Articles

Around-the-World Roundup: Skyfall Adds Incredible $156 Million Overseas
by Ray Subers (from Box Office Mojo)

One of the many great things about the James Bond series is it makes a mockery of American websites' US-focused view of film box office stats. Unlike, say, Tintin (which a lot of sites were aware America had never heard of and so was a much harder sell in the US than the rest of the world), they know Bond; people in the US do go to see Bond films; and so they think it'll follow the pattern of a regular blockbuster... and it never, ever does.

Latest example: Skyfall has yet to take a penny in the US and it's already the seventh highest-grossing Bond film of all time worldwide.

The US market will be important to what its final total is, obviously, but... well, I was going to say "nothing like as important as with most other big films", but that's not actually that true. The top ten highest-grossers of all time (worldwide) have roughly a 34/66 average split between the US / the rest of the world; conversely, the first two Daniel Craig Bond films come out at 28.5% from the US versus 71.5% from elsewhere. Not that out of step, really, and in the Brosnan era the States accounted for a closer-to-average 35%.

I suppose the difference is Skyfall has had two whole weeks to boost that always-big international box office, which is normally lost under stories about the US gross because it comes out everywhere else first. And actually, if you look at the top ten highest grossing films of all time in the US alone, the list is quite different (only half match up), so, y'know, there's that. (Look, this is going on, you probably don't care, let's take a look at the next article.)


How do you solve a problem like Potemkin?
by Michael Brooke (from BFI)

On the issue of presenting frames with atypical frame rates on home media formats (mainly silents, but potentially a problem in the future too). That might sound dry, but for film/tech fans it's an interesting issue, and one that deserves to be more mainstream (a little bit, anyway) so that whatever replaces Blu-ray doesn't miss the same opportunity. If more and more films begin to be shot at 48fps or 60fps, perhaps the need for a solution will become more pressing, and will retroactively aid the presentation of silent films. Fingers crossed.