early Winter with Michael Rowe, taking in The Nova Carlton in Melbourne (October 4), Dendy in Canberra (October 5), New Farm Cinemas in Brisbane (October 7), Dendy Newtown in Sydney (October 9), and The Regent Cinema in Ballarat (October 10), which is where Michael Rowe was born. The film will then be released in cinemas nationally on October 13.

For further information on screenings, head to FilmInk Presents:

https://filmink.com.au/2016/early-winter/

Read the first and second parts of the FILMINK interview with Michael Rowe:

https://filmink.com.au/2016/michael-rowe-an-expat-returns-with-early-winter/

https://filmink.com.au/2016/early-winter-director-michael-rowe-the-internationalist/

By Dov Kornits FILMINK September 27, 2016

Momentum Pictures has taken U.S. rights to family entertainment movie “Oddball,” which is being sold at the Toronto Film Festival by Global Screen. The final Australian theatrical box office for Oddball hit $11 million in December 2015 <from a $7 million budget> and went on to be the top-grossing Australian Family Film of 2015 for distributor Village Roadshow.

The film has also been acquired by Snap for free-TV, pay-TV and VOD rights in Latin America, Trade Media for France, Just4Kids for Benelux, Lusomundo for Portugal, Champ Lis for China, and Suraya for Malaysia.

Previously announced deals include sales to Icon for U.K. and Ireland, Mongrel Media for Canada, Microcinema for Italy, Kino Swiat for Poland, Gulf Film for Middle East, Fivia for Ex-Yugoslavia, Albania and Slovenia, Medyavizyon for Cyprus and Turkey, Star Films for Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia (theatrical rights), and Globo for Brazil (TV and VOD rights).

“Oddball” stars up-and-coming Australian star Shane Jacobson (“Kenny”), Sarah Snook (“The Dressmaker,” “Steve Jobs,” “Predestination”) and Alan Tudyk (“Frozen,” “I, Robot”) in the lead roles, and tells the true story of an eccentric chicken farmer who, with the help of his granddaughter, trains his mischievous dog Oddball to protect a penguin sanctuary from fox attacks, while also trying to reunite his family and save their seaside town.

The film opened TIFF Kids Film Festival in April, and has screened at more than 40 film festivals.

“Our buyers simply cannot keep from the irresistible charm of ‘Oddball,’ clearly demonstrated by the ever-growing momentum of sales on the film,” Julia Weber, head of theatrical, said in a statement.

“Oddball” is produced by WTFN/The Film Company, Practical Pictures and Kmunications, in co-production with Screen Australia and Fox International Channels, in association with Film Victoria.

Leo Barraclough – Variety + Wikipedia – September 12, 2016

Made on a measly $11,000, Joseph Sims-Dennett’s twitchy psychological thriller is poised on a knife edge between excellence and a cabin-fever B movie – 3 / 5 stars

For 11 days in January 2013, director Joseph Sims-Dennett holed up in an apartment in Rozelle, Sydney and spent $11,000 making his second feature film – roughly the same cost as the duck canapés and gougères served at a Hollywood premiere. Two years later he emerges with Observance: a twitchy, icky, genuinely unsettling psychological thriller about a private investigator who takes on what appears to be a simple, well-paying job.

Observance stars Lindsay Farris as the private investigator, Parker.

From a derelict apartment across the street, all Parker (Lindsay Farris) is employed to do is spy on a woman and report daily updates over the phone to his employer (voiced by Brendan Cowell). Things aren’t as they seem, as these things often go, and Parker – traumatised by the recent death of his young son – spirals into confusion, delusion and possibly madness.

Why is he paid to watch this woman (played by Stephanie King) and who is he working for? When a man on the street mumbles something about her being “a sacrifice” it feels like the film is about to get Wicker Man-style weird. Instead, Sims-Dennett gravitates towards things-that-go-bump-in-the-night style inclinations, largely swapping out plot-based mysteries for spooks part-and-parcel with scary sound effects and gnarly images.

Think body horror and surprise discoveries made during his surveillance, such as an ominous-looking silhouette captured in a photograph and a ghostly voice found on an audio file. Opening images of a beach and coastal rocks are clearly, in some way, important to the riddle of what exactly is happening and why.

The actors speak in American accents, making it clear which market Sims-Dennett was hedging his bets on. Even John Jarratt, a fair dinkum actor if ever there bloody well was one, talks like a yank, arriving to hand over documents to Parker in a car during the dead of night, cloak-and-dagger style.

The director’s gambit appears to have worked. Observance premiered last July at Canada’s Fantasia film festival, where it was greeted enthusiastically. Off the back of a review published in the Hollywood Reporter, Sims-Dennett was contacted by The Weinstein Company and flew to LA to meet representatives.

Observance continues a pattern of Australian films that from the get-go have found more success abroad than at home, including last year’s conversation starter The Suicide Theory (incredibly, the better part of a year later, it is still not available in its home country). The director doesn’t so much extrapolate bang for the buck as an atomic bomb for the buck, or whatever expression reiterates the point that his film sure as hell looks the part.

The atmosphere is largely comprised of small details: lots of close-ups and mid-shots, tied together with an unnerving sense of show and (don’t) tell, as if in most scenes something terrible is bobbing just off frame.

The cinematography of Rodrigo Vidal-Dawson (who was a camera operator on 1998’s Bride of Chucky) is textured with eerie colour-sapped grading. Scenes are tinted in unhealthy-looking shades of green and blue, as if the film is slowly making itself sick.

Sound editors rarely get a guernsey in film reviews, so take a bow David Gaylard and David Williams; their work here is terrific (observe how they mesh together the sounds of the sea with the sound of a train).

There are hints of Roman Polanski’s early films, particularly Repulsion, which was largely based inside an apartment, and Cul-De-Sac, which like Observance features surreal visions of a shoreline – also, when Parker sneaks into “Subject 1’s” apartment in a particularly tense moment, Christopher Nolan’s first feature film, Following.

Sims-Dennett eventually loosens the throat-choking tie grip established in the first half and the film takes on a throbbing intensity, not entirely in a good way. The director indulges in obscene, conventional horror images that feel like shorthand for shock rather than earned scares or suspense. Blood oozing out of a person’s mouth is an easy way to disturb viewers, but feels particularly gratuitous in a film that works studiously hard to get its tone and mood right and – for a while – avoids cheap tricks.

Some of the discipline that defines its early moments is lost when the crunch time comes to start coughing up revelations, or at least hinting at what on earth is happening across the street and in the protagonist’s mind. With a story that gravitates towards cryptic resolutions and an aesthetic that also grows increasingly hallucinogenic, you get a protagonist, a plot and a visual makeup that all feel in danger of spiralling out of control.

In this way Observance feels poised on a knife edge, on some occasions tinkering on the precipice of excellence and on others feeling at risk of slipping into a cabin fever B movie. Somehow Sims-Dennett and his peculiar thriller stand their ground.

Whatever you make of the film’s oblique thinking-person’s ending, and whether or not it cuts the mustard from a storytelling point-of-view, Observance is undoubtedly an impressive achievement.

Luke Buckmaster – The Guardian – Tuesday 5 April 2016

Watch the Observance trailer here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_S6XKT6DyY

An investigative report from Film Industry Analyst Stephen Follows and Founder of The Numbers Bruce Nash

Breakout indie hits may be some of the most romantic stories in the movie business.

The plucky lone film-maker battles the odds to make their dream film, putting naysayers in their place when it becomes a box office sensation, bringing them fame and fortune beyond their wildest dreams…

But are breakout hits random events that no-one can plan for or do they share some kind of DNA that can teach us how to make successful independent films, and also what genres or techniques to avoid?

To answer these questions, we began with a list of over 3,000 films from The Numbers’ financial database, investigating full financial details, including North American (i.e. “domestic”) and international box office, video sales and rentals, TV and ancillary revenue. We narrowed our focus to study feature films released between 2000 and 2015, budgeted between $500k and $3 million, which generated at least $10 million in Producer’s Net Profit, using a standard distribution model where the distributor charges a 30% fee.

This produced a list of 63 films in total: roughly four films a year over the 15 years under consideration. Almost all of the movies will be familiar to followers of independent film, from small films that became Oscar hopefuls, like Beasts of the Southern Wild and Winter’s Bone to horror movies like Insidious and The Purge that got picked up by the major studios and became box office sensations. With the list in hand, we looked for common themes and found (with a small number of exceptions) that the breakout hits broke down naturally into four types.

Model One: Extreme, Clear-Concept Horror Films

It will come as no surprise to most producers that horror films feature prominently on the list of top low-budget breakout successes.

 Most Profitable Films: Insidious, Monsters, The Devil Inside, Paranormal Activity 2, Dead Snow.

 MPAA Rating: 82% are rated ‘R’, 12% PG-13 and 6% not rated.

 Running Time: Relatively short, with an average of 94 minutes and no film ran over two hours.

 Critical Reviews: Average to poor. Highest rated film in this category is Buried, which has a Metascore of just 65 out of 100. The average Metascore across the dataset was just 49 out of 100.

 Audience Reviews: More supportive than the critics, but still not above average for most films, at an average of 6.2 out of 10 on IMDb.

 Release Patterns: Two very distinct release patterns – half played in fewer than around 100 theatres while the other half played in over 1,500 theatres.

 Income Streams: 30% from theatrical, 64% from home video and 6% from TV and other ancillary income.

 Income Location: 46% of income was from the US & Canada and 54% international.

Model Two: Documentaries with Built-In Audiences and/or Powerful Stories

The second group of films that stood out were documentaries.

 Most Profitable Films: Exit Through the Gift Shop, An Inconvenient Truth, Marley, Tyson, Bowling for Columbine.

 MPAA Rating: A healthy spread across all ratings, with the most common being PG-13.

 Running Time: Average of 102, although a wide range from 80 minutes up to 144 minutes.

 Critical Reviews: Very high, with a Metascore average of 79 out of 100.

 Audience Reviews: Very high, an average IMDb rating of 7.8 out of 10.

 Release Pattern: Small number of theatres, with most playing in under 250 theatres and the widest release being An Inconvenient Truth in 587 theatres.

 Income Streams: 75% of income comes from home video, 18% theatrical and 7% via other sources.

 Income Location: 58% international and 42% domestic.

Critical reviews seem vital for this type of film to break out and it’s interesting to note that the documentaries with the lowest scoring critical ratings (The September Issue at 69 and Religulous at 56) each had strong inbuilt audiences (‘Vogue / fashion’ and ‘Bill Maher / religious scepticism’).

In fact, only a handful of the documentaries on the list don’t have an obvious audience: Man on Wire, Anvil: The Story of Anvil, and Searching for Sugar Man are the only ones that needed to find a crowd. The others were either about someone already very famous (Marley, Tyson, Senna, Amy… note the one-name titles!) or played very directly to a receptive audience (Inside Job, Blackfish, An Inconvenient Truth etc).

Model Three: Validating, Feel-Good Religious Films

Speaking of receptive audiences, the third group of films we found were faith-based films.

 Most Profitable Films: Fireproof, God’s Not Dead, To Save a Life, War Room, Courageous.

 MPAA Rating: Two-thirds were rated PG and the remaining third were PG-13.

 Running Time: Fairly long, all were over 110 minutes and the average was two hours.

 Critical Reviews: Incredibly poor, with an average Metascore of just 26 out of 100.

 Audience Reviews: Similar to the horror pool, with an average IMDb rating of 6.3 out of 10.

 Type of Release: An average of 1,273 theatres with the widest being War Room at 1,945 theatres.

 Income Streams: 60% from home video, 31% from theatrical and 9% from television and other ancillary streams.

 Income Location: 90% of income came from North American sources with just 10% coming from outside the US and Canada.

Two things stand out with these films. First, they make virtually all of their money in the United States. Second, they get very bad reviews from mainstream movie reviewers. The strength of these movies isn’t necessarily their quality so much as the message; they deliver to an audience that is interested in what they have to say.

Model Four: Very High Quality Dramas

At the other end of the spectrum, at least in the eyes of professional film reviewers, come very high quality dramas. Almost half of these films were American productions, with the rest coming from a wide variety of countries including Germany, Argentina, Mexico, the UK, France and Poland.

 Most Profitable US Dramas: Half Nelson, Waitress, Blue Valentine, Fruitvale Station.

 Most Profitable Foreign Dramas: The Lives of Others, The Motorcycle Diaries, Amores Perros, Sin Nombre.

 MPAA Rating: The vast majority are R-rated, with just a third being rated PG-13.

 Running Time: A wide range, from 81 minutes up to 154 minutes long.

 Critical Reviews: Extremely high, with an average Metascore of 81 out of 100.

 Audience Reviews: Similarly high, with an average IMDb rating of 7.5 out of 10.

 Type of Release: Small release, with all but four playing to fewer than 300 theatres.

 Income Streams: 67% from home video, 27% from theatrical and 6% from other sources.

 Income Location: 66% of income for US dramas came from the US and Canada, whereas the reverse was true with non-US dramas, with 64% of income coming from international sources.

The lowest rated film in this category received a Metascore of 68 out of 100, which was higher than all of the films within the Horror breakout success category.

A common thread among these films is awards attention. While they might not be big enough to win a lot of main-category Oscars, these are the films that have picked up a bunch of Independent Spirit Awards, Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, and got some screenwriting and/or acting Oscar nominations.

Do the Films Have to be Any Good?

An interesting finding from this research is that the quality of the film is only relevant for certain types of films.

Religious films received extremely low ratings from critics but had mixed ratings from audiences.

 Horror films showed a range: some were disliked by both audiences and critics (such as The Devil Inside), while others had middling support from both camps (such as Monsters) and then there were films which audiences enjoyed but critics were lukewarm towards (such as Dead Man’s Shoes).

 Documentaries and Dramas were all popular with audiences and the vast majority also received extremely high ratings from critics.

If we plot this on a graph, we can see just how distinct these three sub-categories are:

http://americanfilmmarket.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/AFM-indie-breakout-chart-03-2.jpg

What’s Missing?

Many of the films in the list come as no surprise, but what’s interesting is what’s missing from the list. We found…

 Virtually no comedies (Waiting… is the only out-and-out comedy on the list, and it was made at the peak of the DVD sales boom)

 No action movies

 No thrillers

 No musicals

 Virtually nothing directed at kids — Dr. Dolittle 3 was the only family movie that made our list — although we believe some animated franchises such as Barbie are very profitable but their budgets aren’t quite in our range.

Aside from the missing genres, the other notable absence is any major star involvement. Of course, this is largely a function of the budget—it’s hard to get Tom Cruise for a $3 million film—but it’s remarkable that none of these films attracted anybody who would even be called a B-list star at the time the film was made.

Lessons for Filmmakers and Producers from this Research

So we think there are a few lessons for independent film-makers who are hoping to make breakout hits:

 Some “niche” audiences are large enough to make for a very profitable market, if you can reach them. The “faith-based” film audience stands out, but there are also receptive audiences for certain types of documentaries. Having a very clear idea of your audience is the first step to making a financially successful film.

 If you’re aiming for a more general audience, quality matters. A lot. Honing your screenplay to what you think is perfection and then having it ripped apart at a workshop may be hard work, but it’s almost certainly what it takes to get a dramatic film to ultimately work with audiences, and to make back its investment.

 Look for good actors, not big stars, and do the same with all of the technical crew on a film. Fun fact: Affonso Goncalves, who edited list member Beasts of the Southern Wild also edited fellow list member Winter’s Bone and 2016 Oscar nominee Carol. Finding a good editor, cinematographer, production designer and other key members of the crew is more important for a low-budget film than blowing a big chunk of your budget on a famous (or, just as likely, previously-famous) actor or actress.

The Full List of Films

This analysis looked at feature films released between 2000 and 2015 budgeted between $500k and $3 million and which we estimate generated at least $10 million in Producer’s Net Profit. The films which fit our criteria are listed below.

RANK FILM TITLE YEAR METASCORE IMDB RATING ESTIMATED BUDGET

1 Bowling for Columbine 2002 72 8 $3,000,000

2 The Lives of Others 2006 89 8.5 $2,000,000

3 War Room 2015 26 6.2 $3,000,000

4 God’s Not Dead 2014 16 4.9 $1,150,000

5 An Inconvenient Truth” 2006 75 7.5 $1,000,000

6 Garden State 2004 67 7.6 $2,500,000

7 Insidious 2010 52 6.8 $1,500,000

8 Fireproof 2008 28 6.5 $500,000

9 Paranormal Activity 2 2010 53 5.7 $3,000,000

10 Hustle & Flow 2005 68 7.4 $2,800,000

Showing 1 to 10 of 63 entries. See the full list here:

What Types of Low-Budget Films Break Out?

Notes

 The financial figures come from a variety of sources, including people directly connected to the films, verified third-party data and computation models based on partial data and industry norms. It is possible that one or two of the individual figures are different to our predictions, though en masse we are confident of the larger picture.

 The number of theatres relates to the widest point of the film’s North American release.

About the Authors

Stephen Follows is a writer, producer and film industry analyst. In addition to film analytics, Stephen is an award-winning writer-producer and runs a production company based in Ealing Studios, London.

Bruce Nash is founder and President of Nash Information Services, LLC, the premier provider of movie industry data and research services and operator of The Numbers, a web site that provides box office and video sales tracking, and daily industry news.

July 2016 – http://americanfilmmarket.com