09/07/2003

Iberian audiences are staying away from cinemas in droves. According to the latest data published by the Estudio General de Medios (EGM), a weekly average of just 2.8m tickets (8 per cent of the Spanish population) were sold between April and June 2003, the lowest on record since 1995. This is 740,000 tickets down on the weekly average for January-to-March 2003.
The full gravity of the situation emerges in a comparison with 2002. During the second quarter of last year, the weekly average was 3.4m tickets, fully 627,000 tickets more than in the second quarter of 2003. Cinema attendance in Spain dropped from 9.9 per cent in 2002 to this year’s 8 per cent.

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(Translated from Italian)