Halifax: As always, the annual study of movie-going dollars and demographics by consultant Howard Lichtman was the must-see slide show of ShowCanada. Must see and don’t blink, that is, because he talked at auctioneer speed for almost a full hour.

Bottom line? The Canadian box-office take was up less than 1% in Canada last year to $952 million according to the 500-page thinkpiece assembled by his Toronto-based Lightning Group – propelled in part by the ever-reliable Quebec receipts and by certain overachieving U.S. films. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, for instance, placed no higher than number 18 at the U.S. box office but hit number five here. Same goes for The Notebook, which did not break the top 20 in the U.S. but hit number 16 in Canada, and for Fahrenheit 9/11, which placed at seven here, up from 20.

Lichtman notes that docs and book-based British-type films such as these generally do better in Canada than in the U.S., but he also suspects there’s an ‘Alliance factor’ involved. All three were distrib’d by Alliance Atlantis and ‘they’re great marketers and distributors’ says Lichtman.

Quebec’s numbers are also up. Last year marked the first time that each of the Quebec-shot films in the top 10 grossed more than $1 million. Quebec-shot films in total accounted for 14% of the province’s total film revenue, up from ’03 and well ahead of the 4.5% share held nationwide by Canadian films in general.

By comparison, domestic films account for 22% of the Swedish box office, 20% in Italy and 17% in the U.K.

Lichtman went on to note that the Canadian and U.S. box offices are set to move further apart. Americans are still having large families, for instance, whereas fertility levels in Canada are at an all-time low, contributing to the already growing number of Canadian empty nesters.

Also, as Statistics Canada recently pointed out, the immigrant population here is continuing to boom and will make up 20% of the population by 2017. This will create more demand in Canada for ethnically diverse films and may also urge exhibitors to offer films that are dubbed into a greater number of languages, perhaps by taking advantage of new digital soundtrack technologies, says Lichtman.

‘If I was a Canadian theater owner I’d start thinking about it,’ he says.

-www.showcanada.ca