GFT in 2023: Our Year in Admissions
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GFT in 2023 - Our year in admissions
Our Finance/Commercial Director and man with all the stats, David Gattens, looks back on the films and admissions of the year at GFT.
I used to do something like this in each of the last few years of the 2010s. My last annual review was in 2019 (remember back then?), and was then put on the backburner for reasons that may be obvious. But now I have been asked back to impart some highs, some lows, a bit of drama and a possible sprinkling of surprises in the story of GFT in 2023. There’s even an unwelcome twist in the tale! So to those of you who are new to my annual ramblings, hello. And to those here for yet another addition, welcome back! Let’s get on with it…
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Just to illustrate how the new release slate can impact on GFT even when titles aren’t the sort of output we offer at GFT, it wasn’t until 13 January that a major new release screened at GFT, as distributors largely avoided releasing anything against the anticipated behemoth that was Avatar: The Way of Water. However, we still opened January strongly thanks to the return of 2022 big guns, The Banshees of Inisherin and Aftersun, and to our curated programme entitled 'We’re Not in Kansas Anymore' playing alongside Alexandre O. Philippe’s brilliant documentary, Lynch/Oz.
In the summer of 2022, several of us here were speculating as to what our biggest hits would be in this all-important quarter at GFT. The same two or three titles were regularly mentioned, but I don’t think anyone foresaw Tár being our biggest hit of the quarter. A monster performance at our box office, as well as by Cate Blanchett on screen, it was clearly one of our strongest word-of-mouth titles of the year given its pattern of sales. Tár is now Cate Blanchett’s biggest hit ever at GFT, easily overtaking 2013’s Blue Jasmine (yes, I was surprised that it wasn’t Carol too).
Our other top performers in January were all assisted by unique offerings at GFT — Enys Men (supported by a preview screening with director Mark Jenkin), Empire of Light (with its exclusive 35mm presentations) and All The Beauty and The Bloodshed (including a Q&A with Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras). But none of these titles could even match half of Tár’s box office here.
Also in January, we had our best performing Scorsese of the Month presentation of 2023, a sold-out Cinema 1 screening of Goodfellas with introduction by filmmaker James Price. Only Taxi Driver — screened within the GFF23 programme – came close to matching its numbers this year, with The King of Comedy (September) and The Departed (November) in a dead heat for third place. February turned out to be a little more sluggish as some expected big hitters fell short of their anticipated returns — not just at GFT but everywhere else too (I’m looking at you in particular, Fabelmans!). But thankfully the continuing run of All The Beauty and The Bloodshed, and the new release triumvirate of Women Talking, The Whale and Blue Jean did more than enough to keep our numbers ticking along.
March began with our Opening Gala in our 19th edition of Glasgow Film Festival (GFF), Adura Onashile’s debut feature, Girl. The hottest tickets were our Opening and Closing Galas – the latter being Polite Society, our Special Events (in particular, Under The Skinwith the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra), numerous titles across our FrightFest programme, and – of course – the always-popular-for-audiences, always-nerve-shredding-for-programmers Surprise Film, which this year was War Pony, the debut feature from Gina Gammell and Riley Keough. Several GFF titles also went on to claim spots in our Top 20 Box Office Chart of the year - more on them shortly. Overall attendance across all participating venues of over 33,000 represented a 25% increase on 2022.
And for the first time, we saw over 2,000 total admissions for our free retrospective season, this year entitled “In The Driving Seat”, ten films (including the likes of Roman Holiday, Bonnie and Clyde, and Thelma and Louise) introduced splendidly as always by Allan Hunter, who was hanging up his raincoat as Festival Co-Director after seventeen editions. The most popular title of the season – and indeed the most popular morning retrospective title ever to play at GFF – was Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou.
The weeks post-Festival are traditionally among the quietest at GFT, and that situation has not changed in the post-pandemic world. Thankfully, the performances of returning GFF titles Rye Lane and The Beasts were sufficient to ensure that the quarter (and our financial year) did not end on a low note.
Overall, the 56,000 total admissions at GFT we enjoyed was considerably up on the 43,000 we saw in the opening quarter of 2022 (when post-Omicron blues and actual Government restrictions impacted significantly on audience numbers, especially in January). However, this total was well down on the 65-70,000 admissions we routinely saw in the same quarter through the latter half of the 2010s. More on that to follow too.
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Our Spring quarter is always the quietest of the year. The stats tell us that this is down to one primary factor — and it isn’t weather-related. Instead, it’s down to a shortage of new titles with wide appeal being released in this window. That’s so frustrating for us, because history tells us that when distributors are brave enough to release quality titles in the Spring, then audiences will still come in their droves. Even if the sun is out. Some of our biggest hits of recent years have been Spring releases: Isle of Dogs (2018), Diego Maradona and Beats (both 2019), and our biggest-ever Spring hit of all, Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022). Dear distributor friends, do you really want me to quote that line from Field of Dreams?
Stepping off my high horse and returning to April and May, admissions ticked along in pretty much expected fashion, thanks to four of the most popular titles from GFF: God’s Creatures, Polite Society, How to Blow Up a Pipeline and The Eight Mountains(the latter proving to be the 'word-of-mouth hit' of the season, with admissions increasing the longer it played here). Meanwhile, until the final week of June, our biggest hit of the quarter was Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid, followed – in money terms – by two NT Live titles, Good (starring David Tennant) and the Encore return of Fleabag.
Beau is Afraid’s numbers would have been comfortably beaten if we had counted our most successful CineMasters season of the year as one title. That was – of course – our full, 10-title, 18-screening retrospective of the feature films of Wes Anderson, which played May through to early-July. It turned out to be one of our most popular CineMasters seasons ever, joining the ranks of Christopher Nolan (July 2022), Paul Thomas Anderson (January 2018) and David Lynch (one of our first CineMasters picks back in April/May 2017).
It was therefore fairly predictable that our biggest title of the quarter – and indeed the year to date – would end up being the one released in the final week in June: Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. Even though its claim to the year’s top spot would be ultimately shortlived, it did manage to bag a couple of records: (1) it played more times than any other new release ever at GFT – 91 screenings in total, beating the record previously held by… Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs,(2) it became Wes Anderson’s fourth entry in the all-time Box Office Top 20 at GFT, alongside The French Dispatch, Isle of Dogs and The Grand Budapest Hotel. (Just to put that into some perspective, there is only one other director with more than one title in our all-time Top 20 – Martin McDonagh.)
Total admissions of just under 30,000 for the quarter was 20% higher than the total recorded in 2022, but again well down on levels seen in the late-2010s.
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Hmmmm…. What can we highlight about our Summer quarter? Hmmmmm….
Before we address the elephants (one of them pink) in the room, I shouldn’t overlook the performances of two other titles over this period. First of all, there was Past Lives, the directorial debut from Celine Song, arguably the best reviewed film of the year. And then there was the 40th anniversary return of Gregory’s Girl which was assisted by two sold-out Cinema 1 screenings, featuring a cast Q&A and an introduction from Gregory himself, John Gordon Sinclair. We all knew how popular Bill Forsyth’s tale of adolescence in Cumbernauld was with our audience, but none of us really expected it to do quite as well as it did. It would have comfortably claimed a spot in this year’s GFT Top 20 had it been a new release — and yet, it wasn’t even our biggest re-release of 2023.
But the summer was, of course, dominated by two films and in particular by the burning question:
"Did you do the double bill?"
Remarkably, in the opening weekend alone of the phenomenon that was 'Barbenheimer', over 350 of you did just that at GFT.
That opening weekend and that opening week were our busiest recorded in GFT’s history outside of Christmas and Glasgow Film Festival. What a week then to change our box office system and website too! (Word to self: Don’t ever try that again!)
Both Oppenheimer and Barbie went on to claim places in GFT’s all-time Box Office Top 10 of new releases. However, unlike the rest of the world, it was Christopher Nolan that came out on top in the battle for Rose Street. He and his film were largely assisted by the incredible popularity of our 70mm screenings — to illustrate: around one third of our total screenings of Oppenheimer were on 70mm, and those screenings accounted for over two thirds of its total take at GFT (the mathematically-minded of you can now work out just how much more popular our 70mm presentations were). Indeed, the box office earned from the 20 70mm screenings alone was greater than the entire take from our full run of Asteroid City. That’s how huge it was.
At this point, I think it is only right to take time to acknowledge the excellent efforts of our Technical/Projection team not just for their exemplary presentation of those 70mm screenings but also for looking after the upkeep of our equipment all year round that allows us to put on such shows in the first place. Malcolm, David, Euan, Kris – thank you!
The other burning question around that time, of course, involved the best order in which to 'do the double bill'. For the record, the correct answer was first Barbie, then Oppenheimer. We were able — for the first time since our 2021 reopening — to report quarterly numbers exceeding pre-pandemic norms. Our 42,000 admissions were around 3% ahead of what we normally achieved in the late-2010s (and 27% ahead of 2022’s summer totals). And it was largely achieved thanks to just two films.
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Our biggest hit in the month of October was not the title most people were expecting to be. Despite a limited number of screenings, the 40th anniversary re-issue of 'the greatest concert film ever' Stop Making Sense blew away all the competition, as well as giving rise to a few heartstopping moments for our patient Front of House team (we didn’t want to get all Footloose on you guys, but some of you drove us close — if you were there, you might know what I mean). If we were placing it on our new release chart for the year, it would have been #5. But in the end, it had to settle for being our top re-release of the year.
Meanwhile, Killers of the Flower Moon also delivered the goods even though its length restricted us to just two screenings a day. Its numbers were however over one third down on those of Martin Scorsese’s previous (and highest-earning) release at GFT, The Irishman. Ken Loach’s latest final film, The Old Oak, slotted into third place for October, but falling well short of the returns from his previous two features, I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2019). We also screened an excellent fortnight of selections from this year’s BFI London Film Festival in October; the most popular titles were — in descending order — All of Us Strangers (returning to GFT on 26 January), Saltburn, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget and May December.
Following on from its London Film Festival opening, Emerald Fennell’s second feature, Saltburn, stood head and shoulders above all contenders in November. It possibly ranks as the most Marmite-y film of the year (I loved it, but I know others really didn’t), but it was undeniably one of our strongest word-of-mouth titles of 2023 — its second week numbers being notably up on its first week at GFT. The Palme D’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall — another excellent film — also delivered strong numbers in the month, as did David Fincher’s The Killer (but shhh, don’t let Netflix know I told you this, otherwise I’ll have to send Michael Fassbender round your way). Meanwhile, our final CineMasters season of the year (featuring 11 features from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, alongside numerous guest introductions and talks) has been captivating audiences in great numbers with their bold and passionate artistic vision.
At time of writing, December (Powell and Pressburger aside) was looking like a mixed bag – first two weeks meh, second two weeks yay!
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Across the year at GFT and GFF, we screened over 650 different titles from over 60 countries. Time and space prevented me from mentioning all of them — so apologies if I have missed out anyone’s particular favourite.
My best estimate (at time of writing) is that we will close out the year with around 180,000 admissions. That would represent a 18% increase on 2022’s total. This is genuinely fantastic news — and we cannot say thank you enough to our staff, our volunteers and our audiences (and our distributors too) for helping us get there. However, as we regularly reported in the final years of the 2010s, GFT used to consistently achieve annual totals around the 200,000 mark. So admissions at GFT are only back to 90% of pre-pandemic levels. Still, that figure is still significantly outperforming the rest of the sector in the UK — which is hovering at 75-80% of its previous norms.
Is it any wonder that many of my current presentations to staff and the Board feature a glass half-full, glass half-empty motif?
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So while we continue to perform much better than many and continue to make steady progress back to normal, pre-pandemic levels of admissions, the fact is that this only sees us get back to 2019 levels of income.
The sting is that our expenditure has continued to grow every year since the pandemic struck. While cost-saving measures have alleviated some of the pain, there is also a limit to what can be done without compromising our programme and activity. So it is presently the case that GFT is operating at a loss and having to fall back on our hard-earned reserves. While this is manageable in the short term, such a situation is unsustainable over the longer term. In response, we are actively seeking more support from our current funders.
You can also show your support here - https://www.glasgowfilm.org/donate - to ensure that GFT can continue to provide Cinema for All.
Or you can support us by buying GFT Gift Vouchers or becoming a member through the purchase of a CineCard, for you or as a gift. CineCard benefits include access to exclusive previews, free cinema tickets, a discount on standard tickets, loyalty points and much more!
Thank you to everyone who has already donated. Your support and generosity is truly appreciated.
AND FINALLY… THE SCORES ON THE DOORS
TOP FIVE RE-ISSUES OF THE YEAR
5. The Exorcist
4. Local Hero
3. Fleabag (NT Live)
2. Gregory’s Girl
1. Stop Making Sense
GFT’S TOP 20 NEW RELEASES OF 2023
20. The Fabelmans
19. Blue Jean
18. Empire of Light
17. Enys Men
16. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
15. Anatomy of a Fall
14. Polite Society
13. The Eight Mountains
12. All The Beauty and The Bloodshed
11. The Old Oak
10. The Whale
9. God’s Creatures
8. Women Talking
7. Killers of the Flower Moon
6. Past Lives
5. Tár
4. Saltburn
3. Asteroid City
2. Barbie
1. Oppenheimer
David Gattens, Finance/Commercial Director
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