For years, Canadian cinephiles had become so accustomed to seeing the prize for the top-grossing domestic film go to a French-language movie from Quebec that it almost became pointless to call it the Golden Reel Award. Inevitably, the winner picked up a Bobine d'Or.
Not this year. Paul Gross's First World War epic Passchendaele is set to take home the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television's Golden Reel at the Genies in April, marking only the third time in the past 11 years a French-language Quebec feature has not run away with the prize.
But Passchendaele's modest domestic box-office take of about $4.4-million is less a sign of a new appetite for English-Canadian film than an uncharacteristic year of flops in Quebec cinema.
The much vaunted Québécois movie machine sputtered in 2008. Local films designed to give Hollywood blockbusters a run for their money failed to connect with audiences.
Top-grossing Cruising Bar 2, a summer comedy sequel starring bankable Quebec star Michel Côté, took in only $3.5-million. Distributor Alliance Vivafilm, which spent megabucks to promote the film, had banked on a box-office take of at least twice that much.
For the better part of the past decade, Alliance seemed to have found the key to Quebeckers' movie-going hearts with alternately mushy and merry releases – from 2002's Séraphin to 2006's Bon Cop, Bad Cop. But in 2008, neither Alliance nor its competitors captured the imagination of Quebec moviegoers. It has been a psychological as much as financial blow.
To be sure, the energetic “Quebec new wave” of filmmakers delivered a string of gems in 2008, including Philippe Falardeau's highly regarded C'est pas moi, je le jure (It's Not Me, I Swear) and Benoît Pilon's Ce qu'il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life), which was shortlisted for a foreign-language Oscar nomination. But like the other critics' favourite of 2008 – the multi-Genie-nominated Tout est parfait (Everything is Fine) – those films weren't expected to have broad-based audience appeal.
Over all, homegrown francophone movies' share of the provincial box office slipped below 10 per cent in 2008 for the first time in six years. And even though that 9.3 per cent share is about 10 times the share held by domestic English-language features across Canada, it represents an almost 50 per cent decline from the Quebec industry's 2005 peak of 18.2 per cent.
The relative funk of the mainstream Quebec movie business has provoked ample debate among producers, filmmakers and distributors in the province about how to get their groove back. As much as they all insist that a 10-per-cent market share is still a highly enviable performance in a world dominated by Hollywood products, no one denies it's a disappointment.
“It's been a bit of a wake-up call for a lot of people,” says Patrick Roy, chief executive officer of Alliance Vivafilm, the Quebec arm of Alliance Films. (The latter moved its head office to Montreal from Toronto last year after the provincially owned Société générale de financement acquired a 51-per-cent voting stake in the distributor.) At a 10-per-cent market share, Roy says, the Quebec industry remains in a “comfort zone” that can still yield profits for distributors. The latter typically buy the rights to films from producers in exchange for about half of the box-office receipts. But to be profitable, the megabucks marketing that accompanied some Quebec releases in the past probably needs to be scaled down.
“Certain distributors have voluntarily reduced their marketing budgets. There was a kind of overkill before,” notes Simon Beaudry, president of Montreal-based Cinéac, a consulting firm that compiles data on the Quebec film industry. The previous marketing mania, Beaudry adds, contributed to the 2008 collapse of Christal Films, whose Les trois p'tits cochons nevertheless won the Golden Reel for 2007.
