Last week, to celebrate International Women’s Day, PVR Inox organised a film festival with three special re-releases at its centre. The multiplex giant brought back women-oriented films like Highway (2014), Queen (2014), and Fashion (2008); while also screening films like Lootera (2013), Seethamma Vakitlo Sirimalle Chettu (2013), and Kumbalangi Nights (2019).
Re-releasing classics is an institutionalised business model for PVR now, since post the pandemic, theatres have struggled to bring audiences in. The company’s executive director Sanjeev Kumar Bijli had told FE previously, “Re-releases were born out of necessity, but have now become a staple and established property for us. We have a dedicated team stationed in Mumbai that is looking at films that can be re-released.”
However, recent data has been showing improvement in this regard. PwC, one of the big four accounting firms, released a new report a few months ago which said, “Aided by a number of blockbuster releases in 2023, cinema saw a 30.4% year-on-year increase in spending at the box office.”
The report went on to add, “Global cinema revenues are poised to surpass their pre-pandemic, 2019 levels in 2026. Together, movie box office and live music ticket sales represented well over one-third — 38.6% — of 2023’s net increase in consumer spending on entertainment and media worldwide.” This was, in part, thanks to films like Barbie, Oppenheimer, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Deadpool & Wolverine, Dune: Part Two, among others.
France, the birthplace of cinema (the Lumière brothers who invented the Cinématographe — the first motion picture camera and projector – were French), is “leading the charge back to movie theatre,” The New York Times suggested in the early days of March. In 2023, the number of movie tickets sold in France increased by 19%. In the following year, the number went up to 181 million tickets sold, with France’s box office grossing over $1.4 billion.
France also has a ‘media chronology’ law which means that there’s a certain time period that streaming platforms have to wait for before they can have access to films that have been released in theatres.
Earlier, this used to be a three year waiting period. In 2022, Netflix got it down to 15-17 months. And last month, Disney+, whose waiting period was also 17 months, got a nine month waiting pact signed with French authorities; while Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Max are still negotiating with the film guilds. Quite interesting, to be honest, since this drives audiences to theatres as and when the movies are released, especially unheard of in a country like ours where we often know that the movie will be available on a streaming platform sooner rather than later.
It’s not just France though. Even the UK saw a 2% rise in box office admissions in 2024 — reaching 126.5 million admissions and over $1,062 million in earnings. This is, of course, still behind the pre-pandemic high of 176 million admissions and $1.4 billion earnings in 2019; but a victory post Covid, nevertheless. In fact, in 2024, Wicked (which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture this year) was the highest grossing film in the UK, and accounted for 6% of the entire box office collections.
Among other countries which have a considerable and sincere movie-going population, Turkey makes a big splash. According to a Turkiye Today report, the country received 381 million lira in funding for cinema in 2024. The government has also been running programmes such as ‘Mobile Cinema for Children’ and ‘No Child Left Without Cinema’ to encourage people to take kids to the theatres. Interestingly, Sean Baker, who won the best director award at Oscars this year for Anora, said in his acceptance speech, “We continue to lose them (American movie screens) regularly. If we don’t reverse this trend, we’ll be losing a vital part of our culture.” The good news is, we still have folks who’re keeping this fate an arm’s length away — by going to the movies and being patrons of the art!