By Simon de Bruyn
After attracting controversy and headlines all weekend, The Combination’s first box office results have been announced, with the film taking just over $188,000 since opening on February 26.
The film opened on 32 screens across the country over the weekend, with the majority in NSW and Victoria, before reported incidents of violence in several cinemas in Sydney’s west caused Greater Union to remove the film from its four screens on Sunday morning.
The $188,054 in box office takings, sourced from MPDAA statistics, is a promising opening for the film which doesn’t feature established stars in its cast, and is backed by new distributor Australian Film Syndicate (AFS).
As a comparison – and to forecast how well it could do – this opening is bigger than the $162,000 opening weekend for Unfinished Sky, which was released by Palace in June last year and went onto accumulate $966,000.
However it is less than the respective openings of The Black Balloon ($239,000) and Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger ($302,000) which were released around the same time last year.
The Combination has already surpassed the $160,000 box office total of last year’s Cactus, which was released by Hoyts and hit a maximum of 45 screens.
Before the film’s release, AFS had stated its intention to weight the screen count towards suburbs populated by some of the nationalities in the film, rather than city centres, and launch a marketing campaign that would speak directly to this audience.
AFS was founded last year by the same team behind the Dungog Film Festival, with the aim to distribute only Australian films and documentaries. AFS will next turn its focus to Emulsion, a re-cut version of the black and white feature Jonathan Ogilvie made before The Tender Hook.
The Combination is the first Australian film to be released this year. Beautiful opens next week on March 5, while Eric Bana’s directorial debut Love the Beast opens on March 12.