Following some intense viewing at the Berlin International Film Festival – of which more in a future blog – I am currently catching up on two weekends of releases at Watershed.

Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird has been spectacular with a brilliant release strategy from the distributor, Universal.

It was given a limited platform opening (16 Feb) on 10 prints, hitting a fantastic screen average of £15K, followed by an expansion to 100 from Fri 23rd Feb. In its third week it will go wider to 400.

It has delivered great results and demonstrated how to make a smaller title work in a crowded market.

Certainly by my anecdotal reckoning we have been getting a larger female audience with a distinct mother/daughter skew.

When I was booking this period I felt The Shape of Water was going to be the bigger film and Lady Bird the more modest, so scheduled accordingly in our large screen and medium screen.

However the reverse has been the case with Lady Bird selling out in our Cinema 1 and The Shape of Water performing well in Cinema 3. I’m sure this is down to a combination of Universal’s excellent management of Lady Bird‘s release, as per above, also the fact that a lot of the heat seems to have gone out of The Shape of Water.

It got fantastic buzz last year from it’s premiere at Venice Film Festival followed up by rave reviews from Toronto. It seemed a sure-fire hit (thus my expectations of its’ performance at Watershed) but a long time has passed since then and perhaps anticipation has been dampened by the range and quality of films being released.

We are coming to the end of the awards season with the Oscars this weekend so expect a spike in demand for the winners. Three Billboards certainly saw an uplift following its success at the BAFTAs and any of Lady Bird, The Shape of Water and Phantom Thread, amongst others – including films released last year like Call Me By Your Name – could get an extra boost at the box-office.