The $2.29 billion spent on scripted content across film,television and streaming projects in 2021-22 eclipsed the previous record of $1.94 billion set just a year earlier. That 18 per cent increase came despite a drop in expenditure by foreign titles,from $1.07 billion last financial year – when Australia was reaping the advantages of being relatively COVID-free – to $777 million this year.
Alyla Browne and Sigourney Weaver star in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.Amazon Prime Video
At $1.51 billion,the Australian component of the tally was up significantly on last year’s $872 million,and was almost three times as much as it was worth in 2019-20 ($566 million).
“Hitting well over the $2 billion mark is an incredible milestone for our sector,” said Graeme Mason,chief executive of Screen Australia,which collated the figures for its annual Drama Report. “It’s truly a bumper year for Australian scripted content – to have local productions make up 66 per cent of this spend is extraordinary.”
The figures are based on the claimed budgets for productions that commenced principal photography during the year in question.
That means big-budget features such as Baz Luhrmann’sElvis and George Miller’sThree Thousand Years of Longing are excluded,as they started in the previous financial year. But the likes of Miller’sMad Max spin-offFuriosa and Garth Davis’ enviro-catastrophe filmFoe are captured though audiences won’t see them for some time yet.
Though the first impression is of an industry enjoying a purple patch,a deeper reading of the report suggests the picture is slightly more complex.
The hours of scripted content made for the free-to-air networks and their BVOD (broadcast video on demand) platforms (such as iView,9Now and 7Plus) continued a steady decline,with just 278 hours made last year compared to 330 hours the year before,432 in 2018-19 and 715 hours in 2000-01.
Bojana Novakovic on the set of Love Me.Ben King/Binge
The number of Australian feature films (24) was half the previous year (46),though the budgeted total ($786 million) was up by more than 50 per cent (from $495 million).
“There’s fewer films,but the films that are getting made are at a more substantial level,” said Mason. “It’s tougher to get films made than it ever was,and I think that is because the audience was already shifting[away from cinemas to home viewing],but COVID really accelerated that.”
The other major trend,he said,was “new streaming players coming in,needing to make their mark,needing to have a real clear place here as they jostle around”.
Deadloch,from the Katering Show’s Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney,was shot in Tasmania.Amazon Prime Video
That had translated to a high level of local commissioning,often with relatively high budgets,and would undoubtedly be cited by those very players as proof that the industry regulation that arts minister Tony Burke has.
“I would be saying one great year does not a pattern make,” said Mason of the bumper investment from the streamers. “I don’t know[if you could call it] a full-time pattern.
“I’m really keen to see them making a range of content still,obviously scripted,but I’d also love to see them – because I think they should,because I think it makes sense,and because families are doing it a little bit tougher,so they need to look at where they can get all the content for the whole family. It makes commercial sense. And obviously,I think it makes cultural sense.”
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