Despite the juggernaut The Batman and the Printemps du Cinéma, cinema admissions are still falling.
At the end of 2021, a blockbuster broke all French and international box office records: Spider-Man: No Way Home. The film directed by Jon Watts has restored hope in cinema attendance by becoming the most viewed superhero film on the big screen in France (7.3 million admissions), the third highest grossing of all time on American soil excluding inflation (more than 802 million dollars) and the sixth best score at the world box office, still without inflation (1.890 billion dollars).
A sign of hope which recalled the potential attractiveness of cinemas. And saw the exit of the American behemoths Uncharted and The Batmanbut also French productions with high ticket sales potential such as Despite himself superheroes and Retirement homethis beginning of the year 2022 should have (could) have been the extension of this great success of the spider-man.
But behind this tree hides deforestation. The CNC recently revealed the cumulative figures for cinemas in March 2022… and it’s not pretty.
Spectators and the cinema… or not?
From March 1 to 31, 2022, 13.19 million cinema tickets were sold in France. It’s about lowest score since 1999, where the hexagonal rooms had welcomed 12.9 million spectators during the same month. Since 2006, the symbolic bar of 15 million minimum entries had become systematic, up to twenty million since 2016.
Despite its correct figures of more than 2 million spectators gathered in three days, even the Printemps du cinema did not manage to save the French box office, which struggling to regain color after the pandemic uppercut. This is particularly evident in the week of March 23 to 29, which saw the worst scores of the year. Worse even than those of June 2021, when the spectator gauge was still set at 35% of the capacity of the rooms and a curfew limited travel beyond 9 p.m.
Spider-Man and Batman: beacons in the night?
Except The Batman and its 2.7 million admissions – which make it the best score of 2022 so far – around 900,000 curious people were attracted this month by the Uncharted directed by Ruben Fleischer, released last February. Same score for Retirement home with Kev Adams and Gérard Depardieu, followed by Goliath and Notre Dame is burning who have both accumulated around 600,000 tickets sold in recent days.
The phenomenon Jujutsu Kaisen 0 has, meanwhile, gathered around 450,000 spectators in two weeks, not far from the good score of Demon Slayer: The Infinity Train and its more than 518,000 tickets sold in May 2021. In total, the CNC estimates that 51.4% of cinema seats were allocated to French films, compared to 29.5% to American productions, these first three months of 2022.
Our savior ladies and gentlemen!
With unstable figures, the month of March ended on a hopeful note with approximately 430,000 tickets counted by ComScore, thanks in particular to sonic 2 and Morbius. To see if the American duo will bring back the slope to the cinemas during the month of April. In any case, they should be helped by the release of What have we all done to Godfrom Fantastic Beasts: Dumbledore’s Secrets and possibly Secret of the Lost City.