Film

Junk Explained: Why Are Films Always Delayed In Australia?

Why is Australia always the last to get a popular film?

by Cameron Williams  7 December 2018
Australian Film Release Dates

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If you’re an Aussie and you’re keen on seeing any upcoming film release, the most important question you need to ask is: when, if ever, will I get the chance to see it? Australian film release dates are a complicated beast.

Films get delayed in Australia, a lot.

You can never tell if a film is going to get a release, even if it’s popular or critically acclaimed. One recent example is Eighth Grade, a teen drama directed by Bo Burnham, which currently has a 99% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and won best first film at the 2018 New York Film Critic Circle awards.

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For most of 2018, Eighth Grade has been missing from the Australian film release schedule despite being praised as one of the year’s best. It finally got a date, next year, 3 January 2019.

Other high-profile 2018 releases that are slow starters in Australia were the corporate satire, Sorry to Bother You, and First Reformed, the film that may get Ethan Hawke close to an Oscar.

Both films were given small releases despite attracting a considerable amount of hype from overseas.

Even high profile Cannes titles and local festival favourites like Cold War and the Palme d’Or winner, Shoplifters, got releases in late 2018. The Nic Cage film, Mandy, got the honour of ‘one night only’ screenings before expanding due to popularity.

There are strategic reasons why distributors choose to release films at certain times but they will always face the challenge of Australia’s poor track record with piracy.

Since the Government began blocking piracy websites in 2016, driven by Foxtel and Village Roadshow, a screen industry body reported a 25% drop in illegal piracy and 53% drop in downloads from websites that were on a hit list: PirateBay, isohunt, SolarMovie, TorrentHound and Torrentz. Still, a culture of piracy remains and film delays only aggravate audiences to track down films they want to see on their own time.

So why the heck are they still delaying films?

Doin’ It For The Kids

Blame the school holidays for major delays to big releases.

Distributors in Australia will often delay films with a younger audience in mind to ensure they’ll do better business during the school holidays. The timing often works out great with release windows in America lining up blockbusters to match the major winter and summer breaks, but it’s not always the case.

Village Roadshow delayed the release of The Lego Movie by a few months for a school holiday release in Australia, a decision they would later regret. Due to piracy, Roadshow took a hit of roughly $5 million on The Lego Movie.

The boss of Village Roadshow, Graham Burke admitted: “… we made one hell of a mistake with Lego (Movie). It was an Australian film, we financed it together with Warner Brothers and it was made here in Kings Cross, in Australia, and because it was so important we held it for a holiday period. It was a disaster.”

“It caused it to be pirated very widely. As a consequence — no more — our policy going forward is that all our movies will be released within the time and date of the United States.”

A few years later The Batman Lego Movie got delayed — but Roadshow backed themselves by admitting it was a gamble, but that the model of releasing films during the school holidays was eventually worth it.

Roadshow also claim they took a hit on Mad Max Fury Road and Lion due to piracy. They continue to put pressure on the government to crack down on piracy and have recently targeted Google for being part of the problem.

I Love You, Aussies

If a celebrity wants to visit Australia to promote a film there’s a good chance it will get delayed.

Distributors will delay a film to work with a star’s schedule so they can align the release with the free publicity they’ll get from interviews, like when Marc Fennell makes an actor feel every single emotion on The Feed — priceless.

There’s a downside to this strategy, because you can tell a film may be bad if there’s a press tour in Australia.

Our box office is a drop in the ocean compared with the rest of the world and it’s a long way to travel for a handful of local interviews and a red carpet event in the foyer of a shopping centre. If they are going to a lot of effort they may be overcompensating for something.

Beware the curse of the Australian press tour.

Festival Hype

Major festivals around the world like Cannes, Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival still hold a lot of weight when it comes to the lifecycle of a film.

In Australia, we get a lot of the major festival films on our shores quickly thanks to the Sydney Film Festival and the Melbourne International Film Festival: always the best chance to see a film if you’re unsure if it’s going to see the light of day beyond a festival in Australia.

A positive reaction from audiences at a festival can sustain a film well after its premiere. Social media amplifies the hype so a film begins to promote itself before the first trailer has been cut.

Jennifer Kent’s follow up to the Babadook, The Nightingale, originally had a mid-2018 release in Australia, but it was pushed back to 2019 after it was selected for the Venice Film Festival where it won two major prizes.

Since Venice, Kent’s film has been placed strategically at film festivals around the world while continuing to earn praise ahead of its release in Australia next year.

It’s both a blessing and a curse because certain films can thrive in a festival bubble but fail to find a home when the premiere after party is over. Unless a film already has distribution in place, making a festival premiere part of the publicity, a lot of films don’t escape festivals because distributors can’t foresee a film finding an audience.

In Australia, research shows the audience tends to skew towards women over the age of 35 when it comes to ticket sales. The age bracket of 35-49 year olds are buying the most tickets in general so these factors will definitely be top of mind when distributors are considering giving a film a run in Australia.

For Your Consideration

“A serious award season contender” is a statement you should fear anywhere near an anticipated film.

The award season, roughly, occurs between November and February each year, and ends with the Oscars.

The Oscars give a film an incredible amount of free publicity because it creates a shortcut to sell a film: this is worthy of awards so you must see it. Awards equal quality. The problem is the Oscars occur the year after the release of the films they’re celebrating.

Studios cram all their award contenders into 4 months so the people who vote for the Oscars can keep these films top of mind when filling out their ballot.

In Australia, films get delayed to maximise the hype of award season so the films are in cinemas around the time of each award ceremony. For example, it’s easier to promote a film nominated for 10 Oscars in 2019 than it is to release it in 2018 with uncertainty and a pull quote from the review in the New York Times.

If Beale Street Could Talk, the latest film from the director of Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, is expected to be a major awards contender, and has already been nominated for multiple Golden Globes and it has an Australian release date to match: 14 February 2019. The film will be released in America: 14 December 2018. Another agonising wait.

The recent Best Picture Winner, The Shape of Water, played the game perfectly, it rolled out in America at the beginning of December 2017 but we didn’t get it in Australia until January 2018.

Relying on award season is risky because what if a film gets snubbed? It happens, which can lead to a film getting scrubbed from the Australian release schedule if the distributor was banking on riding its success to ticket sales. These films either disappear or get pushed back into March, which is traditionally a dumping ground for distributors — they take out the trash while people are still talking about the Oscars.

Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, thanks to a bunch of lawsuits, took over 7 years to get a release in America and was surrounded with speculative awards hype.

Margaret gained zero awards traction and became an urban legend. Margaret eventually got a release in Australia in 2012, but as film critic Phillipa Hawker noted: “there was always the possibility that it would pass into legend as a lost movie acclaimed as a masterpiece by those few who were able to see it.”

Recent films that became M.I.A after little awards attention include Stronger, Roman J. Israel Esq. and Wonderstruck.

Ye Have Little Faith

Sometimes studios and distributors have zero faith in a film despite paying millions to get it made.

Earlier this year Paramount sold the international rights to Annihilation to Netflix after they weren’t happy with the film after giving the director full creative control. Annihilation got the cinema treatment in America, Canada and China in February where it bombed at the box office, and then found its way to Australia via Netflix in March.

Annihilation is worth seeing despite the drama but it hints at the unsteady nature of film releases that aren’t blockbusters. Even something like Annihilation, which had everything going for it — a director with a good track record, Natalie Portman, based on a popular book series — got shafted.

There’s a worrying trend of adult-orientated films slowly evaporating or finding homes elsewhere.

It Is The Film Business, Not The Friend Business

If none of the reasons tabled apply, the reason for a film’s delay may be petty old competition.

Distributors can shuffle release dates to give their films the best chance of finding an audience. Sometimes films are moved because they don’t want to compete with whatever Marvel is doing. Smaller films can get released on the same day as a blockbuster in hopes of finding a crowd who doesn’t want to see The Rock punching a skyscraper.

A delay can be a business decision and distributors are working harder than ever to not just compete with each other, they’re also up against the rising cost of going to the cinema, poor customer service and streaming options that give you the best excuse to stay at home.

Most of the time the films that get delayed are worth the wait — but sometimes it feels like the entertainment industry in Australia is making the same mistakes the music industry did in the late 90s when Napster arrived.

Give people what they want when they want it, a simple concept muddied by outdated distribution models and publicity playbooks while millions of dollars are thrown at lobbying the government to censor the internet.

Film delays will remain a fact of life in Australia until something changes — but until it does, your best mate will be a well-marked calendar. Best to get an erasable one for all those amendments.

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Cameron Williams is a writer and film critic based in Melbourne who occasionally blabs about movies on ABC radio. He has a slight Twitter addiction: @MrCamW.