Why European Cinema Is on a Critical High, But Also a Commercial Low

Critically, European films are having a hell of a year. Euro cinema is well represented in this season’s Oscar race, with the likes of Jacques Audiard’s transgender crime musical Emilia Pérez, Edward Berger’s papal thriller Conclave, Coralie Fargeat’s body horror satire The Substance, Steve McQueen’s WW2 drama Blitz, Tim Fehlbaum’s historic thriller September 5, and Pablo Almodovar’s end-of-life drama The Room Next Door, are among the award frontrunners.

Commercially, it’s another story. On Thursday, the European Audiovisual Observatory (EAO), a research body, published its annual report on the theatrical performance of European movies worldwide. It’s not a pretty picture.

According to EAO, European films accounted for just 6 percent of worldwide ticket sales in 2023, compared to 56 percent for U.S. productions and 26 percent for Chinese films. Japan, thanks to the global success of anime, is close on Europe’s heels, with Japanese releases accounting for 5 percent of theatrical admissions worldwide. (The EAO measures theatrical admissions, not gross box office revenue to better account for currency fluctuations and differences in ticket prices across different countries).

Total theatrical admissions for European films hit 239 million last year, up slightly (2.7 percent) on 2022 but ticket sales are still some 35 percent below the pre-pandemic average, from 2014 to 2019, of 367 million admissions annually.

Worryingly, admissions in the United States and China, once the most important export markets for European films, “are plummeting” the EAO reports. In 2015 there were more than 33 million U.S. admissions for European films — led by Euro blockbusters like Olivier Megaton’sactioner Taken 3 (9.8 million admissions) and Paul King’s family feature Paddington (8.1 million). The number last year was 4.8 million. China’s love of European cinema peaked in 2017, when close to 35 million Chinese moviegoers bought a ticket for a European production, some 11.3 million for Luc Besson’s sci-fi spectacle Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and 6.3 million for Paddington 2. Last year, European films sold just 1.3 million tickets in the Middle Kingdom.

The lack of Euro blockbusters — what the EAO defines as films that sell more than 1 million tickets — is part of the problem. “European blockbusters are an endangered species,” the report says, noting that films achieving more than one million admissions are down 43 percent compared to pre-pandemic years.

What hasn’t fallen is the number of European movies getting made. The EAO counted 3,349 European films in circulation worldwide in 2023, a 7.8 percent year-on-year jump. European movies actually account for more than half (52 percent) of the total films in circulation globally, the group said. The gap between supply and demand is accounted for by generous government support, with most European films being entirely or largely financed through subsidies and tax incentives.

Matthijs Wouter Knol, CEO of the European Film Academy, sees the European theatrical market at a crossroads. The continent’s fragmented structure — with European movies being released at different times in different countries, often by different distributors with different marketing strategies — is not fit for purpose in a digital world where borders don’t exist.

“We have to convince distributors to break with their old habits. Because the world around us is changing, the media and promotion tools, the expectations and habits of the audience are changing very fast.”

Knol points to the success of coordinated pan-European releases, like Ruben Östlund’s The Triangle of Sadness (3 million admissions worldwide) and Justine Triet’s Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall (2. 4 million admissions) as proof that cross-border cooperation is the future.

“If you look at what European film has to offer, if you look at the titles, if you look at the talent, if you look at the stories and topics being addressed through these European films, I think you can see we have some of the most original and appealing cinema in the world at the moment,” says Knol.

“But if we want the European film to be seen by audiences, we can’t explain to them why we still promote films over the course of 12 months at different times in different ways in different territories and languages. The world just doesn’t work that way anymore.”