Early Winter director, Michael Rowe, the Australian-born filmmaker talks about what he sees as the problems with the Australian film industry: “I’ve watched creative workshops there for directors and writers that are terrifying.”

“At 23-years-old, I felt that Australia was a bit boring and a bit staid and set in its ways,” writer/director, Michael Rowe tells FilmInk. “The dizzying heights of cultural creation were a little bit far away and a little bit unreachable. There are certain cultural sacred cows that are highly valued. They’re up high like gods. And as a 23-year-old, I felt it impossible to aspire to. I feel like the cinematic world is way too dominated by people who have nothing to do with the creative processes.”

It was partly that sense of disconnection that drove Michael Rowe on what has been a continuing journey around the world, and continuing separation from his home country. Born in Ballarat, Michael Rowe now lives in Mexico, which is where he made his first big splash with the shot-in-Mexico, Spanish-language 2010 drama, Leap Year, which won the coveted Golden Camera Award at The Cannes Film Festival. Still to make a film on Aussie soil, Rowe’s latest film is the controlled, finely nuanced Early Winter, an Australian/Canadian co-production about a seemingly typical marriage in Quebec that is slowly coming apart at the seams.

Tellingly, Rowe has embraced outside filmmaking communities, while maintaining a more distant one with Australia. “I’ve watched creative workshops there for directors and writers that are terrifying,” he continues about Australia’s filmmaking scene.

“They give them all these workshops about funding bodies, about distribution, and about how to reach and appeal to certain audiences. So you get all these poor bloody kids who are in their twenties or thirties, with all this shit in front of them, and they’re trying to make a film. You can’t start out with that. You can’t have the cart before the horse. If you’re thinking about audiences, and worse than that, producers, and worse than that, distributors, and worse than that, funding bodies…,” his voice trails off.

“If you’re thinking about pleasing these people before you’re thinking about what kind of story you want to tell, then it’s destined to failure and absolute mediocrity.

There’s a saying, ‘A camel is a horse designed by a committee.’ And that’s what happens when you have funding bodies and distributors in the mix. It’s not their fault, but they know nothing about creative processes. They do their best to give helpful advice, but since they don’t know how it works, they get it all wrong. And the poor creators are beaten over the head with ideas that are completely irrelevant, and it makes it a very difficult environment for creating. I feel very sorry for them, and this vision needs to change.”

Michael Rowe, however, doesn’t want to just stand by and watch it continue.

“Whatever I have in terms merit and achievement, I hope that I can help change things at least a little bit,” he says. “There’s a massive amount of talent in Australia, and it’s usually hamstrung by the fear of funding bodies and distributors, and this ridiculous idea that somebody is going to be able to make a film that is going to make everybody rich. You’ve got 20 million people, and you’re not going to make any film that’s going to make anyone rich even if everyone in the country sees it. Stop it! Make a film that’s about something honest. Animal Kingdom, for instance, is an honest film. It’s a good film. And I know that there’s a lot of David Michod in that film; his suffering, his struggles, it’s all there. It’d be very difficult for anyone else to have made that film. And that’s why it resonates, because it’s true. You cannot hide honesty on screen. If you’ve got the balls to put it out there, it’ll work. Even if you have to dress it up as a film about bank robbers. The other thing is the politically correct police. Let’s make a film about indigenous transsexual lesbians because that’s going to get funding. That’s not the way either. You can’t be thinking about funding, you can’t be thinking about distribution, and above all, box office, when you’re creating something. It’s going to turn out bad.”

And what about Michael Rowe’s relationship with the funding bodies? Can he see himself working with them in order to shoot a film in the country where he was born? “Early Winter is an Australian co-production, and I have got an upcoming project in Australia that I’m working on for 2018,” the director replies. “I am interested in working in Australia. I think that the Australian funding bodies will have no problems in letting me work on my terms and my kind of film. I have a track record now with a couple of decent prizes that will allow them to justify that. I am enthused about that.”

FilmInk Presents will be hosting a series of Q&A screenings of Early Winter with Michael Rowe, taking in The Nova Carlton in Melbourne (October 4), Dendy in Canberra (October 5), New Farm Cinemas in Brisbane (October 7), Dendy Newtown in Sydney (October 9), and The Regent Cinema in Ballarat (October 10), which is where Michael Rowe was born. The film will then be released in cinemas nationally on October 13.

For further information on screenings, head to FilmInk Presents:

https://filmink.com.au/2016/early-winter/

Read the first and second parts of the FILMINK interview with Michael Rowe:

https://filmink.com.au/2016/michael-rowe-an-expat-returns-with-early-winter/

https://filmink.com.au/2016/early-winter-director-michael-rowe-the-internationalist/

By Dov Kornits FILMINK September 27, 2016

Momentum Pictures has taken U.S. rights to family entertainment movie “Oddball,” which is being sold at the Toronto Film Festival by Global Screen. The final Australian theatrical box office for Oddball hit $11 million in December 2015 <from a $7 million budget> and went on to be the top-grossing Australian Family Film of 2015 for distributor Village Roadshow.

The film has also been acquired by Snap for free-TV, pay-TV and VOD rights in Latin America, Trade Media for France, Just4Kids for Benelux, Lusomundo for Portugal, Champ Lis for China, and Suraya for Malaysia.

Previously announced deals include sales to Icon for U.K. and Ireland, Mongrel Media for Canada, Microcinema for Italy, Kino Swiat for Poland, Gulf Film for Middle East, Fivia for Ex-Yugoslavia, Albania and Slovenia, Medyavizyon for Cyprus and Turkey, Star Films for Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia (theatrical rights), and Globo for Brazil (TV and VOD rights).

“Oddball” stars up-and-coming Australian star Shane Jacobson (“Kenny”), Sarah Snook (“The Dressmaker,” “Steve Jobs,” “Predestination”) and Alan Tudyk (“Frozen,” “I, Robot”) in the lead roles, and tells the true story of an eccentric chicken farmer who, with the help of his granddaughter, trains his mischievous dog Oddball to protect a penguin sanctuary from fox attacks, while also trying to reunite his family and save their seaside town.

The film opened TIFF Kids Film Festival in April, and has screened at more than 40 film festivals.

“Our buyers simply cannot keep from the irresistible charm of ‘Oddball,’ clearly demonstrated by the ever-growing momentum of sales on the film,” Julia Weber, head of theatrical, said in a statement.

“Oddball” is produced by WTFN/The Film Company, Practical Pictures and Kmunications, in co-production with Screen Australia and Fox International Channels, in association with Film Victoria.

Leo Barraclough – Variety + Wikipedia – September 12, 2016

Made on a measly $11,000, Joseph Sims-Dennett’s twitchy psychological thriller is poised on a knife edge between excellence and a cabin-fever B movie – 3 / 5 stars

For 11 days in January 2013, director Joseph Sims-Dennett holed up in an apartment in Rozelle, Sydney and spent $11,000 making his second feature film – roughly the same cost as the duck canapés and gougères served at a Hollywood premiere. Two years later he emerges with Observance: a twitchy, icky, genuinely unsettling psychological thriller about a private investigator who takes on what appears to be a simple, well-paying job.

Observance stars Lindsay Farris as the private investigator, Parker.

From a derelict apartment across the street, all Parker (Lindsay Farris) is employed to do is spy on a woman and report daily updates over the phone to his employer (voiced by Brendan Cowell). Things aren’t as they seem, as these things often go, and Parker – traumatised by the recent death of his young son – spirals into confusion, delusion and possibly madness.

Why is he paid to watch this woman (played by Stephanie King) and who is he working for? When a man on the street mumbles something about her being “a sacrifice” it feels like the film is about to get Wicker Man-style weird. Instead, Sims-Dennett gravitates towards things-that-go-bump-in-the-night style inclinations, largely swapping out plot-based mysteries for spooks part-and-parcel with scary sound effects and gnarly images.

Think body horror and surprise discoveries made during his surveillance, such as an ominous-looking silhouette captured in a photograph and a ghostly voice found on an audio file. Opening images of a beach and coastal rocks are clearly, in some way, important to the riddle of what exactly is happening and why.

The actors speak in American accents, making it clear which market Sims-Dennett was hedging his bets on. Even John Jarratt, a fair dinkum actor if ever there bloody well was one, talks like a yank, arriving to hand over documents to Parker in a car during the dead of night, cloak-and-dagger style.

The director’s gambit appears to have worked. Observance premiered last July at Canada’s Fantasia film festival, where it was greeted enthusiastically. Off the back of a review published in the Hollywood Reporter, Sims-Dennett was contacted by The Weinstein Company and flew to LA to meet representatives.

Observance continues a pattern of Australian films that from the get-go have found more success abroad than at home, including last year’s conversation starter The Suicide Theory (incredibly, the better part of a year later, it is still not available in its home country). The director doesn’t so much extrapolate bang for the buck as an atomic bomb for the buck, or whatever expression reiterates the point that his film sure as hell looks the part.

The atmosphere is largely comprised of small details: lots of close-ups and mid-shots, tied together with an unnerving sense of show and (don’t) tell, as if in most scenes something terrible is bobbing just off frame.

The cinematography of Rodrigo Vidal-Dawson (who was a camera operator on 1998’s Bride of Chucky) is textured with eerie colour-sapped grading. Scenes are tinted in unhealthy-looking shades of green and blue, as if the film is slowly making itself sick.

Sound editors rarely get a guernsey in film reviews, so take a bow David Gaylard and David Williams; their work here is terrific (observe how they mesh together the sounds of the sea with the sound of a train).

There are hints of Roman Polanski’s early films, particularly Repulsion, which was largely based inside an apartment, and Cul-De-Sac, which like Observance features surreal visions of a shoreline – also, when Parker sneaks into “Subject 1’s” apartment in a particularly tense moment, Christopher Nolan’s first feature film, Following.

Sims-Dennett eventually loosens the throat-choking tie grip established in the first half and the film takes on a throbbing intensity, not entirely in a good way. The director indulges in obscene, conventional horror images that feel like shorthand for shock rather than earned scares or suspense. Blood oozing out of a person’s mouth is an easy way to disturb viewers, but feels particularly gratuitous in a film that works studiously hard to get its tone and mood right and – for a while – avoids cheap tricks.

Some of the discipline that defines its early moments is lost when the crunch time comes to start coughing up revelations, or at least hinting at what on earth is happening across the street and in the protagonist’s mind. With a story that gravitates towards cryptic resolutions and an aesthetic that also grows increasingly hallucinogenic, you get a protagonist, a plot and a visual makeup that all feel in danger of spiralling out of control.

In this way Observance feels poised on a knife edge, on some occasions tinkering on the precipice of excellence and on others feeling at risk of slipping into a cabin fever B movie. Somehow Sims-Dennett and his peculiar thriller stand their ground.

Whatever you make of the film’s oblique thinking-person’s ending, and whether or not it cuts the mustard from a storytelling point-of-view, Observance is undoubtedly an impressive achievement.

Luke Buckmaster – The Guardian – Tuesday 5 April 2016

Watch the Observance trailer here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_S6XKT6DyY

An investigative report from Film Industry Analyst Stephen Follows and Founder of The Numbers Bruce Nash

Breakout indie hits may be some of the most romantic stories in the movie business.

The plucky lone film-maker battles the odds to make their dream film, putting naysayers in their place when it becomes a box office sensation, bringing them fame and fortune beyond their wildest dreams…

But are breakout hits random events that no-one can plan for or do they share some kind of DNA that can teach us how to make successful independent films, and also what genres or techniques to avoid?

To answer these questions, we began with a list of over 3,000 films from The Numbers’ financial database, investigating full financial details, including North American (i.e. “domestic”) and international box office, video sales and rentals, TV and ancillary revenue. We narrowed our focus to study feature films released between 2000 and 2015, budgeted between $500k and $3 million, which generated at least $10 million in Producer’s Net Profit, using a standard distribution model where the distributor charges a 30% fee.

This produced a list of 63 films in total: roughly four films a year over the 15 years under consideration. Almost all of the movies will be familiar to followers of independent film, from small films that became Oscar hopefuls, like Beasts of the Southern Wild and Winter’s Bone to horror movies like Insidious and The Purge that got picked up by the major studios and became box office sensations. With the list in hand, we looked for common themes and found (with a small number of exceptions) that the breakout hits broke down naturally into four types.

Model One: Extreme, Clear-Concept Horror Films

It will come as no surprise to most producers that horror films feature prominently on the list of top low-budget breakout successes.

 Most Profitable Films: Insidious, Monsters, The Devil Inside, Paranormal Activity 2, Dead Snow.

 MPAA Rating: 82% are rated ‘R’, 12% PG-13 and 6% not rated.

 Running Time: Relatively short, with an average of 94 minutes and no film ran over two hours.

 Critical Reviews: Average to poor. Highest rated film in this category is Buried, which has a Metascore of just 65 out of 100. The average Metascore across the dataset was just 49 out of 100.

 Audience Reviews: More supportive than the critics, but still not above average for most films, at an average of 6.2 out of 10 on IMDb.

 Release Patterns: Two very distinct release patterns – half played in fewer than around 100 theatres while the other half played in over 1,500 theatres.

 Income Streams: 30% from theatrical, 64% from home video and 6% from TV and other ancillary income.

 Income Location: 46% of income was from the US & Canada and 54% international.

Model Two: Documentaries with Built-In Audiences and/or Powerful Stories

The second group of films that stood out were documentaries.

 Most Profitable Films: Exit Through the Gift Shop, An Inconvenient Truth, Marley, Tyson, Bowling for Columbine.

 MPAA Rating: A healthy spread across all ratings, with the most common being PG-13.

 Running Time: Average of 102, although a wide range from 80 minutes up to 144 minutes.

 Critical Reviews: Very high, with a Metascore average of 79 out of 100.

 Audience Reviews: Very high, an average IMDb rating of 7.8 out of 10.

 Release Pattern: Small number of theatres, with most playing in under 250 theatres and the widest release being An Inconvenient Truth in 587 theatres.

 Income Streams: 75% of income comes from home video, 18% theatrical and 7% via other sources.

 Income Location: 58% international and 42% domestic.

Critical reviews seem vital for this type of film to break out and it’s interesting to note that the documentaries with the lowest scoring critical ratings (The September Issue at 69 and Religulous at 56) each had strong inbuilt audiences (‘Vogue / fashion’ and ‘Bill Maher / religious scepticism’).

In fact, only a handful of the documentaries on the list don’t have an obvious audience: Man on Wire, Anvil: The Story of Anvil, and Searching for Sugar Man are the only ones that needed to find a crowd. The others were either about someone already very famous (Marley, Tyson, Senna, Amy… note the one-name titles!) or played very directly to a receptive audience (Inside Job, Blackfish, An Inconvenient Truth etc).

Model Three: Validating, Feel-Good Religious Films

Speaking of receptive audiences, the third group of films we found were faith-based films.

 Most Profitable Films: Fireproof, God’s Not Dead, To Save a Life, War Room, Courageous.

 MPAA Rating: Two-thirds were rated PG and the remaining third were PG-13.

 Running Time: Fairly long, all were over 110 minutes and the average was two hours.

 Critical Reviews: Incredibly poor, with an average Metascore of just 26 out of 100.

 Audience Reviews: Similar to the horror pool, with an average IMDb rating of 6.3 out of 10.

 Type of Release: An average of 1,273 theatres with the widest being War Room at 1,945 theatres.

 Income Streams: 60% from home video, 31% from theatrical and 9% from television and other ancillary streams.

 Income Location: 90% of income came from North American sources with just 10% coming from outside the US and Canada.

Two things stand out with these films. First, they make virtually all of their money in the United States. Second, they get very bad reviews from mainstream movie reviewers. The strength of these movies isn’t necessarily their quality so much as the message; they deliver to an audience that is interested in what they have to say.

Model Four: Very High Quality Dramas

At the other end of the spectrum, at least in the eyes of professional film reviewers, come very high quality dramas. Almost half of these films were American productions, with the rest coming from a wide variety of countries including Germany, Argentina, Mexico, the UK, France and Poland.

 Most Profitable US Dramas: Half Nelson, Waitress, Blue Valentine, Fruitvale Station.

 Most Profitable Foreign Dramas: The Lives of Others, The Motorcycle Diaries, Amores Perros, Sin Nombre.

 MPAA Rating: The vast majority are R-rated, with just a third being rated PG-13.

 Running Time: A wide range, from 81 minutes up to 154 minutes long.

 Critical Reviews: Extremely high, with an average Metascore of 81 out of 100.

 Audience Reviews: Similarly high, with an average IMDb rating of 7.5 out of 10.

 Type of Release: Small release, with all but four playing to fewer than 300 theatres.

 Income Streams: 67% from home video, 27% from theatrical and 6% from other sources.

 Income Location: 66% of income for US dramas came from the US and Canada, whereas the reverse was true with non-US dramas, with 64% of income coming from international sources.

The lowest rated film in this category received a Metascore of 68 out of 100, which was higher than all of the films within the Horror breakout success category.

A common thread among these films is awards attention. While they might not be big enough to win a lot of main-category Oscars, these are the films that have picked up a bunch of Independent Spirit Awards, Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, and got some screenwriting and/or acting Oscar nominations.

Do the Films Have to be Any Good?

An interesting finding from this research is that the quality of the film is only relevant for certain types of films.

Religious films received extremely low ratings from critics but had mixed ratings from audiences.

 Horror films showed a range: some were disliked by both audiences and critics (such as The Devil Inside), while others had middling support from both camps (such as Monsters) and then there were films which audiences enjoyed but critics were lukewarm towards (such as Dead Man’s Shoes).

 Documentaries and Dramas were all popular with audiences and the vast majority also received extremely high ratings from critics.

If we plot this on a graph, we can see just how distinct these three sub-categories are:

http://americanfilmmarket.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/AFM-indie-breakout-chart-03-2.jpg

What’s Missing?

Many of the films in the list come as no surprise, but what’s interesting is what’s missing from the list. We found…

 Virtually no comedies (Waiting… is the only out-and-out comedy on the list, and it was made at the peak of the DVD sales boom)

 No action movies

 No thrillers

 No musicals

 Virtually nothing directed at kids — Dr. Dolittle 3 was the only family movie that made our list — although we believe some animated franchises such as Barbie are very profitable but their budgets aren’t quite in our range.

Aside from the missing genres, the other notable absence is any major star involvement. Of course, this is largely a function of the budget—it’s hard to get Tom Cruise for a $3 million film—but it’s remarkable that none of these films attracted anybody who would even be called a B-list star at the time the film was made.

Lessons for Filmmakers and Producers from this Research

So we think there are a few lessons for independent film-makers who are hoping to make breakout hits:

 Some “niche” audiences are large enough to make for a very profitable market, if you can reach them. The “faith-based” film audience stands out, but there are also receptive audiences for certain types of documentaries. Having a very clear idea of your audience is the first step to making a financially successful film.

 If you’re aiming for a more general audience, quality matters. A lot. Honing your screenplay to what you think is perfection and then having it ripped apart at a workshop may be hard work, but it’s almost certainly what it takes to get a dramatic film to ultimately work with audiences, and to make back its investment.

 Look for good actors, not big stars, and do the same with all of the technical crew on a film. Fun fact: Affonso Goncalves, who edited list member Beasts of the Southern Wild also edited fellow list member Winter’s Bone and 2016 Oscar nominee Carol. Finding a good editor, cinematographer, production designer and other key members of the crew is more important for a low-budget film than blowing a big chunk of your budget on a famous (or, just as likely, previously-famous) actor or actress.

The Full List of Films

This analysis looked at feature films released between 2000 and 2015 budgeted between $500k and $3 million and which we estimate generated at least $10 million in Producer’s Net Profit. The films which fit our criteria are listed below.

RANK FILM TITLE YEAR METASCORE IMDB RATING ESTIMATED BUDGET

1 Bowling for Columbine 2002 72 8 $3,000,000

2 The Lives of Others 2006 89 8.5 $2,000,000

3 War Room 2015 26 6.2 $3,000,000

4 God’s Not Dead 2014 16 4.9 $1,150,000

5 An Inconvenient Truth” 2006 75 7.5 $1,000,000

6 Garden State 2004 67 7.6 $2,500,000

7 Insidious 2010 52 6.8 $1,500,000

8 Fireproof 2008 28 6.5 $500,000

9 Paranormal Activity 2 2010 53 5.7 $3,000,000

10 Hustle & Flow 2005 68 7.4 $2,800,000

Showing 1 to 10 of 63 entries. See the full list here:

What Types of Low-Budget Films Break Out?

Notes

 The financial figures come from a variety of sources, including people directly connected to the films, verified third-party data and computation models based on partial data and industry norms. It is possible that one or two of the individual figures are different to our predictions, though en masse we are confident of the larger picture.

 The number of theatres relates to the widest point of the film’s North American release.

About the Authors

Stephen Follows is a writer, producer and film industry analyst. In addition to film analytics, Stephen is an award-winning writer-producer and runs a production company based in Ealing Studios, London.

Bruce Nash is founder and President of Nash Information Services, LLC, the premier provider of movie industry data and research services and operator of The Numbers, a web site that provides box office and video sales tracking, and daily industry news.

July 2016 – http://americanfilmmarket.com

Anna Snoekstra must have wondered where her life was heading as she wrote her first novel while working nights at the Kino cinema in Melbourne. But even before Only Daughter is published in September, the film rights have been sold to no less than Working Title, the Universal Pictures-owned production company whose recent films include The Theory of Everything, The Danish Girl, Les Miserables and the coming Bridget Jones’s Baby. Even better, a script has been written by Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary, The Girl on the Train) with talk of Emma Stone and Julianne Moore starring, pending a director being attached.

A delighted Snoekstra, who is just 28, tells Short Cuts the film rights to the psychological thriller were sold from a single line in the Publishers Marketplace newsletter that described the novel: a 25-year-old fugitive caught shoplifting pretends to be a decade-long missing girl and moves in with her family.

“It’s about growing up in Canberra but in America they just went crazy for it,” she says. The film, The New Winter, is to be set in Arizona. Snoekstra, who studied creative writing and cinema at the University of Melbourne then screenwriting at RMIT, has also worked as a waitress, barista, nanny, film reviewer, receptionist and “cheesemonger”. She started writing Only Daughter as a script then, finding it difficult to break into film, turned it into a novel. Having sold her second and third novels, Snoekstra is also writing a script with US-based Bronte Payne that they want to shoot in Australia.

Garry Maddox – SMH – July 20 2016

The film industry faces an “increasingly dire” outlook as audiences continue to shrink in the U.S., with too many studios producing too many tentpole films, which end up cannibalizing each other’s audiences, analyst Doug Creutz reported Friday.

The Cowen and Company entertainment expert said that there is no easy solution for Hollywood studios but that a “slow-moving consolidation” is the likely end result.

In “Another Memo to Hollywood. Prediction? Pain,” Creutz says the industry’s woes are demonstrated by the fifth consecutive year in which domestic box office demand “has taken a step function lower.” The fight for remaining audiences has become increasingly fierce as “the market appears to be condensing into fewer, but bigger, hits,” as studios crank out more films in the $100 million-plus budget range.

The analyst reports that, when the video game industry faced a similar dilemma, with fewer but bigger hits, it resulted in dramatic change. Rather than a series of mergers — the preferred result — a number of big gaming companies simply went out of the business, including THQ, Midway, Acclaim, Atari and LucasArts.

A similar breakdown in the film industry would not help investors, Creutz wrote.

“We note that even the stocks of the eventual survivors of the video game shakeout didn’t do well during most of this period, until their recent spectacular out-performance,” the Cowen report says.

Creutz offers a welter of stats to back up his contraction argument: “Last year, over 25% of total box office came from just five films, well above the average of roughly 16% from 2001-14 and the prior peak of 19% in 2012.” He called this a “consistent phenomenon.”

The top grossing films each week accounted for 33% of total box office in both 2015 and 2016, almost twice the average of 18% that prevailed in 2011-13, Creutz wrote.

And No. 1 films tend to persist, he said, noting the “nigh-unexplainable” persistence of films like “American Sniper” in 2015 and “Deadpool” this year.

It’s not only the few films, but the few studios that are taking most of the spoils.

While Disney and Universal’s combined profits were up 54% year over year and, collectively, managed 70% of total industry profit, the other studios saw profits drop 40%. “We expect this type of volatility to continue due to the narrowing of the window for hit films,” at least until there is a “likely slow-moving, consolidation,” Creutz wrote.

In many other industries, the consolidation might move more quickly, Creutz contends. But the entertainment business puts weight not just on profits but on concepts like “prestige” and “star power,” Creutz wrote. He said it would make sense for Viacom to sell Paramount — a move that is reportedly under consideration — but suggested a deal might be difficult because Viacom’s exit from the movie business would be seen as “diminishing its importance and reputation in Hollywood.”

Creutz predicts tough sledding for most of the studios in 2016, though he adds: “We expect that one or two of the companies will likely outperform our generally negative view; however, we also think picking the winners at this point is a high-risk proposition.”

A summary of some of the analyst’s predictions:

DISNEY: He calls the studio “the lead dog” and sees likely “outsized hits” in “Captain America: Civil War,” “Finding Dory” and “Star Wars: Rogue One.” But even the industry leader will face stiff competition with April’s “The Jungle Book” and its July distribution of “The BFG” for DreamWorks. Despite huge performance, Creutz worries “that investors are capitalizing what in retrospect may prove to be peak studio margins at a very high multiple.”

WARNER BROTHERS: Creutz is concerned about the company’s broad slate of 18 films for 2016, though he expressed some optimism for “likely success” in a new entry in the “Harry Potter” franchise and the kickoff of a two-film-a-year series of DC Comic films, beginning this month with “Batman vs. Superman.” A drag on performance could come from mid-budgeted films like “The Nice Guys,” “Central Intelligence,” “Sully,” “Storks,” “The Accountant” and “Collateral Beauty.” If the DC films underperform, he said, “then results could be very disappointing.”

FOX: Starting the year with runaway hit “Deadpool” sits well, but the studio’s year rests largely with three big summer sequels: “X Men Apocalypse,” “Independence Day: Resurgence” and “Ice Age: Collision Course.” Cruetz concluded: “We tend to think ‘Deadpool’ was more luck than skill (plus a heavy dose of passion from Ryan Reynolds) and so we don’t necessarily expect any success this year to be sustained.”

PARAMOUNT: “We see little hope for a significant turnaround in operating performance over the longer term, and expect this year to be characterized by continued struggles.” Creutz cites “indifferent film quality,” as an issue and too many “Zoolander 2”-type films to make up for winning franchises like “Mission Impossible,” “Star Trek” and “Transformers.”

LIONSGATE: Predicts “an uphill climb” to get back to better profitability, with focus on low- to mid-budget films and some bigger swings, like the $140-million-budget “Gods of Egypt,” missing the mark. Creutz sees a “struggle,” given the competition, for upcoming sequels such as “Divergent: Allegiant” and “Now You See Me Two.”

DREAMWORKS ANIMATION: “We think that being the 4th- or 5th- or 6th-best animated studio (behind Disney Feature Animation, Pixar, Illumination, and arguably Blue Sky and/or Warner Bros.) is not a good place to be.” Creutz worries that upcoming “Trolls” (November, 2016) and “The Boss Baby” (March 2017) will tough time in midst of competition from other animation and tentpole offerings.

James Rainey – Variety – March 4, 2016