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Screenwriter

Donald Clarke

Whingeing about cinema and real life since 2009

Box Office Figures

How easy was it to guess the biggest films of 2011?

I know I am a bit late on this, but I recently remembered that, back in December 2010, I made an attempt to predict the most successful films of the looming year. I could have done better. But it is …

The Hunger Games breaks the franchise drought.

As I noted in my review for the nifty The Hunger Games, all Hollywood — not just the film’s backers at Lionsgate — were keenly hoping that the adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s hit novel would eat the box office alive. …

The strange story of the Jack and Jill press show.

Here’s an odd one. Every now and then, some distributor will fail to screen a film for the press in this territory. More often than not the movie will be shown to our cousins across the Irish Sea. A good …

The Artist is a silent film? You’re kidding me!

Here’s one of those delightful non-stories. The sensationalist version of the headline goes like this: PUNTERS DEMAND REFUNDS AFTER DISCOVERING THE ARTIST IS SILENT FILM. A more accurate translation of the facts would run: A FEW PUNTERS IN ONE CINEMA …

The strange business of Hollywood and its seasons

When knocking up the Autumn movie preview for tomorrow’s Ticket, I was again struck by the way Hollywood stubbornly insists on thinking in seasons. That is to say a certain time of the year is regarded as suitable for a …

The Guard is a smash (and those Fleadh results in full)

This weeks’s box-office news brings interesting tidings.  Both The Guard and The Tree of Life have gone bananas. To deal with the Irish beast first, John Michael McDonagh’s film hoovered up in excess of half a million euro at the …

How do you make a hit documentary?

Make it about cars. That’s how. Thank you and good night. The market for documentaries has fluctuated wildly over the last decade. All the computer screens went green in 2004 when Michael Moore’s entertaining, wildly unreliable Fahrenheit 9/11 took the …

Why do the Irish like comedies?

It looks as if The Hangover Part II and Kung Fu Panda 2 might have — in financial terms, at least — saved the year for cinema. Despite being little more than a pallid relocation of the first film to …