A golden age for independent film? As Hollywood turns off the blockbuster tap, small movies are flooding our screens

We have all heard the squeals from the UK’s beleaguered film exhibitors. Cinema owners have complained long and hard in recent weeks that there is nothing for them to show. Thanks to Covid, almost every big Hollywood title – from new Bond movie No Time To Die to Marvel’s Black Widow – is postponed until 2021. Cineworld, staggering under a mountain of debt, has closed its doors for the time being, as has Picturehouse, the art house chain that it owns. Many Odeon sites are opening only at weekends. And a quarter of Vue’s cinemas are now shut three days a week.

Weighty opinion pieces have pondered the parlous situation in which British cinemas now find themselves. Industry insiders have called for radical reform. No longer, they argue, can the business be so dependent on a handful of big US studio movies. When that tap is turned off, calamity follows.

However, this is only part of the picture. “Crisis, what crisis?” is the question many will ask when they see the avalanche of new movies being released this week. At a time when the sector is supposedly in its death throes, the UK’s cinemagoers have 20 new titles to choose from this weekend alone. There are documentaries, music movies, horror pictures and animation on offer. You'd have thought distributors would have communicated with each other and staggered their biggest releases – but the fact that it’s both Halloween and half-term has prompted the sudden rush.

The choice is mind-bending. If you like football, you can try out Jonny Owen’s The Three Kings, about managers Bill Shankly, Jock Stein and Matt Busby. If ballet is more your thing, watch The Lady of the Camellias, a pre-recorded screening of the Bolshoi in action. There’s highbrow arthouse, with Mick Jagger playing a creepy art collector in The Burnt Orange Heresy. Horror’s on the menu, too, in the form of a new Jason Blum movie and Relic, a blood-curdling yarn starring Emily Mortimer that terrified audiences at the Sundance Festival. Families can indulge in Irish-made animated adventure Wolfwalkers for their cartoon fix.

Rock music fans can sample Phil Lynott: Songs For While I’m Away, a feature documentary about the Thin Lizzy front man. Meanwhile, Josephine Decker’s masterly Shirley, an intense psychological drama about marriage, female friendship and creativity inspired by the life of novelist Shirley Jackson, is also out this weekend. Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, it boasts a revelatory performance from Elisabeth Moss as the troubled and caustic writer.

These are just a few of the flood of new titles available. Bizarrely, thanks to the pandemic, we are actually living through a mini-golden age for independent movies. Space has opened up for them in a way that would have been unthinkable if they’d had to compete with the latest Pixar, Disney and Marvel offerings, or stand toe to toe with 007.

Even more surprisingly, this week, thanks to coronavirus, Liam Neeson is king of the hill. It may not be a very big hill and the movie that has put him there may not be very good, but the fact is Neeson is sitting in the top spot in both the US and the UK box office. In more normal times, Honest Thief, the Neeson vehicle that has finally dislodged Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, would be lucky to receive anything beyond the most token UK cinema release. Its distributors Signature are experts in releasing straight-to-video fare – action films featuring movie stars who are past their cinema sell-by date but can still eke an audience on VOD or DVD.

Signature has had its embarrassments over the years. Take, for example, Momentum (2015), starring Olga Kurylenko and Morgan Freeman, an explosive, South Africa-set action thriller that grossed a measly £46 over its opening weekend. A few months later, Signature’s South America-set cult film The Colony, starring Emma Watson, came in with a microscopic £47 in British cinemas.

Of course, the UK cinema performances of both films were strictly secondary to what they achieved through home entertainment. They were given token big screen releases primarily as a marketing exercise. Nonetheless, the contrast with Honest Thief is striking. The Neeson film went out last week on over 300 screens.

Neeson is the placebo currently being offered to cinemagoers who would far rather be in the company of James Bond. But in spite of the controversy he provoked last year when he made some ill-judged remarks about rape, race and revenge in an interview with The Independent, the 68-year-old Irish actor remains a very dependable action star who can still sell a few tickets, against all odds.

And it’s not just Neeson enjoying his moment in the sun. Exhibitors with nothing else to show have been forced this autumn to become much more adventurous with their programming. Rose Glass’s debut feature Saint Maud, a brilliant but low-budget horror film that was successfully released last week, is now taking up screens in cinemas that would normally be showing superhero movies and Pixar cartoons.

The sleeper hit of this very troubled year is young adult romance, After We Collided. It was ignored or treated with complete contempt by critics but has done more business than almost any other movie in the UK this year, apart from Tenet. An ingenious, social media-driven marketing campaign caught the imagination of fans of the Anna Todd teen novel on which it is based. It helped, too, that there were no big Hollywood romcoms or weepies to get in its way.

To call the past few weeks a golden age for independent film-going is accurate on one level but wildly misleading on another. Although fans have far more choice, the movies aren’t making much money at all. Honest Thief opened at No 1 in the UK with receipts of just over £250,000. That is chump change compared with the £43.4m that Avengers: Endgame racked up on its opening weekend alone in the UK last year. And to compare Honest Thief with a successful indie from last year, Laurel and Hardy biopic Stan & Ollie made 10 times as much with £2.5m.

Whether you’d call it a golden age or not, it won’t last long. One reason there is such an over-supply of indie films in the UK marketplace is that all the smaller distributors are painfully aware that the current situation is temporary. They are rushing to get their films out while they can.

At some point, who knows when, Hollywood will turn the tap on again. By the time this happens, many working in the UK cinema business will already have lost their jobs. It is conceivable that a large number of venues that are closed now because of coronavirus won’t re-open.

The pandemic, combined with the rise and rise of the streamers, has led gloomier analysts to predict that the cinema business may never recover. That seems absurdly pessimistic – and premature. The very fact that the studios are keeping their biggest and best movies under wraps demonstrates how valuable they remain. It can safely be predicted that audiences will come back to see them when the time is right. The downside is that many independent films – from the art house gems to the horror debuts – will be squeezed out of British cinemas.

It’s objectively ridiculous that so many films are being released at once, and that a potboiler like Honest Thief is number one at the box office. Nonetheless, in years to come, those in independent distribution may look back on the strange autumn of 2020 with considerable nostalgia. There won’t be many weeks like this one again.