BLOCKBUSTERS

Foreign Blockbusters on Croatian Screens

From the perspective of the end of October 2004, writing about foreign blockbusters in Croatia inevitably seems to be a sad job. Even a short glance at the current weekend-list of top-grossing films in Croatian cinemas is quite discouraging: among thirty titles on the list, that have been screened in the past few months, only three (Troy; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Shrek 2) have attracted more than 50,000 viewers, and of the remaining 27, the only one that will probably reach that number is Garfield. If you transfer the blockbusters percentages into Croatian situation, it would mean that a particular film would have to have more than 250,000 viewers in order to fulfill the criteria of a blockbuster in Croatian market. This lower limit for a blockbuster represents, however, the unreachable upper limit, which is reached only by real international cinematic phenomena as Lord of the Rings trilogy and Harry Potter series, or this year’s Mel Gibson’s hit The Passion of Christ. In the period between 1998 and 2003, the number of 250,000 viewers in Croatian cinemas was reached or surpassed by seven films in total, while 134 titles surpassed the blockbuster limit of $100 million in the USA in the same period.
What are the reasons of present-day situation in Croatia? Developed network of multiplex theatres is necessary for modern blockbusters, the one that has great number of copies of hit films and provides huge number of viewers. Croatia’s first real multiplex — Blitz-Cinestar in Zagreb — was opened in December 2003. With the exception of Zagreb, there aren’t enough cinemas in Croatia, nor are there first-rate cinema theaters. Osijek, Rijeka and Split can boast only average theaters, while in the rest of the country the situation is completely unsatisfactory. In most countries film industry is making huge efforts to attract audience into cinema theaters by incessantly improving comfort and technical conditions, while in Croatia, with the exception of new theaters in Zagreb, cinemas cannot attract audiences by offering a special experience necessary for the blockbuster type success. One of the most important reasons of stagnation of Croatian cinema market in the second half of the 1990s was definitely release policy of Kinematografi Zagreb, a leading network of cinemas in Croatia. First, they neglected calls for modernization of theaters, and did not start building multiplexes. Second, their release policy was inflexible, relying too much on international success of blockbusters, without considering the fact that some of them were not so well accepted in Croatia. Third, they started to apply strange policy saying that none of the films could be screened at major theaters for more than two weeks, and thus confused the audience interested in major blockbusters by ’degrading’ films by screening them in second and third-rate theaters. The fourth mistake was that the animated blockbusters were not synchronized, so that their potentials were not fully exploited. The result of such a strategy, or the lack of one, was that the important segment of family audiences in Croatia was quite neglected, and only in the past couple of years has there been systematic effort in this segment. The fifth problem is the fact that, because of the stagnation of Croatian market in general, the distributors cannot afford more aggressive investing into marketing, and that represents a big problem in the light of the fact that today it is harder than ever to attract audience into cinema. Without strengthening the network of cinema theaters and more aggressive marketing, Croatia will stay the country where blockbusters do not succeed to be blockbusters.
ANALITICAL CONTENTS: The ’free fall’ of film release in Croatia; When a film is ’blockbuster’?; Reasons of ’de-blockbusterization’ in Croatia; The catastrophic policy of Zagreb theatrical chain Kinematografi; The neglect of family audience.

Igor Saračević