Why did Ex Machina succeed at the Box Office?

Ex Machina was a film that did succeed at the box office but many people thought it wouldn’t do due to the following reasons. Some people have the opinion that the film had little satisfactory closure because it doesn’t have the conventional happy ending. The ending is unconventional where Ava escapes and leaves her creator dead and the romantic interest is locked away to die. Traditional sci-fi films have endings where the hero gets the girl. Unlike most box office films that have a lot of action and explosions in, Ex Machina fails to have these elements and has little exposition.  

The $15 million independent British film succeed with this cheap budget due to there being few actors in the film. The main three characters that are in the film is Nathan Bateman played by Oscar Isaac, and the other two characters, Ava played by Alicia Vikander, Caleb smith played by Domhnall Gleeson. These two characters are not seen to be highly regarded actors for a box office film. However, they both will be characters in the new Star Wars film coming out soon. Ex Machina was directed and written by Alex Garland who has been successful in screenplay and wrote “28 days later” and “never let me go”.

 As there were few actors in the film, there was a greater reliance on the script. In some areas of the film it lacks pace and takes a long time to understand what is going on. Unlike other films where the story line is virtually given to you, this film allows your imagination to decide what you want to happen. This film is quite simple as the budget was small, to create the robots no CGI was used. The film was shot live action, so the robotic parts were made and the camera took different shots each time Ava moved. As the budget was small, they couldn’t afford CGI and in a scene where Ava puts clothes on, this was to save money and save time as they didn’t have to film as many frames.

The film only had 2 locations where it was filmed, one was at the Pinewood studios for 4 weeks and the other was at the Juvet hotel in Valldalen, Norway for 2 weeks. Filming only took 6 weeks as there were only ten characters in the film. The house in the film was where most of the filming took place and the house was real so no set was needed.

Ex Machina was funded by Film Four and DNA films. It was released in the UK and US. Ex Machina is an indie sci-fi thriller, which didn’t appeal to millions of people. The film was seen by people known as “film buffs” as these are people who enjoy just watching films, this is one of the reasons why the film succeed. These types of people are what made profit go up. The film lost a lot of audience to the “Avengers age of Ultron” as they were released at the same time. When the films came out the Avengers was shown on screens all over the U.S whereas Ex Machina was shown on smaller screens. This was to make the viewing of the film do film buffs and prevent bad reviews whilst the Avengers was popular. As the number of viewing fell for the Avengers, this gave Ex Machina the chance to be successful at the box office as there weren’t other films like it.

Ex Machina made $36.9 million at the box office, this is a success as most films need a budget of at least $100 million to make a good box office film. Ex Machina didn’t have the common four quadrants that most blockbuster films have, it could only appeal to half of the quadrants. This is because in the film full frontal nudity was shown and this made the film as over the age of 25 to watch it. This ignore the age bracket of people under 15 who could have been potential viewer of the film which could have brought profits up higher.

The marketing team who had to promote the film came up with the idea to make a Tinder account for Ava. People who would click on it would be asked questions by Ava. The questions would be similar to the ones Ava was asked in the film like, what makes a person human, where they would meet and if they attracted to Ava. The Tinder app would then have a link to an Instagram page that promoted the film. Tinder complained about the account saying that other users could think it was fake, this meant publicity for the film. The publicity meant that people had now heard of the film and it may have encouraged them to go and see it. Due to Ex Machina using clever marketing skills it succeed being a low budget film which may have not done as well at the box office without thought out decisions when to release or promote the film.

To conclude, Ex Machina succeed well at the box office, it made a profit and managed to encage viewers like film buffs to help with keeping the film on screens during The Avengers. The film was screened behind the larger blockbusters which everyone wanted to see, however these films would get bad reviews as everyone had seen them. On the other hand, Ex Machina could then promote the film more widely once film buffs created a popularity on social networking about the robots and Ava.  Ava and the robots could have been represented for the male gaze as they were naked for a lot of scenes and would do what Nathan and Caleb told them to do. The film’s success was a good accomplishment seeing that the budget was very small but it manage to make a good profit from well thought-out marketing and distribution ideas which made the film stand out from other blockbusters.