Moscow rolls out the red carpet for Hollywood's finest

Published on Monday 18 July 2011 13:32

MOSCOW may not become the next Hollywood, but Tinseltown is definitely coming to Russia, where audience numbers are growing fast and United States blockbusters are gaining greater popularity over domestic films.

Recognising Russia's potential as a rapidly emerging film market, Hollywood has been flying silver-screen stars to Moscow for red-carpet events, to the delight of avid Russian fans.

Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz visited Moscow for the Russian premiere of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides in May, while the world premiere of the 3D blockbuster Transformers: The Dark of the Moon attracted 80 Hollywood names, including director Michael Bay.

"Moscow is an emerging market, it plays a very important international role," Mr Bay said before the premiere. The film made the equivalent of 14.6 million in Russia in its first week, 3.4 per cent of its global box office take so far.

Cinema-going is booming in Russia two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union put a night out at the movies out of reach for many. Cinemas made a record 620m in sales last year, on the back of 15.2 per cent audience growth.

"We're seeing a solidly positive trend, which shows that people feel comfortable. Russians are adopting the lifestyles and consumer behaviours of the developed nations," said Yevgeny Nadorshin, an economist and former government adviser.

Foreign movies became Russian favourites two years ago, when their returns first outperformed those of domestic films. Last year, US productions made almost five times as much as the Russian ones.

The latest high-profile Russian film, Tired with the Sun-2: The Citadel, heavily promoted at last year's Cannes festival by veteran actor-director Nikita Mikhalkov, flopped, earning less than 4 per cent of its 21m budget in its first two weeks.

The film was the sequel of a Second World War epic by the same director, and it was billed as the most expensive Russian film since the fall of the Soviet Union. It featured Nikita Mikhalkov as General Kotov, a former revolutionary hero betrayed by Stalin, who escapes death in the Gulag and ends up fighting on the front line as a private. Russian critics were said to dislike it for sticking to close to the officially approved outlook on Second World War history.

"The problem with producers here is they don't co-produce well with other countries, or with each other, and a lot of them get money too easily," said Russian-based independent film director Johnny O'Reilly.

"They are not as hungry as foreign producers are; they churn out movies with very little quality."

The Russian government invested a record 4.5 billion roubles (99m) in the film industry in 2010, nearly twice as much as the previous year. A similar amount will be put into the industry in 2011, prime minister Vladimir Putin has said.However, the investment will primarily go on doubling the number of cinemas from 2,246, instead of supporting individual production companies as before.

Independent industry research firm Movie Research forecasts that even if the project boosts ticket sales by a third, domestic film-makers may still struggle to find funding.

Russian World Studios, the country's largest independent television production company, last week obtained a 26m loan from ING bank and Sberbank, using its library content as collateral, in the first such funding deal in Russia.

Production group Bazelevs launched a fund with broker Troika Dialog last month to raise money for an animated film Smeshariki, which is due for release in December.

"This is the first opportunity in the history of the (Russian] film industry when film-makers can offer their projects to investors directly," Nikita Trynkin, chief executive at Bazelevs, said.

But seeking financial backing, especially from foreigners, will not prove an easy task in Russia. Overseas film financiers are used to making money from DVD sales, which have never been great in Russia, where most viewers illegally download films online for free.