Tom Cruise’s sequel was still playing in a handful of cinemas last week, 32 weeks after its opening. But that made it only the second-longest-running film of the year, behind Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was still showing on a solitary screen 38 weeks and $6.42 million after its bow.
The biggest Australian film of the year was Elvis, with a haul of $33.48 million. The biggest Australian-made film of the year, however, was Thor: Love and Thunder, which took third place with a haul of $44.33 million.
Assessing how well Australian films have done is tricky (Screen Australia typically does its own assessment later in January). Include Thor (with its Australian crew, Australian star and Kiwi director) and Aussie-made films accounted for 10.5 per cent of the box office total, a share not seen since the 1980s.
Exclude Thor but allow Elvis and it’s a still-respectable 5.48 per cent (a little over $48 million). But discount Baz Luhrmann’s film on the grounds of its American subject matter, stars and finance (a harsh call, but some would urge it) and the 70 remaining Australian movies that made it to a cinema screen in 2022 make up just 1.67 per cent of the total.
Leading that pack is Wog Boys Forever, which took $2.92 million, a long way short of the $11.45 million Nick Giannopoulos’ first film took in 2000 (about $20 million in today’s currency).
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Renee Webster’s How To Please a Woman, a comedy about male cleaners-cum-escorts and the women they, ahem, service, was next with $2.4 million, while Leah Purcell’s terrific Indigenous colonial western reinterpretation of Henry Lawson’s short story The Drover’s Wife took $1.91 million.
The only other Australian films to top $1 million at the local box office were George Mad Max Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, and Ben Lewin’s Falling For Figaro.
Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, which was directed by Australian Sophie Hyde and shot and edited by her partner Bryan Mason, took $3.25 million, while the made-in-Melbourne Liam Neeson action thriller Blacklight barely raised a flicker with a take of just $742,760.









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