The Canadian movie industry

By DTL
Posted April 26, 2001

Canada has no movie industry to speak of.

What we call a movie industry in this country is a country where American productions can take advantage of our low Canadian dollar, close proximity, and interlinked trade practices. Canadians who work in the “Canadian” movie industry provide creative and technical talent for American movies.

Real Canadian movie budgets are ridiculously low compared to American productions. Big-budget Canadian productions can be as little as three million dollars, a low-budget film will cost up to $500,000, and the average budget is about $1,500,000. Titanic cost $260 million . . . in American currency. How much did Whale Music or Kissed cost?

The worst obstacle native Canadian movies face is that there is no venue for them. Hollywood’s distribution chains buy distribution rights to North America as a bloc. American multi-national corporations would rather book four theatres of The Phantom Menace instead of anything by Atom Egoyan, and he’s a Canadian success story.

(In all this, Quebec has a real advantage in their minority language. French-language movie-makers can fill the vaccuum that demands movies in the native tongue.)

Canada already has a venue to show made-in-Canada productions: the taxpayer-subsidized Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC is broadcast nation-wide; some remote places that get CBC TV get no other TV at all.

Let’s try this: the CBC takes over funding and distribution of movies, absorbing organizations such as Telefilm Canada, and broadcasts them over CBC television. It recoups money by selling videocassettes of the movies, and splits the money with the movie’s producers. CBC and the producers would also share all revenue from theatrical release (if any), foreign sales, and other markets.