French box office revenues have fallen for nine straight months, with local companies facing their first financial crisis since the pandemic. And after the 2024 milestone that positioned France as Europe’s healthiest theater market, a market unlike anything anyone had seen before arrived.
In most other countries, this sudden disruption would have led to a wave of cinema closures, but in France, where the film industry benefits from a strong support system, the National Cinema Commission (CNC) has devised a targeted plan to rescue small and medium-sized exhibitors.
Under the initiative, first outlined at the Congres des Exploitants (France’s annual conference for exhibitors) at the end of September, CNC will provide immediate cash flow to struggling independent businesses facing liquidity issues or possible bankruptcy. What’s interesting about this plan is that it will not be funded from the national budget, but from theater admission fees that CNC collects from performance companies and saves. Therefore, CNC will issue cash advances from their savings to exhibitors in need, but unlike grants, the advances must be repaid by the exhibitor.
Richard Patry, president of the National Film Festival Federation (FNCF) and director of the Cannes Film Festival, noted that time is of the essence for the CNC to enact a rescue plan, as many exhibitors are currently on the brink of bankruptcy.
“We’re in a very difficult time for cinema. I’ve been working in this field for many years and I’ve never seen a crisis this long and deep,” Patry told Variety. “Up until mid-September, we had eight straight months of declining attendance, down 15%. We were losing between 15 million and 20 million viewers.”
He said exhibitors have been alerting FNCF to their situation since July. “We’ve received testimony over the last few months saying, ‘We can’t do this, we can’t make it, we’re at risk of filing for bankruptcy, we’re at risk of going into receivership,'” he says.
Those most affected are independent exhibitors who invested heavily in 2019-2020, before the pandemic, when the market was much healthier than it is now, but are now in a situation of insolvency.
But multiplexes are also feeling the pinch. Pathé and UGC, two major French movie theater chains, recently added shipping billionaire Rodolphe Saade and Canal Plus Group (owned by another billionaire Vincent Bollore) as new shareholders, respectively.
“The fact that they’re investing in cinemas means they trust them, but if they’re doing it now it’s also because these big chains are also in trouble and sharing the same predicament as independent cinemas,” Patry said.
Eric Marti, head of Comscore France, said the drop in box office revenue was mainly related to a selection of films that failed to attract moviegoers during the summer, with the exception of Universal Pictures’ “How to Train Your Dragon” and Apple’s “F1: The Movie.” Even those performances pale in comparison to last year’s strong BO, powered by three local blockbusters: “A Little Something Extra,” “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “Beating Hearts.”
“As of the end of September, the number of hospitalizations was approximately 111 million, with a 13% year-on-year decline in 2024 and an 18% decline in 2023,” Marti said.
Meanwhile, Patry argues that the box office crisis is due to a “perfect storm” of market conditions. He noted that rising energy costs have significantly increased utility bills for theater companies, and theaters have been closed for 300 days after the pandemic, making it difficult to attract regular moviegoers back. Although younger audiences have returned recently, he says getting older audiences back to theaters has been a challenge.
However, there is still hope that last quarter’s downward trend will reverse with the release of a number of highly anticipated titles, including U.S. standouts such as Disney’s “Zootopia 2” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” Patry and Marti are also enthusiastic about promising upcoming French films, including Cedric Jimenez’s dystopian film Dog 51, produced by Studio Canal. IMAX is also scheduled to be released. So is Jan Kounen’s “Shrinking Man” from UGC. “Jean Valjean” by Eric Benard at Studio TF1. and Alexandre Astier’s “Carmlot Part 2” (SND).
