Heritage plans to gauge non-theatre distribution in both French and English

It’s an idea that’s been around since the turn of the millennium, but the Department of Canadian Heritage is now starting to get serious about finding ways to capture viewership numbers for Canadian films exhibited to audiences outside of movie theatres. "Everybody agreed then, and everybody agrees now, it’s a good idea," says Marc Séguin, VP of feature film and new technology at the Canadian Film and Television Production Association. Last month, Heritage released its response to a report from Parliament’s Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage which outlined proposed changes to the 2000 Canada Feature Film Policy to fine-tune it and bring it up to date with the current environment. In the Heritage response, it agreed with the committee that distribution of filmed entertainment – like other media – had fragmented to encompass not just theatrical releases but broadcast television through pay, pay-per-view and specialty services, DVD sales and rentals and, increasingly, downloads over the Internet. "It’s something that’s going to take some work to define adequately, that’s for sure," agrees Douglas Chow, deputy director of strategic communications at Telefilm Canada, the Crown corporation and funding agency set up to foster audio-visual production. He notes that as is the case with television, the film industry is very much cognizant of the realities of the multi-platform digital era. "Taking that into account…Telefilm is looking at re-examining its definition of box office, not just ticket sales at theatres," he says. But many pay, pay-per-view and specialty broadcasters already have a system in place for trapping viewership figures for Canadian movies. "At this point I don’t know if we’d need to pull anything incremental, because that information is already there," says Michelle Marion, director of original production at Astral Media Inc.’s Astral Television Networks division. She notes that all broadcasting licensees submit Canadian programming figures to the Canadian Television Fund, which compiles the information in its database, a process put into place in 2003-2004. "They can track it on a title-by-title basis," she adds. When its licence was last renewed in 2001, Astral’s The Movie Network was mandated to spend a minimum of $9.1 million on "script and concept development." In addition to contributions from The Movie Network and Super Écran, there’s also Astral’s two production funds operating in both official languages: the Harold Greenberg Fund, which provides capital for English-language productions, and the Fonds Harold Greenberg for francophone films. As a result, it’s possible for Astral to invest in a film production three different ways, as was the case with recent films such as Beowulf and Grendel, which received equity investment and pre-buy money from The Movie Network and Super Écran as well as script development and equity investment by the Harold Greenberg Fund, and C.R.A.Z.Y., which garnered equity investment and pre-buy by Super Écran and The Movie Network and equity investment from the Fonds Harold Greenberg. Interestingly, it’s only recently that a system for capturing box-office receipts has been put into place in Canada. Séguin, a former Heritage policy manager, was one of the architects of the 2000 Canadian Feature Film Policy and helped implement a national theatrical audience reporting system that came online in 2001. Previously, Canada’s film policy makers had used distributor data, which didn’t break the markets down by language, so English- versus French-language audiences were, at best, rough estimates. "We knew for years that there was a big difference between French and English television," he says, but only after two years’ worth of box office data became available did Heritage and Telefilm realize the magnitude of the gulf between cinema in both of Canada’s official languages. And true to the old notion of the "two solititudes," the Francophone film market – mostly contained within Quebec – has managed to tap into a wellspring of support that has thus far eluded English-Canadian filmmakers. In Telefilm’s 2005-2006 annual report released on October 18, the funding agency noted that all Canadian films garnered a 5.3% audience share in Canada, besting its target of 5% set at the beginning of the period. But those figures disproportionately reflect the successes of French-language filmmakers, who accounted for 26.6% of theatrical viewing in the Francophone market, up from 21.2% in 2004. English-language Canadian film actually lost market share, falling to 1.1% from 1.6% last year. But despite the disparities between production in both official languages, there’s optimism that Canada’s film industry is ascendant, even going by theatre receipts alone. "I know it doesn’t translate into market share exactly, certainly in 2006 we are more solid, and more Canadians are seeing Canadian films than five years ago," says Séguin.

Heritage plans to gauge non-theatre distribution in both French and English

News | 10/24/2006 4:00 am EDT

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