AS EXPECTED, the box office results of the ongoing Metro-Manila Filmfest online fail in comparison to the former film festivals held in actual theaters.
This is not surprising since the general populace is not really that tech savvy yet to quickly adapt to the new way of watching movies online, specially in the provinces where they don’t even have wi-fi.
Also, like what we’ve said before, Pinoy viewers are still hesitant when it comes to paying for what they’ll watch, since they’d rather access content they can watch for free on line on youtube or downloadable from pirates.
We got it from someone very trustworthy that business on Upstream.ph is really slack.
On the third day of the festival, their total earnings is only P11 million! That’s way way down below of former grosses in past filmfests where they have already earned P200 million just by the third day of the festival.
And mind you, one half of the P11 million was earned only by the best picture winner, “Fan Girl”. Number 2 is “Mang Kepweng”. Number 3 is “Boy Foretold by the Stars”. Number 4 is “Pakboys: Takusa”. Number 5 is “The Missing” and Number 6 is “Magikland”.
The last four is shared by drama films “Isa Pang Bahaghari”, “Tagpuan”, “Coming Home” and “Suarez: The Healing Priest”. Looks like, online viewers really avoided drama films.
“Fan Girl” got a lot of hype because of the publicity that leading man Paulo Avelino had a frontal nudity scene, but it turns out that his organ showed on screen was just prosthetic, just like that of Mark Wahlberg in “Boogie Nights”.
But now that the film won several awards, including the lead acting awards, we have no doubt that more viewers from the bigger cities will be enticed to watch it.
