Local market share at record 32.7% in 2009

by Annika Pham

05/03/2010 - Thanks to the Millennium phenomenon, Swedish films had a record 32.7% share of the domestic market in 2009, the best ever registered since the Swedish Film Institute started recording cinema attendance statistics in 1966/67.

Swedish admissions hit the roof in 2009, with 5.6 million, the first time in the 2000s that domestic films passed the five million mark. Even without the three Millennium films, local films attracted over 20% of country’s moviegoers. General admissions as well increased year on year by 13.4%, to 17.3 million.

US films slid from a 68.3% market share in 2008 to 53.9%. With regards to other non-US other films, after Sweden the UK had the second best market share (7.3%), followed by Australia (2.2%) and France (1.4%).

However, last year most certainly belonged to Nordisk Film thanks to the Millennium trilogy – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [trailer, film focus] (1.2 million admissions), The Girl Who Played with Fire [trailer] (1 million) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest [trailer] (508,749 admissions) – which ranked first, second and sixth respectively in the domestic top ten.

Nordisk also released the Swedish summer hit Sommaren med Göran [trailer] (550,085 admissions, fifth place) and US blockbuster Twilight 2 (in at sixth). Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [trailer] was number three with 754,497 tickets sold for Warner/Sandrew Metronome.

A total of 12 Swedish films sold over 100,000 tickets each in 2009 against eight in 2008, proving that a wide variety of domestic titles hit their target audiences. Even documentaries had notable success, such as The Queen and I, the biggest Swedish documentary of the last 30 years.

This year continues to look promising for Swedish cinema, even without the Millennium blockbusters. Daniel Esposito’s thriller Easy Money [trailer] has sold over 560,000 tickets so far for Nordisk Film and continues to hold strong at the box office after seven weeks, and Josef Fares’ comedy Balls [trailer] is still number one in the top ten Sweden last weekend after three weeks (246,893 admissions for SF Film).