/News 25.10.17
Glancing through the list of successful Australian movies reveals more than just the fact that Aussie filmmaking maestros George Miller and Baz Luhrmann are over-represented.
Even though movies about a penguin, a dog, a post-apocalyptic hero and the third adaptation of one of the most famous works of American literature couldn’t be more different from each other, they each reveal a slice of life that’s unique to Australia.
Whether it’s the self-effacing humour foreigners love about us, or landscapes not found anywhere else in the world, the most successful Australian films say something about our national character and can-do spirit. And when it comes to the below list, the rest of the world agreed.
Director: George Miller
Global box office: USD$ 384m
With Hollywood cementing a new art form – the computer-animated family film – veteran director Dr George Miller stepped into the breach, finding his inner child and taking cues from real-world biology to make the story of a young penguin who loves dancing – universal.
Director: George Miller
Global box office: USD$ 378m
Thirty years after the last instalment of Max’s trilogy, Dr George Miller showed Hollywood how action movies were really done with a stripped back, visually eye-popping movie that combined raw, armrest-shredding, driving sequences with the best female heroine of recent times.
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Global box office: USD$ 351m
The nouveau riche of depression-era America also seems like it couldn’t be further from home, but Luhrmann took F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel and turned it into a spiritual sequel to Moulin Rouge!, a glitzy world of finery and gilded debauchery where the music, the movement and the party never stop.
Director: Peter Faiman
Global box office: USD$ 328m
Along with Hoges’ infamous ‘shrimp on the barbie’ tourism ads, this was Australia’s first big film into the US, a fish out of water comedy that put the iconic larrikin in the midst of the urban American human condition.
Director: Chris Noonan
Global box office: USD$ 254m
Taking the talking animals with human problems playbook that had worked for Disney for generations and applying cutting-edge film technology to it seemed like a no-brainer, and the charm of the triumphant pig and his soft-spoken master (James Cromwell) did the rest of the work to win the world over.
Director: John Cornell
Global box office: USD$ 239m
Who can forget when Mick Dundee (Hoges) took a walk on the wild side in the streets of New York.
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Global box office: USD$ 211m
The stockman, Indigenous culture and the beautiful but unforgiving wide brown land down under. Need we say more.
Director: Alex Proyas
Global Box office: USD$ 183m
This epic science-fiction story posed the age-old question, is everything in some way preordained or does it happen by chance?
Story supplied by Stage and Screen Travel, written by Drew Turney.
Image: Mad Max: Fury Road © Warner Bros Ent. / Village Roadshow