TARA BRADYon the idiosyncrasies of the arthouse box office
CAN CANNES matter at the box office?
We’re not talking about the scuzzy bazaar that is the Cannes market. (Together at last
in a Turkish comedy: Mariel Hemingway and Steve Guttenberg!) We’re not talking about the blockbusters they parachute in for red carpet photo ops. (Madagascar 3? Huh?) We’re talking about the main event: the competition.
Precedent suggests that in the grand scheme of things, a Cannes win is maybe worth about €57 and change at the box office.
Maybe. If you’re lucky.
Only three major prize winners have grossed more than $80 million to date, and one of them (Apocalypse Now) took decades and several re-releases to do so.
To be fair, the two biggest- grossing Palme d’Or winners of all time – Fahrenheit 9/11 ($222 million) and Pulp Fiction ($213 million) – could not have done the boffo trade they did without the hoopla that surrounded their Cannes premieres and gongs.
A Palme d’Or win ensured that David Lynch’s Wild at Heart ($15 million in the US) did much brisker business than the superior Blue Velvet ($8 million) managed five years previously. The same gong launched Steven Soderbergh’s career and propelled sex, lies and videotape toward a domestic take of $25 million.
In 2011, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives took $1,130,645 worldwide. The Avengers takes that amount every time you blink. But Boonmee’s business is certainly better than the money amassed by your average Apichatpong Weerasethakul picture.
But only a little: unhappily, the statistics suggest that arthouse films will do whatever arthouse films will do. When it comes to reliable arthouse brands such as the Dardenne brothers, there is very little to distinguish the total box-office scored by their Cannes winners and their non-winners.
Just look at Nanni Moretti, another carrot-cake fleapit reliable. Last year his non-Palme d’Or film We Have a Pope mustered $15,992,923, a small, in-line-with-inflation improvement on the $11,767,402 for his 2002 Palme d’Or winner The Son’s Room.
The figures are more disheartening still when you break them down. Even today, when Rest of World rules, the fact that 84 per cent of Uncle Boonmee’s business happened outside the US seems screwy. Most Cannes triumphs,
in fact, do disastrous trade in America – though still better than non-winners. Those Moretti figures look awfully different when divided by region. The Son’s Room only made 8.6 per cent of its final take in the US. And that’s way better than We Have a Pope: that made only 2.4 per cent of its money in dollars.
Where Cannes can count is down in the smaller categories, such as Director’s Fortnight and International Critics’ Week.
The Cinéfoundation, a section that focuses mostly on student films, has, since its inception in 1998, launched the careers of Jessica Hausner (Lourdes) and Asif Kapadia (Senna). And a Queer Palm win ensured that Gregg Araki’s Kaboom was released in a great many more territories than Smiley Face, his previous outing. With only $539,957 in the kitty, Kaboom is hardly as profitable as more populist Araki joints such as Mysterious Skin and The Living End. But it’s a vast improvement on Smiley Face’s $179,381.
Sadly, we’ve been unable to work out what a Palme Dog is worth. Is Uggie’s triumph the reason The Artist has $131,342,084 (and counting) in its back pocket? We’d like to think so.
