NZ's healthy movie box office bucks trend

Kiwis spent $183.1 million on movie tickets last year.

Record revenue down to ‘thirst’ by local filmgoers for wide-ranging selection.

The New Zealand movie box office for 2014 bucked international trends by increasing its annual gross and breaking its previous yearly record.

Kiwis spent $183.1 million on movie tickets last year compared with the previous high of $176.5 million set in 2010, says the Motion Picture Distribution Association of New Zealand.

Cinema revenues were 5 per cent higher than in 2013.

Association chairman Andrew Cornwell said that while the total grosses of the top 10 movies at New Zealand cinemas in 2014 were lower than in 2013, overall revenue was higher, a fact he put down to filmgoers' "thirst for a wide-ranging selection of content".

He cited local films as making a significant contribution to the total.

What We Do in the Shadows was top local performer with $2.57 million, The Dark Horse grossed nearly $2 million and The Dead Lands $1.1 million.

Elsewhere, box office figures for 2014 declined - the US take shrank by 5.3 per cent, Australia by 2.3 per cent, the UK and Ireland by 2.9 per cent and Germany by 2 per cent.

That international slump had been blamed on Hollywood's lacklustre offerings for the northern summer.

Other factors cited have been video-on-demand programming as well as online piracy.

Peter Jackson's third and final Hobbit film The Battle of the Five Armies, restored some cheer to the box office in many countries. In New Zealand it has grossed $7.7 million since early December, while its worldwide gross stands at US$867 million, second in 2014 behind Transformers: Age of Extinction.

This year is pitched as a bumper year with run of franchises returning, including Jurassic World, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Avengers: The Age of Ultron, the new Bond movie Spectre and the final Hunger Games.