While this year’s Whistler Film Festival was a bit soggier than usual thanks to an onslaught of torrential rains on the mountain, the conversation remained lively at the festival’s industry summit. Over the course of three days, panelists discussed a wide range of issues facing the Canadian film industry, including distribution challenges, surprising misses at the box office and the death of the mid-range box office earner. Here, Playback breaks down some of the highlights of this year’s festival.

The death of the mid-range box office earner

In a panel taking stock of the year in Canadian film, Cineplex EVP of filmed entertainment Michael Kennedy said 2015 was a particularly tough year for indie film, as “the big movies are getting bigger and the small movies are getting smaller.” So far this year, Cineplex’s top 20 films represented 51% of its whole business, with most of those titles being adaptations of something else, such as comics or novels. Even projects with big budgets and marketing spend behind them, such as Victor Frankenstein, Steve Jobs or Suffragette, missed the mark at the box office this year, Kennedy said.

“That seems to be what is happening – you either miss completely, or you kill it. Now there’s no in-between, and we used to live on the in-between,” Kennedy said, stressing that an increasingly fragmented market means movies need to be either of an extraordinary quality, or created for a very specific audiences. For example, event programing continues to perform for Cineplex, Kennedy said, pointing to a recent one-night event screening of Star Trek episodes and the Corner Gas: The Movie release as examples of recent successes.

“The interesting thing about movie theatres is that they have become community centres. They’ve become a place for people who like the same things to go,” Kennedy said.

The year of the killer Canadian copro

While this year’s Toronto International Film Festival played host to a number of buzzy Canadian titles, it seems few performed at the box office. Deepa Mehta’s Beeba Boys felt flat for Mongrel Media, said director of theatrical releasing Tom Alexander during a panel, despite what he felt was a strong marketing effort put behind the project.

Both Kennedy and Elevation Pictures execs also expressed disappointment about the performance of Hyena Road, a $12.5 million-budget film which pulled in under $1 million at the box office despite a $2 million marketing spend. What may be the issue with projects like these is the fact they “existed in a bubble,” Alexander said. Beeba Boys is about South Asian gangsters in Vancouver, while Hyena Road is a war story told from a specifically Canadian perspective.

“What you have is really insular Canadian stories which didn’t resonate,” he said. Meanwhile, there are two Canadian copros currently gaining traction in box office earnings and Oscar buzz: Room (Canada/Ireland) and Brooklyn (Ireland/U.K./Canada), which Alexander said is the result of filmmakers working together to create great, global stories without a hyper-focus on Canadian culture.

“It’s not just financial…it’s great filmmakers from different points of views coming together and making magic,” Alexander said of these copro structures. As of the week of Nov. 20 to Nov. 26, Room had earned $775,703 at the Canadian box office, with Brooklyn pulling in $75,145, according to data from  MPTAC and Zoom Services.

The box office isn’t always the whole story

Noah Segal, co-president of Elevation Pictures, said during the “View from the Top” panel that the distributor expected Hyena Road to generate about $3 million in the box office, but ultimately earned closer to $1 million. However, Segal noted a free Remembrance Day screening of Hyena Road at select Cineplex theatres performed extremely well. The film also had a strong opening weekend of $486,000, and for a time was also tracking above several Warner Brothers titles released at the same time, such as Our Brand is Crisis.

“As much as we were disappointed in Hyena, we got a good subset of the audience,” Segal said. “We hit at some extent a commercial and cultural connection,” he said, adding the distributor does aim to support films in Canada that have both cultural relevance and commercial value.