Seeing Avatar in 4-D

OPINION: Few taxpayers who have seen Avatar would have guessed they had already paid the ticket price in the form of the $44.7 million government grant awarded to the film's producers.

It certainly adds another dimension to the viewing experience.

Indirectly, the very private Weta Digital is probably the biggest single beneficiary of the largesse from the public purse.

Its reputation may be its biggest drawcard in winning work from Hollywood, but it may be that the grant was required to get Avatar over the line for the company.

It would be hard to quantify the benefits of bringing big productions such as Avatar and The Lord of the Rings to New Zealand.

A fair slice of the spending on Avatar would have gone on kitting out Weta Digital's brand spanking new Miramar datacentre with imported computer hardware.

Weta had 700 people working for it in March last year when work on Avatar was at its peak, but many of its graphic artists are contractors who flit from country to country.

It's anyone's guess what proportion of their pay cheques would be recycled into the economy.

Film New Zealand acting chief executive Sue Thompson notes that film productions have had a huge spinoff for tourism, although that is probably more true of The Lord of the Rings trilogy than it will be for Avatar. Godzone became Middle Earth, but marketing it as Pandora might be stretching it.

The more amorphous reputational benefits shouldn't be dismissed, though.

Weta may enjoy being behind the spotlight more than in front of it, but New Zealand's involvement in the production has not gone unnoticed overseas.

It is the country's highest-profile industrial achievement.

It is possible that the movie industry may become a game for high rollers, too rich for Kiwi taxpayers to stay at the table.

The hope has to be that the film industry's undeniable momentum and the country's natural advantages – its skills base and the lifestyle it can offer young, creative people – will mean that New Zealand can get away with offering lower subsidies than competitors, or at least not further fuelling the arms race over production grants.

The media in South Korea is expressing some cynicism over the ability of its government to buy its way into the industry.

Encouragingly, Weta Digital spokeswoman Judy Allen reports a strong pipeline for the year ahead, with work on The Adventures of Tintin, The Secret of the Unicorn, The Hobbit and other projects.

There is some irony in Sir Peter Jackson's acquisition of the film rights to Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines novels.

In the books, which are both nostalgic and futuristic, cities have become mechanised but impoverished, travelling an increasingly scavenged Earth in search of other cities they can conquer and scrap.

Civic competition in the film and special effects industries hasn't quite come to that, but it's closer to the bone than the cliched depiction of economic motivators in big business on Pandora.

- © Fairfax NZ News