UK Edition
Box office hits including Star Wars helped boost UK economy by £7.7bn in 2016
British-made TV and film boosted the UK economy by a record £7.7bn last year, an 80pc hike from the revenue generated by the industry five years earlier.
Hits including Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which grossed $1bn (£74m) worldwide, and £66m in the UK and Ireland, highlights a visible sign of growth in the British film and television industry, official Government data suggests.
Equally impressive figures are expected this year, thanks to two UK-made movies set to dominate the cinemas over Christmas: Paddington 2 and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the latter of which hits cinema screens on Friday.
Currently at the top of the UK box office charts, raking in $77m (£57m) worldwide as of November 29, Paddington 2 has already proved a big Christmas hit with cinema-goers, and the latest Star Wars film is projected to make $200m in the US in its opening weekend alone.
The production of films – including the preparation and shooting of movies and TV programmes – and distribution, which includes licensing films and television programmes and managing rights, contribute the most to the UK economy: around £2.5bn and £3.5bn in 2016 respectively.
But the industry also benefits other parts of the economy, in areas such as advertising, set design, catering and tourism.
In 2016, almost 60,000 people were working in the film industry, and the figure has been rising since 2013, with some of the most notable increases in the production sector.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that tax breaks given to the creative industries appear to have played a major part in attracting big-budget productions to the UK.
Introduced initially for film in 2007 and later expanded to support high-end TV, video games, animation and children’s programmes, the tax relief aims to ensure that big hit productions are created in Britain, rather than overseas.
Film tax relief allows production companies to claim a cash rebate of up to 25pc of the money they spend making the film in the UK (up to a maximum of 80pc of the film’s core expenditure).
For a film to qualify as “British” for tax purposes, it either has to pass a “cultural test” based on how much of the story, setting, production and crew are British (or from the European Economic Area), or be an official co-production from a country that has a reciprocal agreement with the UK.
In the last decade, the British Film Institute (BFI) has certified almost 2,000 films in this way, including many blockbuster hits.
The Government data showed that, between 2008 and 2017, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) was the highest grossing UK-made film at box offices across Ireland and the UK, bringing in £123.2m. That was followed by the James Bond movie Skyfall in 2012, at £103.2m, and 2015’s Spectre, at £95.2m.