Why Did Ex_Machina Succeed At The Box Office?

Ex_Machina is a sci-fi film about a computer genius named Caleb who was invited to stay the week with Nathan, CEO of an internet company, who asks Caleb to be part of his latest experiment- evaluating the abilities and how alert his artificial intelligence robot is. His robot is a female named Ava, and the experiment requires Caleb to run a Turing-test on Ava. He has several sessions with her where he decides whether or not she can pass for being human.

Ex_Machina started off as an original idea created by director Alex Garland, who initially wondered if computers had minds of their own. He developed his idea by talking to friends and researching the topics he wished to involve such as consciousness and neuroscience. Garland had been working on multiple other films as this idea began to further develop. He took his time to make sure this screenplay would work and that it would be interesting enough for an audience. Garland decided, in the planning process, to create the film on a low budget (estimated $15,000,000/£9,787,960.00). He used production companies which weren’t popular like ‘Film4’, ‘DNA Films’ and ‘Scott Rudin Productions’. The owner of ‘DNA Films’, Andrew Macdonald, was one of the producers of Ex_Machina. He had worked closely with Garland while producing other films like ’28 Days Later’ which were also written and co-directed by Garland. This cut costs, as well as using stars who were either unknown or existing in the industry. The biggest stars from the film were Oscar Isaac (Nathan) and Domhnall Gleeson (Caleb). Gleeson attracted the public to come see the film as he is the most well-known out of all the cast members, after playing the roles of Bill Weasley in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Rodney in Never Let Me Go. When the public began talking about the new film, Garland had a lot of expectations to live up to. He had previously won awards for best screenwriter, so the public had expectations that the film would be fantastic; especially because it was an original idea. He had a high reputation to live up to, which was successful in the end. The film, being written and directed by Garland, would have been one of the main reasons why it did so well, as well as it involving stars like Gleeson. Some may even have gone to see it as the science fiction genre is so popular, usually creating fantastic films and with it being a low budget film, they wanted to see how successful it was to create.

The filming of Ex_Machina began in 2013. The film was shot over several weeks in different locations. The majority of the film was shot at ‘Pinewood Studios’, and the rest was filmed in Norway. This is where Nathan’s house was situated in the forest- hidden from view. The film was shot like any other ordinary live action film/tv show, and there were no special effects used until the post-production editing process. This made it cheaper, and easier to get characters like Ava across to the

audience. Ava's non-human features were added at the end, as they filmed each scene containing her both with and without the actress (Alicia Vikander). Ava was designed by a cartoon artist who sketched her out multiple times. Garland didn’t want Ava to look like a stereotypical robot. He wanted her to be as human as possible, but include robotic features like her caged mesh stomach. They created a prosthetic cap for the actress to wear, as well as a mesh costume (similar to the edited one) to enable the editing/special effects crew to digitally paint her clear stomach and wires in. The end result left Ava looking like a normal character not an effect. This is one of the reasons why it did so well at the box office, as Ava was a character everyone could connect with despite her being a robot. This helped the audience emotionally connect with the film, and understand the feelings between Caleb and Ava. Usually in film productions there are issues which occur while filming, however there are no known issues during the filming of Ex_Machina which suggests how well thought out the film was.

Ex_Machina was released in the UK in January 2015. It was later released in the US in April 2015. The film was shown on 4 screens in the preview weekend, with numbers rising to 1,255 in the US on the opening weekend of the film and its highest screen peak being 2,004. The number of screens shows how successful it was, as well as the overall box office figure of 36.9 million dollars. It made 25.4 million dollars in the US alone, and 12.5 million dollars from the rest of the world. This meant the film made a profit of 21.9 million dollars. The film was promoted and advertised extremely well by releasing trailers and teaser trailers. This gave viewers an insight of key moments in the film, drawing people in and raising their expectations of the film. Multiple posters were also used as a marketing method against buses, at bus stops and on billboards across the globe. Most of these included images of Ava, which ended up drawing people in as she was mysterious and different to any other character ever produced. The film ran in cinemas in the US for 4 months (April-August) which, again, shows it was successful as it was screened for a long time. The running time depends on how many people see it and reviews. Ex_Machina had hundreds of positive reviews which helped keep it on show for longer so as many people could see it as possible.

In conclusion, Ex_Machina was extremely successful at the box office as it had to compete against many huge high budgeted films released at a similar time like ‘Fast and Furious 7’ which was distributed in March 2015 in the US. This would have been hard, especially being a low budget film, so for it to have made the profit and success that it did was very good, suggesting they can do equally as well as high budget films.

Hannah Duncan.