Local features are going great guns, writes GARRY MADDOX.
You can list any number of reasons Australian films should be struggling in cinemas.
With massive marketing budgets, Hollywood blockbusters continue to dominate. Ticket prices are up. Viewers are downloading movies at home. Television drama is better than ever.
However, against all odds, Australian films have rebounded in cinemas this year. 
It started when The Water Diviner, which opened on Boxing Day last year, took $15.8 million, then continued when the family film Paper Planes surprised with $9.7 million.
The hits continued with Mad Max: Fury Road ($21.6 million), documentary That Sugar Film (a record $1.7 million), touching drama Last Cab to Darwin ($6.6 million) and, on limited release, gay romance Holding the Man ($873,000).
There are still many releases to come, including two this week, the animated Blinky Bill the Movie and family comedy Oddball, followed by crime drama Cut Snake next week, comic drama The Dressmaker and cross-cultural romance Alex & Eve next month, and comedy Now Add Honey in   November.
Sure, there have been box office disappointments, including Manny Lewis, Partisan and Ruben Guthrie, but it is still shaping as a boom year at the box office, with the Australian share likely to be the best since the 7.8 per cent in 2001, which was fuelled by Moulin Rouge and Lantana.
It comes down to the quality of individual films, believes the managing director of Universal Pictures in Australia, Mike Baard.
"There's no secret sauce that gets dropped into the filmmaking community, and suddenly they're connecting with audiences," he says.
"And it's not like the Australian films that are hitting the marketplace are being developed with a cohesive strategy behind them. They're all individually developed ... and arrive in their own individual capacity."
But Baard notes one significant factor: they were all funded under the federal government filmmaking incentive known as the producer offset, a 40 per cent tax rebate that was introduced in 2007.
"The Water Diviner and The Dressmaker would not have been made without the offset," he says. "It simply would not have been possible for movies of that scale - not $100 million tentpoles, just modestly budgeted movies by a global standard - [to be financed]."
Instead of small-scale films costing $2 million to $5 million, the offset has allowed producers to fund more ambitious projects costing from $10 million up to the Hollywood scale of Mad Max.
There are other reasons too. Although Crowe was a first-time director, the rebate has allowed experienced hands such as George Miller (Mad Max), Robert Connolly (Paper Planes), Jeremy Sims (Last Cab To Darwin) and Neil Armfield (Holding the Man) to make films with well-developed scripts, in contrast with years when Australian film has been dominated by first-time writer-directors. The quality of many of these projects attracted private investors, which boosted their budgets.
The real financial success of Australian films depends on how well they sell around the world.
The producer of Holding the Man and The Sapphires, Kylie Du Fresne, thinks success comes down to the quality of the films. "Both Holding the Man and Last Cab to Darwin show people are having an emotional experience, which drives a really positive word-of-mouth," she says. "Ultimately it's about the quality of work we put out there."