Judging Australian films’ success or failure by their local B.O. results is unfair and misleading, according to several academics who have devised a new formula for measuring the global impact of individual titles.
Dubbed film impact rating (FIR), the metric assesses films on 14 criteria including the location, volume and saturation of film screenings including film festivals; critic and user ratings, award nominations and wins; and Australian and international B.O. returns and production budget as a percentage of worldwide B.O.
The study’s authors Deb Verhoeven, Alwyn Davidson and Bronwyn Coate tracked 134 Australian films, including co-productions, that screened between December 1 2012 and June 1 2014.
By that yardstick, Saving My Banks had the greatest impact worldwide, narrowly ahead of The Great Gatsby, despite the gap in their total B.O. earnings: $US112.5 million for the Disney film co-produced by Essential Media and Entertainment’s Ian Collie, versus $351 million for Baz’s extravaganza.
The Railway Man ranked third ahead of Walking With Dinosaurs 3D. Perhaps surprisingly, The Rocket was reckoned to have had greater impact than Tracks, while B.O. bomb Adore/Adoration outranked Wolf Creek 2.
The findings were published in the trio’s paper Australian films at large: expanding the evidence about Australian cinema performance.
“We weren't surprised by any of the results,” Verhoeven, Professor and Chair of Media and Communication at Deakin University, tells IF.
“The point of the FIR was to expand the evaluation of Australian films beyond domestic box office by introducing a much wider range of factors to the way we understand their impact. Expanding the attribution of impact from just one to a combination of 14 different factors was always going to produce different results compared to the way we have previously measured film success.
“For example, this expanded approach gives films that might otherwise have been perceived as box office 'failures' a newfound form of attention based on additional attributes like critical acclaim, public attention, distribution coverage, international box-office and so on. But we are also mindful that the FIR is intended primarily as a discussion starter about how we understand value and impact in the Australian film industry. So we are explicitly interested in industry and public feedback on our model.”
The FIR tool can he found here (http://www.reelmeasures.com) so anyone can generate his or her rankings of Australian films according to one’s sense of what is important in evaluating the impact of movies.
“We’ve been really impressed by the level of feedback we've received which has ranged from detailed responses to the underlying formulation of our impact algorithm, to individual film producers contacting us to generate an FIR for them,” she says.
“Typically, and sadly, there isn't enough collaboration between academics and film industry members – we hope that this kind of recursive exercise might create more opportunities for these two sectors to work productively together. At this stage the signs are certainly promising. In addition to direct feedback, we've had an enthusiastic response to our online tool at www.reelmeasures.com which is allowing us to track user feedback on the value of the various impact measures we have identified.
“So far we are picking up from the public use of this tool a definite leaning to factors associated with critical acclaim as the most important measure of film impact. Feedback like this will allow us to adjust our algorithm to produce a more widely informed set of results in the future.”
You can view the FIR Chart here.