Below you can find the translation of my article, published last Sunday in Folha de Sao Paulo, one of the largest newspapers in Latin America, talking about genres in Brazilian cinema. I think it can bring an overview of the industry in Latin America, which can be handy since streaming companies are analyzing their products taking into account their potential penetration in other countries, outside the US. The link for the original article is at the end os the text. It's a long reading.
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The Cookie Dilemma and the Brazilian Cinema
Suffocated by Hollywood powerful competition and lacking private investment, Brazilian's film producers lean on cheaper genres
There's an old cookie commercial in Brazil where a kid asked his mom: “Is this cookie sold out because it is so fresh, or is it so fresh because it sells too much?”
The Brazilian film industry faces an equally complex existential dilemma. Do Brazilian movies flop because they have no money, or do they lack money because they flop? In an industry that employs 400,000 people, this issue has profound repercussions.
Every year, 160 million people invade the 3,300 Brazilian cinema theaters. But 8 out of 10 prefer to watch Hollywood movies.
The incredibly low quantity of theaters, the virulent marketing of foreign titles, and our anemic public policy for the sector may be pointed out as partially responsible for this scenario, but this is the subject of another article. I am a screenwriter. And I'll talk about what I understand: tell stories.
What stories are our movies telling? And what kind of stories should we tell?
A recent study by Ancine (Brazil's National Film Agency) contradicts the myth that Brazilians don't like Brazilian movies. Of the 10 most viewed feature films in the country from 2009 to 2017, three are Brazilian and two of them are on the top of the list: “The Ten Commandments” and “Elite Squad 2”. "Elite Squad's" protagonist Captain Nascimento has sacked Captain America, at least in Brazil.
Brazilians love Brazilian movies, but the success of a few titles cannot set standards for an entire industry. We need to produce what the audiences want to see. The table below provides data to enlighten this discussion.
Cinemas are swarmed by young people, half of the cinema-goers have between 14 to 34 years of age. They love intense emotions. Thus, it's not a surprise that the genre that most attracts audiences in Brazil is adventure (38%).
The international film industry analyses this kind of information and follows suit. Of all adventure films released in Brazil from 2009 to 2017, 96% were foreign.
In Brazil, we don't follow the script as we should. Only 1% of all Brazilian feature films released in the same period were adventure movies. We simply ignored the genre with the highest average audience per movie in the country. If we add to this the action movies, another forgotten genre in Brazil, we come to 38 titles produced between 2009 and 2017, which sold over 30 million tickets. The 384 dramas released in the same period sold 35.7 million tickets.
Why don't we produce adventure movies? Or action movies, a genre in which our films perform slightly better nationwide than the foreign ones?
Comedy is our most successful case - the national box office is far above the foreign one. Our alignment with the market is unequivocal, stated by the average number of titles released every year, and also by the stories we are telling on the screens. So why can't we replicate this strategy in other genres?
For instance: there is a lot of room for Brazilian animations. We have the technique, which can be confirmed in our award-winning TV productions that are being aired worldwide. Nonetheless, investments are scarce. It is a very expensive genre to produce.
And we lack good animation scripts. We can't compare the particularities of writing a two-hour movie, in contrast to an eight-minute TV show episode. Some of our animations don't seduce the audiences. And they usually forget about the parents, the poor bastards that take their children to the movies.
Something similar can be said about horror. Considered a niche genre in Brazil, it is distrusted by distributors and producers, despite its more modest budget. There is room for writers that bring a fresh look and alternatives to the heritage of José Mojica Marins (Coffin Joe), who has undeniable merits but is only part of our tradition in the genre. In literature, for example, we have fantastic realism to inspire us.
The good performance of Brazilian action and adventure films proves their potential. However, these genres demand higher budgets to afford remote locations, breath-taking sequences and lots of visual effects. This situation has a direct impact on the number of annual releases.
About two years ago, I was hired to write an adventure movie. Due to the high cost, the producers asked me to adapt the script to English. Now they are negotiating with an American studio. It will be a foreign production, spoken in a language that is not ours.
Money plays a definitive part in the genre choices of Brazilian movies. Films are expensive. A feature can cost the same as an industrial plant. There is much talk in the movie industry about “production value”: the viewers only spend their money on a film if they “feel” that the ticket is worth paying.
This translates to impeccable sets and costumes, perfect sound, astonishing visual, A-list cast, and, of course, a compelling story. To produce animation, action or adventure in a tight budget compromises the “production value”. Audiences will disband. The financial risk may be insurmountable.
Raising investments, apart from incentive public programs, is hard all over the world. Even American blockbusters can be partly funded by tax rebates or tax cuts. Here in Brazil, things are even worse. Our economy is vilified by scorching taxes and government bonds that pay high interest at low risk, taking all the money from the productive system.
So we end up producing less expensive genres: dramas and comedies. Our comedies found the tone to please the audience. Our dramas seduced festivals worldwide. Cinema, after all, cannot live on economic results alone.
Great movies raise the bar for artists and bring deep questions to society. Some of our dramas have delivered excellent results, especially those with a supernatural penchant - a worldwide trend, and biopics, such as “Chico Xavier” and “Bruna Surfistinha”.
But there is a genre that costs the same as a drama or a comedy, and, in South Korea, it conquers 15% of the total audience: thriller. Built on an engaging text and a lean cost structure, thrillers have proven their strength in the hands of directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, Chan-wook Park, and Brazilians Fernando Coimbra and Beto Brant, among many others.
Some producers in Brazil have already noticed that. Recently I was invited to turn the book “A Garden of Sunflowers”, a drama by Lygia Barbiére Amaral, into a thriller.
It demanded an intense reengineering from me, the director, and the producers. We had endless meetings to identify together the heart of the story, and then I started adding elements of the genre without disfiguring the original plot and without losing sight of our goal: a movie with a Brazilian taste, but able to reach audiences worldwide. This is art complemented by market vision. Although this seems quite obvious, this is not usual in the Brazilian movie industry, even though it's a practice among our TV shows. Two of the five largest TV companies in the world are Brazilian.
There is a lot of space for comedies, and our dramas will continue to receive laurels worldwide. Nonetheless, taking the economic scenario of our country into account, and in face of the uncertainties of public policies for the industry, I bet on thriller to set a new normal among Brazilian audiences in the next decade, filling an important commercial and artistic gap, while adventure, action, and animation find their space among private investors.
If so, maybe after 20 years, we will be able to change the box office balance in favor of Brazilian productions.
So, turning to the cookie dilemma, the answer is quite simple: just tell a story that sells a lot, at a low cost, and eat the cookie. Then, the money to expensive productions that can sell even more will end up appearing.
Rafael Peixoto is the screenwriter of the feature film "A Garden of Sunflowers", currently under production, and author of the awarded series "Queen of Spades", in negotiation with networks.
Ótimo artigo, Rafael!!! - Very insightful!