Telefilm Canada’s executive director Wayne Clarkson says critics should not to compare watermelons to grapes when discussing box office sums of Hollywood versus Canadian films.

‘You can’t compare grapes to watermelons,’ Clarkson said in a weekend CBC news report. ‘You have to put things in context.’

The former director of the Festival of Festivals, as TIFF was once called, said movie theaters can ‘get more bums in seats with [mega-budget films like] Ocean’s Thirteen than they can with a $5-million budget film,’ which he reminds is the average budget for a Canadian feature.

Clarkson says that many star vehicles such as the Ocean‘s franchise work with individual budgets in the $150-million range when marketing budgets are taken into consideration, so he suggests comparing ‘grapes with grapes’ and perhaps comparing Canadian films to other small-budget independent films.

But Clarkson dodged questions about why Canadian cinema-goers — notably in Toronto — will line up for blocks and wait for hours to see a Canadian film during TIFF, but won’t walk across the street to see a homegrown movie when the festival lights go down and the red carpets are rolled up.

The Telefilm topper countered such box office queries with statistics, saying that five years ago, the box office of English-
Canadian films was a pitiful 0.5% of the total take, but rose to 1.9% in 2006.

He noted that critically acclaimed hits like Sarah Polley’s directorial debut Away from Her — which premiered at last year’s TIFF — had very respectable receipts. In fact, the Mongrel Media release peaked at $1.4 million — a veritable blockbuster by English-Canadian film standards — after it ran 16 weeks on screens earlier this year.

Quebec films, which also have ‘grape-sized’ or even pea-sized budgets, often surpass the $3-million mark, including Christal Films’ 3 p’tits cochons, which, by last count, had hit the $3.2-million mark after four short weeks.

La belle province’s success with homegrown features is attributable to two things, according to Clarkson. ‘One, they’re speaking French, and two, they have an absolute commitment to their culture,’ he noted.

Meanwhile, ‘English-Canadian movies are competing in the toughest movie market in the world,’ which is English-speaking North America. ‘Those two markets are asymmetrical,’ he concluded.