Reports have been reaching our ears that Martin Scorsese's finance-sector-excess yarn The Wolf of Wall Street has been packing them in – to the extent that getting hold of a ticket in some cinemas seems almost as impossible as acquiring a Lemmon 714 quaalude. (When you've managed to see the film, that'll make more sense.)
It certainly roared in to the No 1 spot on its first weekend in the UK, driving its Porsche across three parking spaces, falling semi-paralysed on to the street and obliterating the competition with some £4.6m. That's actually the third biggest 18-certificate opening ever in the UK, after Hannibal and Bruno; and boy, is The Wolf of Wall Street 18-certificate. Drugs, sex, nudity and seemingly endless swearing. It's a raucous Saturday-night event movie, the like of which we haven't seen for years.
All this explains, no doubt, why it has proved so popular. After a decade of squeaky-clean, furrowed-brow Spandex superheroes, Jordan Belfort, as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is just a bad boy, for the hell of it. Never mind the squawks of outrage; The Wolf of Wall Street is a reminder of an age when movies weren't exclusively designed to be moral signposts on the highway of life.
A chat with a chap called Alex, who runs the national box-office phone line for Picturehouse cinemas, confirms that Wolf is, in fact, a sensationally hot ticket – "at least, in London", he says. Twitter, that rumpus room for moaners, confirms the picture elsewhere, too, with posters as far afield as Weston Super Mare complaining they couldn't get in. (Though Alex says Stratford Picturehouse didn't sell out; bit of a mystery, perhaps, as it's their closest cinema to Canary Wharf, and all those fancy-dress screenings floating about.)
Perhaps the explanation for the sellout is a little more mundane: with its three-hour running time, there are simply fewer opportunities to go. Mid-week, says Charles Gant, the Guardian's UK box office analyst, "there's only room for a single showing each evening – and that puts a lot of pressure on people who want to see it after work." The Hackney Picturehouse, for example, can only shoehorn three showings in one day as opposed to four for Inside Llewyn Davis (a more conventional 105 minutes). And unlike summer blockbusters, which tend to play on multiple screens in the same cinemas, Wolf of Wall Street is usually playing on one: "Because of all the films around at the moment – 12 Years a Slave, American Hustle, Inside Llewyn Davis, Gravity – it just can't get the space," says Gant. And with scarcity driving demand, The Wolf of Wall Street has become a hot commodity.
