It's a far cry from the crinolines and corsets of period drama, and it doesn't even star Hugh Grant, yet the low-budget cult horror movie 28 Days Later has helped bring the British film industry in sight of its most elusive goal - making it in Hollywood.
The story of a virus accidentally released from an English lab which turns those infected into crazed zombie killers, has become a surprise box-office smash with American cinemagoers, as has Bend It Like Beckham , the tale of an Asian girl's obsession with football. The two films have helped to propel Britain's share of box-office takings in the US from 7 per cent last year to more than 13 per cent last weekend, according to new figures from the Film Council.
These lottery-funded successes, alongside a crop of lesser known but respectable performers such as The Magdalene Sisters and Johnny English , will boost the confidence of the much-mocked British film industry, repeatedly attacked for draining millions in lottery funding without producing very much that the popcorn-munching masses wanted to see. Many British films which have won critical acclaim, such as Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things , have flopped at the box office.
'Our aim is to encourage distinctive UK films split between those which are cutting edge, but not necessarily commercial, and commercially attractive films,' said a spokesman for the Film Council. 'With films such as Bend It Like Beckham , it's not about producing things which you would assume are stereotypically UK films. Yet films like Anita and Me or Bloody Sunday are still distinctively UK-made.'
28 Days Later has taken $40 million in the US and is on course to beat the box-office records set by the last big British success, The Full Monty . It may also help in a crucial battle looming with the Treasury over the future of a tax break which helped kickstart the renaissance of such small-budget films over the last few years. Section 48 relief, which applies to makers of films on budgets of less than £15m, is due to expire next April: Alan Parker, the chair of the Film Council, told MPs earlier this summer that it would be 'a catastrophe' for the film industry if it was not extended. Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, is now lobbying the Chancellor to retain the tax break and extend it to cover distribution of films as well as making them. British films have long been disadvantaged by competition with the massive promotional and distributional clout of Hollywood studio blockbusters.
The summer's hits will trigger debate over whether British directors should churn out more commercial fodder to crack Hollywood. Critics argue that 28 Days Later - directed by Danny Boyle, the man behind Trainspotting - has made it so big because it chimed with post-9/11 American jitters about bioterrorism. Boyle insists it is not just a zombie flick but 'more about contemporary life'.
Bend It Like Beckham defeated pundits who warned that it would flop in the US because Americans had no idea who David Beckham was and little interest in soccer. It has made $28m there so far.
The Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, currently carrying out an inquiry on the future of the British film industry that is due to report in September, recently questioned the film's director, Gurinder Chadha, on why she succeeded in the US where others failed. She said she believed it won American cinemagoers over because 'it's not formulaic in the way Hollywood movies are'. American audiences simply interpreted it as a film about family values, she said.
Chadha made no secret of deliberately setting out to make a commercial movie: she admitted putting Beckham's name in the title 'purely for marketing reasons'.
As for corsets and crinolines, there is always her next project: a Bollywood-style musical version of Pride and Prejudice.
