24/10/2003

A report, called Picture Perfect? just published by the Greater London Authority warns the city's Mayor about the serious shortage of screens and film choice outside the central West End area.

The Culture, Sport and Tourism Committee of six MPs looked into film availability across all London and the measures that may be taken by the Mayor to give Londoners the widest possible choice of cinemas and films. According to the Committee, headed by Labour chair, Meg Hillier, London has 95 cinemas, almost 500 screens and on an average week, there's a choice of over 130 films.
But more than a third of those cinemas are concentrated in Central London (The West End) while 60% of Londoners live well outside that area.
Not only is it difficult for outer London dwellers to go to the movies, but the range of films they can see is also much reduced. For instance, in a single week in August this year, 130 films were shown in the West End, including the 'specialist' titles Good Bye Lenin [+see also:
trailer
interview: Wolfgang Becker
film profile] and Respiro [+see also:
trailer
film profile], but there were only 68 in the rest of London, of which six Hollywood titles accounted for 75% of all screenings. Foreign language films made up 7% of screenings outside the West End, compared with a quarter of all screenings in the West End.
Among the reasons for this imbalance put forward by the report are "the prevalence of multiplexes outside the West End showing mostly blockbuster titles and the difficulty for independent exhibitors (often single-screen owners) to juggle between the desire to be diverse and the need to survive".
A list of six recommendations were identified in the report, including the need for London boroughs to recognise the value cinemas have in their communities; a call for the Mayor to raise the profile of the London Film Festival attracting over 100,000 people a year; a recommendation that the Office of Fair Trading to look into the relationship between exhibitors and distributors; and for film bodies (the UK Film Council and the British Film Institute) to consider promoting a wider diversity in film choice in outer London.