Quality movies will survive short summers, say insiders  

New releases every week, glamorous Hollywood-like premieres and intense advertising have characterized the fiercely competitive summer season for Egypt’s cinema industry. For the past decade or so, summer has been the most lucrative season for Egyptian films, with more than one-third of annual productions released in June, July and August.
But last year’s summer season was cut short with the holy month of Ramadan starting on Sept. 1, and this year the season will get even shorter with Ramadan starting on Aug. 22.
Since this won’t be changing anytime soon — with the holy month beginning earlier every year — the cinema industry has had to re-strategize. One insider even said that summer’s no longer the “hot” season and that distributors are trying to cash in all year round.
Two major distribution companies in Egypt, Oscar/El Nasr/Massa and Misr Al-Arabeya have created an earlier schedule for their releases, kicking-off the season in May with “Youm Ma Et’abelna” (The Day We Met) and “Dokan Shehata” (Shehata’s Store) as well as four other movies lined up for the summer.
“Every year we say the season is getting shorter, but when you look at it, it’s only getting shorter by one week so it doesn’t have such a big effect,” Abdel Gileel Hassan, spokesperson of Misr Al-Arabeya Production and Distribution Company, said.
“Summer is no longer the top season of the cinema industry, nowadays the season is all year with new releases coming out without considering the date. This is all to the benefit of the viewers,” Hassan added.
The current average grosses of what can be branded a blockbuster are LE 15 million and summer has traditionally been the safest season to reach that multi-million-pound mark. With a lot of time on their hands during the summer months, viewers sometimes watch the same movie more than once, which means robust revenues for the industry.
But that way of doing business is quickly changing. Big names no longer keep their movies locked up until the summer and revenues are high at other times of the year. For example, Ahmed El-Sakka released his movie “The Island” during the 2008 winter vacation and it was quite a hit. Mohamed Heneidy’s “Ramadan Mabrouk Aboul Alamein Hammouda,” released earlier this year, also broke all records.
“With Ramadan eating up the summer — and it will be coming even earlier in the coming years — this opened up the season more and it is no longer confined to June, July and August,” Sayed Fathi, director of the Federation of the Egyptian Cinema Industry, said.
Prominent film critic Rafiq El-Sabban said that this change is of great benefit to the audience. The short season has forced producers to release exceptional films, distinctive enough to face the fierce competition.
In the past couple of years, Egyptian audiences have had a wide variety of movies to choose from — no longer a few comedies led by longstanding box-office champs such as Adel Imam.
The competition has intensified as production and marketing costs escalated, propelled by a flood of aspiring young actors appearing on screen every year.
“Since last summer we have been seeing many surprises,” El-Sabban said, noting that last year producer Ahmed Sobky, notorious for making some of the worst reviewed films in the past decade, surprised critics and audiences with the highly-acclaimed “Cabaret.”
“This year we are also expecting a lot of great movies. Already there is ‘Dokan Shehata’ and ‘Ibrahim El-Abyad’ — two major productions,” he added.
There are only two conglomerates controlling movie distribution in Egypt, the Misr Al-Arabeya and Oscar/Al-Nasr/Al-Massa, and rumors of their rivalry always abound.
But Hassan refutes this claim. “Just because we are two companies in the market doesn’t mean we are rivals,” he said, “each company shows its movies in the theaters it owns and both companies are satisfied with this current state.
“There aren’t any losses — if no one is losing and no producer is hurt by our competition, then at the end of the day it is in the benefit of the film industry and our culture.”
Fathi concurs, saying that “there aren’t any problems between the distribution companies as each of them have their movies lined up to be released in the company’s own theaters,” he said.
Because of the relatively short length of last year’s season, no new films were released during Eid El-Fitr and the summer movies continued playing in theaters. This year will be different with new movies lined up for the holiday and some summer movies staying on.
Experts, critics and players in the market all believe that a good movie will survive and succeed no matter when it is released.
“A good movie, even if it doesn’t have any big name [actors] or is released at a peak season, will attract the audience and will succeed no matter what,” said Hassan.
At the same time, “fans will make time to go watch their favorite star’s movie at any time of the year,” Fathi said.