What are the latest figures for Headhunters and how does that compare to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that you released in the UK?
Headhunters is just under £1.2m. I think we'll end up with £1.3m-£1.4m. We opened with just over 100 screens and we're still playing on 86 screens after three weeks. The film has been doing really well and we're very pleased. It's the highest grossing foreign language film so far in the UK this year. As a comparison, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had grossed £1.3m after two weeks but played in more cinemas than Headhunters. The first Millennium film ended up grossing £3.2m, which was a huge number for a foreign language film. We also sold 1.1m units of DVDs in the UK, which was amazing.
Stig Larsson's Millennium trilogy was a literary phenomenon but was Jo Nesbø's book Headhunters also a best seller in the UK when you acquired rights for the film?
No the book wasn't published in the UK when we bought the film. The main reason why we bought it was twofold. First it was because of our connections with the production house Yellow Bird. When we were working closely on the Millennium trilogy they said we should pay attention to Headhunters. Then we saw the promo in Berlin 2011 and loved it.
The book was eventually published by Random House UK as a tie-in with Headhunters' cinema release, what other elements helped you attract UK cinemagoers?
The reviews were pretty good with 4 out of 5 stars across the board. The first screening of the film was at the London Film Festival in November. Morten Tyldum and some of the cast came for the Q&A. People got excited about the film. Then we released it April 6, which was also pretty much the same date as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. We based our hopes on the quality of the film itself.
What kind of advertising and marketing campaign did you do?
With foreign language films like the Millennium trilogy, Troll Hunter (released by Momentum last September) or Headhunters, we tend to do a lot of press advertising in the up market media, plus targeted TV buys, internet campaigns, and lots of editorial press, using the talent. Here the author Jo Nesbø did quite a few interviews. There is definitely a lot of interest from the UK press because of the success of the Millennium trilogy, and the TV series The Killing, and Borgen on the BBC.
There is obviously more competition in the UK for Nordic titles with a cross over potential. Does that mean you try to track them much earlier?
We have a great relationship with the producers of the Scandinavian films that we've acquired and we hope that Scandinavian producers will want to work with us because they know what we can do for their films. We cultivate those relationships, travel quite a bit across Scandinavia and cover the local festivals.
Your Canadian mother group Alliance has other international distribution branches. Do you try to acquire rights for all territories combined?
We buy for Canada (Alliance), the UK (Momentum) and Spain (Aurum). Those Nordic films are not necessarily easy to release in Canada. A lot depends on what happens in the US. In Spain, our division Aurum is more specialized on US movies but we regret to have missed out on The Millennium trilogy that did really well at the Spanish box office. Recently we have bought for Spain Lasse Hallsström's The Hypnotist but we didn't get rights for the UK because one of our competitors was more aggressive.
Do you have other Nordic films set to open?
No we have nothing in the pipeline after The Hypnotist (or Spain). We'll see in Cannes what's out there. We are also looking at Nordic TV series because we missed out on The Killing and Borgen. We would acquire DVD and even TV rights. We'd love to do more with Scandinavia.
How do you think the success of Nordic films in the UK could be sustained and widened?
The problem in the UK is that you can't dub films, and at the same time there is a cap on what we can expect from theatrical revenues with foreign language films. It's getting better because with the success of The Killing, UK audiences have seen that subtitling doesn't prevent them from enjoying a good show. But you have to be really careful when you market a film. If you push too much on the foreign language aspect it can be detrimental to the BO. If people know it's subtitled they might not want to come, but once they are in the cinemas and realize the film is subtitled, they don't mind as long as the movie is good. It's a very fine line.
Still, I don't know if it's possible to expand the BO for foreign language films beyond £2.5-£3m in the UK. A decade ago Crouching Tigers and Heroes managed to break the mold a bit by reaching £10m and the French film Amelie did £6m but at the time UGC was also an exhibitor and was more aggressive in their diversity of films. Today, you do get the support from UK exhibitors but it's more limited. The key is to develop an audience that doesn't mind subtitling. European films these days are more innovative and original than US films so hopefully UK audiences will continue to look for those European/Nordic quality films...even with subtitles.