We have a weird social tendency for top-trump lists. Whether it be fastest motor cards, meanest dinosaurs, being ranked out in the card games we played in junior school, greatest pop anthems of all time in bad Channel 4 chart programmes, or FHM’s annual sexiest women issue, we like our lists.

Sometimes, when compiled with sufficient perspective, from the distance of a decade, these lists can be interesting ways of looking back at the most influential trends and shapers of a period or movement. When thrown together in the moment, however, they should be given limited credence.

Especially when one finds oneself and ones friends in them, which at the moment, in both London and Paris, the ranks of slingshot seem to team with top-trumpers….

To start, this week’s Observer pulls together the ‘Kings and Queens of Paris’ and there above the fold is the lovely Céline Sciamma, director of the achingly tender and awkward and sexy coming of age teen movie Water Lilies, the film we acquired at Cannes earlier this year, and which had its UK premier last night at the London Film Festival. Having spent an evening eating frites and listening to jazz with Celine, I can attest that she is in fact a queen amongst french-women.
Rather less notably, two week ago Variety, in its indelible wisdom, chose Thomas and I as two of top thirty “London Entertainers“. Combine these two stories Slingshot finds itself in the strange position of top-trumping on both sides of the English Channel. Quel strange!

Just to prove, though, that you shouldn’t believe everything you read, Sky News is amongst many sources getting excited that Simon Pegg is staring in Faintheart. A piece of casting so brilliant, that somehow we managed to do it without letting ourselves know. Simon, you just had to ask!

My amazing, brilliant, and dedicated assistant of the past year, she who is known as uber-kate has sadly decided that it is time for her to return to her native New York.

This is a cause of much sadness, for us here at sling-central. Over the past year Kate has become the smiling face, the chirpy voice, the just-anal-enough organiser and the geek-chic cheerleader of the slingshot team.

Add to all of that, her sharp critical and creative mind; focussed unrelentingly across a number of our projects, and you get a sense of how much of a void she will leave and how sad we are to see her go. For me she has become that invaluable extension to my own brain, my voice, my right hand and left foot, and has made my too busy life not just better, but possible. Our shared love of Buffy, of musicals, of high theory and low art made her more than an assistant to me.

And so whilst we wish Kate all the very best, and totally understand the call to her home, her lovely parents and equally talented family and the joys of New York, even though we knew this day would come eventually when we hired her, we will miss her deeply.

Hot Jets, young Brokaw. May the skies always be clement to your travels and tell them of us there in this New York you speak of.

So I didn’t watch the Rugby this weekend. Or rather I did. but not the England-France match. I did catch the last half of South Africa’s rout of the Argentines.
Since I am, more or less, British, and since I have just finished making a movie about British - French rivalry, this decision might strike many as odd.

I was discussing this with a friend, explaining that on the whole I rather watch movies than sport, and in exasperation he said to me “but nobody wins in movies!  I mean they are fun, but its a different TYPE of fun. Nobody wins!”

Fair point.

Or is it.

Thinking about it, I come to realise that the reason I prefer the narrative of most fiction to the narrative of sport is PRECISELY BECAUSE in good fiction nobody wins. Because life, unlike sport, is more complex than winning and losing. And so is the business of film-making
But you wouldn’t know that from reading about the business of film-making in the press. According to the press, both trade and national, film-making is entirely about winning. About winning the weekend box office. About topping last weekend, or last years, or last Augusts. The highest three day weekend in box office history, the highest 2nd weekend in September in Box Office History. The biggest opening of a James Bond movie in a leap year since Goldfinger.

Honestly, who cares.
Well, you might think I should. I am after all now a film distributor, and we are supposed to care about such stuff. The studio boss with his finger on the pulse of the box office numbers, staying up late every Friday night to see the opening night figures in from EDI is a figure of movie legend. Surely I should care.

And in one sense, of course I do. Even if I wasn’t a distributor, I have long maintained that all involved in the film business need to be conversant in the fact that it is a business, and should take a healthy interest in the number side of things, since numbers are after all the same thing as audience.

So what’s my beef?

Well I have two, actually.

First I don’t understand why the public should care about the box office of a film. What conceivable difference can it make to their enjoyment of a particular movie to know that it is the 26th highest grossing movie with a title with 4 Rs in it or not?

All the film-going public should care is whether the movie is any good or not, and if they in particular will like it. They can get the first information from a reviewer, or an aggregation of reviewers such as rotten tomato; and they can get the second set of information from asking a friend who knows their taste and has seen it, or from such peer review sites as Flixster. None of that information comes from knowing the opening weekend numbers. When you buy a car, you don’t ask how many other people have the same one - you want to know that it is properly engineered, safe, efficient and sexy looking. When you buy a tooth-paste, you don’t check that it is the best selling tooth-paste; when you choose a new partner, you don’t want to know that they’ve slept with more people than anyone else in the world.

Why should movies be different? How did a discussion of box office somehow escape from the business pages and make it into the culture pages? How did we come to confuse popularity with quality? Oscar Wilde once remarked that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. A book is either well written or badly written, that is all. If you believe the vast majority of our press, there is no longer such a thing as a good movie or a bad movie - a movie is either a block-buster or it is nothing.

My second beef (you remember, I had a pair of them) is about the industry.  Now, of course we have to care about the numbers, but here my concern is that we are fixating on the WRONG numbers. Never mind that Box Office itself represents only a small share of a movies ultimate audience; and never mind that the co-relation between Box Office and, for example, DVD sales is far from perfect; the real problem with a fixation on Box Office is that it completely fails to distinguish cost and return. The interesting question is not how many people went to see a particular movie, but how much did it cost to get them there.

To take an extreme example, which would you adjudge more successful, a movie with a production budget of $1m and a marketing budget of $500k that succeeded in a UK Box Office of $1m, or a movie with a production budget of $100m, and a marketing budget of $5m that resulted in a UK box office of $5m?

And in case that seems to leading or unrealistic an example, consider as recent a movie as SUPERMAN RETURNS, which took $30m at the UK Box Office, which sounds pretty damn healthy, till you realise the movie cost $270m to make and had a UK marketing spend of circa $10m. Contrast that with, say RUN FAT BOY RUN which is close to taking $20m at the UK Box Office for a budget of around a 10th of SUPERMAN. Does that mean that Simon Pegg’s flabby jogger is a greater hero than the Man of Steel? Or that David Schwimmer is a greater director than Bryan Synger? No, but on this evidence he’s a more profitable one. Not that the Box Office would have told you than.

We need new better metrics, and headlines less obsessed with Box Office.