Despite gloomy economic reports and growing unemployment, Germans flocked to the nation's movie theaters during the first nine months of this year. Visits to movie theaters reached 127.3 million in the period, almost a record and up 15 percent from the 110.7 million visits in the comparable period last year, according to the Federal Film Board.
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the US contributed to the general unease among Germans, who seek entertainment to gain respite from worries about a growing recession and possible military engagement overseas.
And German producers have reason to be content as well, since the share of Germany-made movies has risen to 17.9 percent in the market, which is always dominated by the blockbusters from Hollywood. During the same period in 2000, German-made films made up just 13 percent of the market.
As always in a precarious business, good movies make the difference. Home-grown productions were given a boost by the phenomenal success of the western spoof, The Shoe of the Manitu, which registered more than eight million admissions by September, well beyond the one-million benchmark usually used to judge a successful film in Germany.
Now with with 9.1 million admissions, Manitu has become the most successful German movie since 1980, even beating the comedy Otto -- the Movie with 8.78 million admissions.
And August was the most successful month in the past ten years, pulling 17.6 million visitors. For exhibitors, the spring months were also gratifying, with admissions up 12.4 percent, followed by a more than 8 percent rise during the summer months, when many Germans seek recreation at mountain and lake resorts and the traditional Bavarian beer gardens.
The biggest uplift for exhibitors came from Tinseltown movies. The dinosaur-adventure movie Jurassic Park 3, with 3.29 million visitors, headed the summer's top ten list, ahead of Bridget Jones' Diary, which recorded 3 million admissions. The Hollywood comedy American Pie 2 was a natural drawing card with teenagers, pulling 1.47 million visitors.
And the highly-anticipated Hollywood family film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, based on the best-selling novel, is slated for a Nov. 22 launch.
But it was the increasing popularity of German productions that encouraged the production side of the industry, which has been in the doldrums for decades. Besides The Shoe of the Manitu, movies such as Maechen-Maechen, another comedy, the grim The Experiment, the youth-targeted Emil and the Detective, and the animation children's movie Peterson and Findus all got more than 1 million admissions.
And a number of promising German productions are in the distribution pipeline, including a satire called Suck My Dick, a parody of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which has already been filmed three times in the US.
Other upcoming German movies screened at the just-ended Hof Festival, which specializes in domestic productions, include Sven Taddicken's coming-of-age movie, My Brother, the Vampire, a winner of the event's Eastman prize for best new director, and Soenke Wortmann's The Hollywood Sign, the director's first film to be shot in the US.
The cast includes actors Rod Steiger, Burt Reynolds and Tom Berenger, lined up by Wortmann despite seeming to be past their primes. Other German movies unspooled at Hof include the actor Bernd Michael Lade's gangster episodic, Null 12 (Zero Hour), and Michael Gutmann's Heart over Heels, a teenage love story.
Although the number of releases during the first three quarters of this year dropped to 283, compared with 296 during the same period in 2000, exhibitors could not complain about box office revenues, which totalled DM1.36 billion (US$647 million), compared with DM1.18 billion, an increase of about 15.4 percent. And a 0.5 percent increase in ticket prices obviously had no effect on movie-goers.
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