Poster for the Oscar-nominated South Korean movie 'Parasite'.

With a ready made fan base that's familiar with the main character, 'Ejen Ali' made millions at the local box office.

Malaysia Film Festival

A few years ago, two members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that organises the Oscar Awards admitted to having voted for 12 Years A Slave despite not having watched the movie. A study in 2015 found that nearly 6% of academy members had not watched all of that year’s Best Picture nominees.I think it’s this sort of blind voting that gets a movie like Joker 11 nominations in various categories. I mean, yes, I suppose it’s well-made, but my reaction when I first saw it was that it's more a triumph of style than substance. Contrast that with Parasite, a quirky South Korean film that even the director felt would do well to break even. Whereas I criticise Joker for trying to make a straightforward story complicated, Parasite succeeds in simply telling a story full of twists and turns.I wonder how many of the academy's voters had watched Parasite.Joker made more than a billion dollars at the box office, whereas Parasite has made less than a fifth of that. But when you track the week-to-week box offices of Joker and Parasite, it’s clear they both earned their audience in very different ways.Joker started big, earned US$138mil (RM560mil) in its first week, and then that number sharply dropped to about US$200,000 (RM800,000) in its 14th week.Parasite, on the other hand, made about US$3.8mil (RM15.5mil) between Nov 1 and 7, and although at first there was a sharp drop in the first few weeks, it has since settled out. After 14 weeks, it was still taking in about US$1.5mil (RM6.1mil) a week.What is it that drives these numbers? The short answer is “word of mouth”.A movie like Joker has a lot of exposure. You start hearing about the movie six months before its actual release date, and people are talking about it on social media. This is what a marketing budget of roughly US$30mil (RM122.6mil) buys you.Word of mouth can be friends getting excited. Or it can be the announcement that your film just got nominated for an Oscar or two. That happened on Jan 13 this year for Joker and Parasite, and the week after that, both movies had a bump in box office takings.A study in 2016 looked at the effect of positive word of mouth on the box office takings of movies. Unsurprisingly, the better the word of mouth, the better the takings. However, how effective word of mouth was differed if it was before or after the movie had been released.Basically, it seems that word of mouth before a movie’s release doesn’t really have that much of an effect unless a critical level is reached (estimated in the research paper as when at least 21% of the potential audience have heard of the movie from friends). Crossing that critical threshold improves the word-of-mouth effect four-fold. So the problem is that unless you have enough marketing money to push your movie across that threshold, you won’t see a great return early on. You will instead have to depend on good word of mouth from people who saw and liked your film. Of course, your movie must be good for that to happen, and even if it’s a potential Oscar winner, it takes weeks to build momentum.Let’s turn to local movies now. Compare what happened to low-budget thriller Fly By Night and popular cartoon character Ejen Ali, star of Ejen Ali The Movie (or similarly, Upin & Ipin: Keris Siamang Tunggal, or BoBoiBoy Movie 2). It’s quite obvious that the three animated movies have well-known characters, an enthusiastic fan base, and would be the equivalent of a “blockbuster”.According to various news reports Ejen Ali’s cumulative box office was RM13mil in the first week, RM20mil in two weeks, RM25mil in three weeks, RM30mil in six weeks. Those animated films have pretty much made their money already, and deservedly so, for all three of the big names mentioned above were excellent movies.On the other hand, Fly By Night – directed by Zahir Omar – could be one of those cool noir-ish movies that sneak under the radar and gain a cult-like following. It has great cinematography (by Keong Low) and an amazing performance by Bront Palarae. It could have been the thing that you and your friends watch after midnight and then talk about at a mamak shop at 3am in the morning.But it wasn’t.According to Finas (the National Film Development Corporation Malaysia), the movie eventually only made RM121,842 at the box office, less than half a per cent of any of the three big animation movies.Although Fly By Night had some traction on social media, the traction wasn’t quite good enough. And the word of mouth of people who watched it wasn’t strong enough to sustain it (it didn't cross that 21% threshold).Admittedly, I myself criticised Fly By Night for being more about style over substance, but I know at least one other movie like that in 2019 that managed to do well at the box office....Nevertheless, I think Fly By Night deserves to be watched, especially by those who criticise Malaysian cinema for being “the same boring stories over and over again”.Wouldn’t it be great if Fly By Night was nominated for some sort of award? Then maybe the rise in interest will push audiences to give it a chance. Except that can't really happen, if events that took place last year are any indication. The nominees for the 30thin 2019 were only announced on the day of the awards, March 30. The reason for this allegedly was to avoid controversy and to make sure all filmmakers attended the awards night.Even if festival organiser Finas did allow a gap of about a month between announcement and awards night, the other problem is, where can you watch Fly By Night?There needs to be coordination between Finas and cinemas or online streaming services. Or, dare I say, a national policy that every Malaysian movie should be made accessible at a reasonable price over the Internet at some point.The one production that I know of this year that was made by Malaysians – US-based Teng Poh Si and Cheyenne Tan – and nominated for an Oscar, specifically in the Best Documentary: Short Subject category, is St. Louis Superman. As far as I can tell, it can't be watched anywhere either at the moment.“At times like these, it is important to pause and think of how far we have come as Malaysians,” said Teng in an interview. And maybe, perhaps, be proud of Malaysian cinema by actually watching something we’ve made.