TARA BRADYon the idiosyncrasies of the Irish box-office
WHAT DO the Irish want from Irish movies? The sums can tell us what they don’t want. They don’t want heritage pictures such as Stella Days, starring visiting Hollywood dignitary Martin Sheen. The 1950s-set drama was launched at a well publicised and glittering JDiff premiere, it was anchored into prime sites and it received mostly warm notices from critics.
If a small but vocal faithful are to be believed, there’s a big gap in the market for a corrective to recent, less flattering movie representations of frock-coated priests, right? So if any film were capable of generating a wave of nostalgia for old-school Irish drama, surely it would be Stella Days, right? Nope.
True, the Irish film fared relatively better than bigger-budget rival Bel Ami over the same period – Stella managed €54,659 over two weekends compared with the Robert Pattinson movie’s measly €43,269. But the numbers don’t lie.
There’s no longer an appetite for the priest-on-bicycle flicks of yore. Our chums in Hollywood abide by the maxim that history simply doesn’t exist before the 1970s. The Irish market, too, has failed to produce a sizeable historical hit since The Wind That Shakes the Barley. It’s time, perhaps, to call time on old time.
Surely, contemporary somnambulist Irish murder- mystery The Other Side of Sleep would fare better at the ticket stalls? Sadly, even a sleek street poster campaign and a sterling performance by Antonia Campbell-Hughes could not offset the generic uncertainty attached to the picture. Rebecca Daly’s film managed just over €2,500 from three sites over the bank holiday weekend.
Where did it all go wrong? How could The Guard score so much cash last year over and above these other indigenous titles? Well, d’uh. It’s a comedy. The Irish movie punter, as we’ve observed many times, wants comedy above all other genres.
But not dark comedy. Box office stats inform us in no uncertain terms that the Irish will stay away in droves from any humour that falls under the headings “dark”, “black” or “gallows”. See A Film With Me in It and many others.
And not dramedy, either. Irish consumers had little time for
The Runway last year. In Ireland, comedy means high concept, rambunctious and sweary. And if you can hire in a Hollywood hand to show that it’s Not Just Another Irish Movie, so much the better.
But take away the cookie-cutter genre stamp and the effing and blinding, and even parachuting in an A-lister won’t help in the Irish marketplace. Anyone going to Albert Nobbs next month? Anyone?
