Coddington on Film Commission

Deborah Coddington takes aim at the Film Commission:

So far, so good, until you get down to a miserable failure, The Ferryman, into which the commission poured $6m of our money, and which we could safely guess has not been seen by one person, save those who made it and maybe their mums and aunties.

Not one theatre bought this movie. The commission says 16,000 people have seen The Ferryman, but look closely and you realise this is based on a DVD being rented 13 times and seen each time by 2.5 people (was the third person half-asleep?). …

We spent $6 million on a film that not a single theatre would show?

We know 1330 DVDs were sold, but there’s absolutely no evidence – aside from marketing director Lindsay Shelton’s back-of-the-envelope workings – they were watched by 16,000 people. Let’s be generous and presume these DVDs were sold as rentals, fetching a top price of $25 each. That’s a return of less than $10,000 on an investment of $6m.

Sounds like mroe scrutiny is needed indeed. What I’m surprised about isn’t that the Film Commission lost $6 million on a film, but that tis loss has received such scant coverage, before COddington highlighted it.