The Cannes Festival has just closed its doors on the 2017 edition. The worldwide success of the event, which is now the second most publicized after the Olympic Games, confirms that the ‘product’ of cinema in theaters is still very much alive and has a bright future ahead despite the advent of new technologies offering on-demand solutions.
This confirmation comes from the European Audiovisual Observatory, which recorded 994 million tickets sold across the 28 EU member states in 2016.
This represents an increase of 1.6% compared to 2015. The year 2016 thus marks the best cinema attendance in the EU since 2004.
Ireland, with 3.32 tickets sold per inhabitant per year, is the most cinema-loving European country, just ahead of France, which stands at 3.17.
After a slight decline of 1.4% in France between 2014 and 2015, movie theaters saw an increase of 3.6% in 2016.
The UK, Estonia, and Denmark follow, with 2.58, 2.51, and 2.43 tickets sold per inhabitant per year, respectively.
Conversely, attendance is low in countries like Romania (0.6), Bulgaria (0.73), Greece (0.92), and Slovenia (0.97).
It is noteworthy that while cinema attendance grew by 1.6% at the European level between 2015 and 2016, it declined in Germany (-13.8%), Austria (-5.2%), Denmark (-2.4%), and the UK (-2.1%).
Among the most significant increases in attendance were Slovakia (+23.4%), the Czech Republic (+20.6%), Poland (+16.6%), and Slovenia (+14.5%).
