European Box Office Makes Slow Return Due to American Blockbusters
By Movieguide® Contributor
Despite life returning to normal after the pandemic, the bounce back for the European box offices are taking longer than expected as they are still struggling to get their numbers back to pre-pandemic rates.
The European Audiovisual Observatory announced that total gross revenue for box offices for the European union and the United Kingdom increased by 70 percent in 2022. That brought their revenue to $5.5 billion and 250 million tickets purchased which brought their overall attendance to 657 million.
Movies such as, TOP GUN: MAVERICK, AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER and MINIONS: THE RISE OF GRU were the main contributing factors to the increase in sales. The films sold 34.4 million, 30.6 million and 30.2 million tickets respectively.
Despite those impressive numbers, the ticket sales are still below what they were pre-pandemic. In 2022, ticket sales were just 67 percent of what they were in the years 2017-2019. Making the gross box office sales down by 29 percent.
In addition to the box offices, European movies continued to struggle. No European-produced film was able to vend more than 5 million ticket sales.
FANTASTIC BEASTS managed to sell just under 15 million tickets across the European Union and the United Kingdom. FANTASTIC BEASTS was far ahead of the film DOWNTOWN ABBEY: A NEW ERA which was the European number two production, reaching 4.1 million tickets sold.
The French comedy film, SERIAL BAD WEDDINGS 3 came in at number 3 with 3.8 million sales, where the majority of those tickets came from France.
European film productions continue to make their mark in the film industry while determined to return to their pre-pandemic gross ticket sales.
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