UK Film Council's winners and losers revealed

UK Film Council success Nowhere Boy starring Aaron Johnson as John Lennon. Photograph: Publicity image

Royalty is good. Raucous schoolgirls are even better. But steer clear of Derbyshire mining towns or revisiting Brideshead.

An analysis of productions funded by the UK Film Council has revealed huge variations in what the defunct quango has seen as a return on its recent investments.

According to figures recently released to parliament by the culture minister, Ed Vaizey, the council made 33 film production awards between 1 April 2006 and 31 March 2011 that have so far received "recoupment income".

Recoupments chiefly commence when films are distributed and when they make money abroad. They are wholly reinvested in new productions.

Predictably, The King's Speech, the hugely popular Hollywood-backed film starring Colin Firth, which won three Oscars, was a success for the council, having so far returned 95% of the ?1m lottery money invested. A further 5% was returned by the council directly to the film's producers for them to invest in future productions.

But it was another film featuring Firth, St Trinian's, a comedy set in an all-girls school (described as "monumentally naff" by the Guardian), that was the council's biggest recent success, returning ?1,440,017 on the ?1,432,000 invested.

Other successes include Man on Wire, a documentary following French wire-walker Philippe Petit's tightrope crossing between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Centre, which returned 101% of the ?385,000 invested.

Nowhere Boy – Sam Taylor-Wood's John Lennon biopic, described by Rolling Stone as a "smart" film – returned 87% of the ?1.2m invested.

If those films were the principal winners, there were also some notable losers, at least in box office terms.

Brideshead Revisited, a sumptuous reinterpretation of Evelyn Waugh's inter-war novel of Catholicism, love and nobility, described by the Daily Telegraph as "good-looking" but "empty", returned only 1% of the ?1.4m it was handed.

Big names, it appears, do not necessarily guarantee a good return. Harry Brown, which featured Michael Caine as a retired Royal Marine who takes revenge when his only friend is beaten to death by a gang, returned only ?22,300 of its ?1,002,225.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a comedy starring Simon Pegg as a writer for an upmarket US magazine, returned only ?9,977 of the ?1,471,145 lottery money invested.

Nor does critical acclaim correspond to financial success. Summer, a story of friendship and tragedy in a Derbyshire mining town, for which Robert Carlyle won best actor at the 2008 Edinburgh International Film Festival, returned ?11,792 of the ?467,750 production budget stumped up by the council.

"We need to remember that the UK Film Council was the one-stop shop for commercial and cultural support for the British film industry, so it was never expected to return a profit on its investment," said Martin Spence, assistant general secretary of Bectu, the media and entertainment union.

However, some films backed by the council have been neither a commercial nor a critical success.

The 2008 horror film Donkey Punch, which follows British holidaymakers in Spain as they take drugs, have sex and end up killing each other, received ?457,490 from the council. Total Film explained that the film's title referred to the action of hitting "a woman on the back of the neck while shagging her from behind".

The film was panned by critics. "I can't say that this casually sadistic, misanthropic little movie persuades me that it is any contribution to, or reflection of, our national culture," said Daily Mail critic Chris Tookey.

So far, only ?58,931, or 13% of the council's initial investment in Donkey Punch, has been recouped.

The core of the council's activities – spending ?15m a year of lottery money on independent UK-made films – has now been transferred to the British Film Institute. A spokesman for the BFI said 99 productions were funded by the council over the past five years, 28 of which are still waiting to be released. Around ?8m, 19% of the lottery money invested in the past five years, has been recouped so far.

"Not all of the ones that have been released have started to recoup," explained the BFI spokesman. "The rationale for investing in films is not necessarily on the cultural strength of them. A large part of it is for developing new talent.

"Donkey Punch was invested in under the Warp X new talent initiative – it's new talent, a new director, and one of its cast, Jaime Winstone, has gone on to do new things, and to make a name for herself."

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Best and worst of Britain's subsidised film-makers revealed

In the balance ... the majority of subsidised films in the UK (James Marsh's Man on Wire excepted) haven't repaid their debts. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Who is Britain's most commercially successful film-maker of the past five years – at least among those backed by lottery money from the UK Film Council? Take a bow, James Marsh. His Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire repaid 100% of its UKFC investment, and his chimpanzee documentary Project Nim is set to follow suit.

According to figures published quietly in Hansard last week by culture minister Ed Vaizey, only two other films since 2006 – St Trinian's and The King's Speech – have so far returned their lottery cash in full. Streetdance 3D is also expected to do so.

And who must own up to being the least successful of Britain's lottery-subsidised film-makers? According to the figures, that unwanted honour goes to Stephen Frears. Two of his recent films have received some ?1.7m in funding from the UK Film Council – ?1m for Cheri and ?780,000 for Tamara Drewe – but have yet to pay back a single penny.

The information has come to light after Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt asked Vaizey to provide details on returns from all films backed by the UKFC, and he duly obliged in a written answer. Vaizey identified 33 films which recouped some or all of the lottery funding they were awarded between April 2006 and March this year, when the UKFC closed and its duties passed to the British Film Institute.

But this answer failed to mention all those movies that have paid back nothing. A trawl through the data on the UKFC website reveals a further 25 films in the same time period – between 2006 and 2009 – which received at least ?300,000 but have paid back precisely zero. (For the sake of fairness, our research excluded films from 2010 that haven't had time to earn anything, as well as experimental projects awarded less than ?300,000).

By 31 March 2011, the date of its shutdown, the UKFC had, from its investment of ?41.1m into these 58 films, earned a grand total of ?8.1m. That 20% rate of return may seem modest, but many films – particularly those from 2009 – still have a lot of earning ahead of them.

There are some obvious quirks on the list. The King's Speech has officially recouped 95% because the UKFC gave the producers a 5% share – and is likely to single-handedly double the average recoupment figures when its profits start to flow back to the BFI over the next few years.

Marsh's Project Nim is currently showing a zero return, but that will change dramatically when its recent American sale to HBO is banked. Even Tamara Drewe is expected to save some of Frears's blushes by paying 20-30%, although the expensive Cheri, with its ?23m budget, is almost certainly a lost cause.

There are some unexpected success stories, however. Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy has paid back a surprisingly robust 87% of its ?1.2m award, despite only grossing ?5m worldwide. Jane Campion's Bright Star managed an 81% payback from just ?8m in receipts. Nigel Cole's Made in Dagenham has already returned 80% from a ?9m box office take. All earned their money from strong foreign sales.

By contrast, Oliver Parker's Dorian Gray grossed ?15m worldwide, but has reportedly repaid nothing, a victim of its sizable budget and an underlying deal structure which left the UKFC at the back of the queue for repayment.

Other losers include expensive flops Brideshead Revisited and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which have both returned a mere 1% of the ?1.4m they each received. The Michael Caine vigilante film Harry Brown was a notable UK box office hit in 2009, but has repaid only 2% of the ?1m it was given from lottery funds.

Films not mentioned by Vaizey, and therefore drawing a complete blank, include Stephen Poliakoff's 1939, which received ?970,000, Armando Iannucci's In the Loop (?515,000), Michael Winterbottom's Genova (?500,000), Anand Tucker's When Did You Last See Your Father? (?570,000), Gillian Armstrong's Death Defying Acts (?800,000), and Gabor Csupo's The Secret of Moonacre (?1.23m).

By international standards, any project that pays back more than half its public subsidy is doing well. Outside the UK, it's increasingly rare for any subsidised film to recoup 100%. But the UKFC always took a more aggressive approach to getting its money back than other national film agencies. In fact, its insistence on doing so was arguably one reason for its downfall. Producers complained that the UKFC used its recoupment to pay its own overheads at the expense of film-makers.

That's why the UKFC changed its terms in its final year to share its position with producers and reinvest its recoupment into production. But by then it was too late. Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt decided the UKFC was paying its staff too much, and required elimination.

But there was a reason why the UKFC execs were paid so well. Getting money back from tricksy distributors isn't a job for amateurs. Without the sleuthing skills of the UKFC's debt collectors, perhaps only half of that ?8m would have been found.

There are already whispers that the BFI isn't quite so hot on the trail. But it needs to be. The acid test will be how much of the King's Speech income it can claw back from the Weinstein Company. It's unlikely to be a mission for the fainthearted.

• Read the full figures regarding recoupment of UK Film Council awards between April 1 2006 and March 31 2011

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