Not Suitable For Children opens modestly at box office
Not Suitable for Children, distributed by Icon, has taken $147,000 at the box office in its opening weekend.
The Australian film, Peter Templeman‘s feature debut starring Ryan Kwanten and Sarah Snook opened across 42 screens for a screen average of $3,497.
Templeman told Encore: “It’s a middle-sized release which I think is pretty fair. It hasn’t had a massive marketing campaign so I think its good to not spread out too wide, and see how it does. If there is good word of mouth it will grow from there.”
Templeman added: “I certainly don’t see it as an art house film. It has universal themes with a broad appeal. It seems to get good responses from all age groups. It’s marketed towards the 20s and 30-somethings so that’s a big part of the market.”
“One of the leading independent distributors of filmed entertainment in Australia.” That’s taken directly from Icon’s bio on their twitter feed. The same twitter feed that didn’t post a single thing about this film over its opening weekend (3,900 potential ticket buyers).
Their Facebook page (9,500 potential ticket buyers) featured links to positive reviews on Thursday but nothing after – spending the rest of the weekend posting about OTHER films which aren’t out yet. These are free platforms. It’s not rocket science. No effort was made whatsoever. Then you can go into the rest of the issues (16 screens for a mainstream comedy?) and hopefully someone else has figures on print and outdoor (I saw one poster plastered to the side of an abandoned building in the Sydney CBD).
And this will not be the last Australian film to die a pointless death this year. The ‘good word of mouth’ approach fails dozens of times per year. This is all measurable and has precedence.
And the worst thing? Unlike the majority of Australian features, this film was marketable, mainstream, made by creative people with talent. And it was still messed up.
Australia doesn’t have a film industry. It has a hobby group.
Well said Elliot!
I agree- I hadn’t heard of it before a friend raved about it. I loved it!
Woah! I thought it would do much better than that. It is very marketable, but they stuffed it up. AND if you didn’t know much about it, the title “Not Suitable For Children” is a turn off for the patrons deciding which film to watch on the night.
Fantastic point Elliot.
From what I understand a lot of these distributors are doing a lot with very little in terms of staff/resources. Interesting to note the article published today on this site re: film distributors lack of social media nous.
Kade
Not Suitable For Children? Any Questions for Ben? Can we spend more money and creativity in getting better titles for our films., please! The title itself has to be marketable as well.
The marketing campaign was also confusing: “it’s a rom-com/it’s not a rom-com”.
Fold-out lobby cards are pretty shmick but this film had no discernible online presence until only a few weeks ago.
Somebody give Enzo Tedeschi a call.
And whose bright idea was it to bury the release between two tent-pole franchises (Batman and Spiderman) and a movie with Seth MacFarlane’s massive in-built audience?
Cue the usual “local audiences don’t support Australian films” nonsense…