Crucially, European cinema has had a hell of a year. European films well represented in this season’s Oscar race, including Jacques Audiard’s transgender crime musical emilia perezEdward Berger’s papal thriller secret meetingCoralie Farget’s body horror satire substanceSteve McQueen’s World War II drama BlitzkriegTim Fellbaum’s historical thriller September 5and Pablo Almodóvar’s deathbed drama next door roomboth ranked among the award frontrunners.
From a business perspective, it’s a different story. On Thursday, research organization the European Audiovisual Observatory (EAO) released its annual report on the theatrical performance of European films around the world. This is not a pretty picture.
According to EAO data, European films will account for only 6% of global box office revenue in 2023, while the proportions of American films and Chinese films will be 56% and 26% respectively. Due to the global success of anime, Japan follows Europe, with films released in Japan accounting for 5% of global theater box office. (EAO measures theater admissions rather than total box office receipts to better account for currency fluctuations and differences in ticket prices in different countries).
Last year, the total number of theater audiences for European films reached 239 million, a slight increase (2.7%) from 2022, but box office revenue was still about 35% lower than the pre-pandemic average of 367 million theatergoers from 2014 to 2019. .
Worryingly, box office sales in the United States and China, once the most important export markets for European films, “are plummeting,” the EAO report said. In 2015, European films were watched by more than 33 million people in the United States, led by European blockbusters such as Olivier Megaton’s action films. Shot 3 (9.8 million admissions) and Paul King’s Family Story Paddington (8.1 million). Last year the number was 4.8 million. China’s love affair with European cinema peaked in 2017, when nearly 35 million Chinese moviegoers bought tickets to European films, including some 11.3 million to Luc Besson’s sci-fi spectacle Valerian: The City of a Thousand Planets and 6.3 million paddington bear 2. Last year, only 1.3 million tickets were sold for European films in China.
The lack of European blockbusters (defined by the EAO as films that sell more than 1 million tickets) is part of the problem. “European blockbusters are on the verge of extinction,” the report said, noting that movies with more than 1 million viewers fell 43% compared to before the pandemic.
What hasn’t declined is the number of European films produced. According to EAO statistics, 3,349 European films were released globally in 2023, an increase of 7.8% compared with the same period last year. European films actually account for more than half (52%) of all films released globally, the organization said. Generous government support bridges the gap between supply and demand, with most European films funded entirely or mostly through subsidies and tax incentives.
Matthijs Wouter Knol, CEO of the European Film Institute, believes that the European cinema market is at a crossroads. The fragmented structure of the continent – European films are released at different times in different countries, often by different distributors with different marketing strategies – is not suitable for a digital world where borders do not exist.
“We have to convince dealers to break their old habits. Because the world around us is changing, media and promotional tools, audience expectations and habits are changing rapidly.
Knol points to the success of coordinated pan-European releases, such as that of Ruben Östlund triangle of sadness (3 million admissions worldwide) and Oscar winner Justine Triet Anatomy of a Fall (2. 4 million visitors) proves that transnational cooperation is the future.
“If you look at what European cinema has to offer, if you look at the titles, if you look at the talent, if you look at the stories and themes these European films are telling, I think you can see that we have some The most original and engaging film on the planet,” Noll said.
“But if we wanted audiences to see this European film, we couldn’t explain to them why we were still promoting it in different ways over 12 months, at different times, in different regions and languages. The world doesn’t work that way anymore.
