20/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: At a panel, the Council of Europe’s research body discussed global cinema attendance trends, highlighting a 9% worldwide decline in 2024, but with Europe showing resilience

l-r: Gilles Fontaine, Martin Kanzler, Manuel Fioroni, André Araujo and Daniel Tonacci during the panel

The fourth iteration of the Key Trends in the Film Sector panel, presented by the European Audiovisual Observatory (EAO), took place at the Cannes Film Festival on 16 May and was moderated by Gilles Fontaine, head of the Department for Market Information at the EAO. André Araujo, general coordinator for Audiovisual Diffusion and Internationalisation at the Brazilian Ministry of Culture’s Audiovisual Secretariat, and Daniel Tonacci, coordinator of International Programmes at the Brazilian Film Agency, joined the conversation to discuss their country’s performance.

Martin Kanzler, deputy head of the Department for Market Information at the EAO, opened the Focus 2025 panel by saying that, owing to the fact that Brazil is the country of honour at this year’s edition of the festival, his team decided to expand the focus from Europe to encompass global data, with a particular emphasis on the South American country. As Kanzler pointed out, the number of admissions sold is the most reliable metric for analysing the situation, since other figures can fluctuate owing to inflation. In 2024, a total of 4.8 billion tickets were bought worldwide, generating a cumulative estimated gross box office of about €28 billion. This number equates to 500 million fewer tickets than in 2023 and a year-on-year decline of about 9%. All world regions suffered this decrease, albeit at varying levels of severity.

“These figures clearly show that, on a global level, theatrical releases are no longer bouncing back from the complete collapse they experienced in 2022 and may have reached a new baseline level,” Kanzler said. Europe, when taken as the Council of Europe member states, recorded 843 million admissions (only 1.7% less than in 2023) and accounted for 18% of tickets sold around the globe: “Europe performed significantly better than the rest of the world.” The three largest markets that stand out are China (21% of admissions), India (19%), and the USA and Canada (16%). These countries are also the ones where cinema attendance fell the most, with a 22% decline year on year in China, a 7% drop in the USA and Canada, and a 6% decrease in India. Finally, Latin America represents 11% of global admissions and went down by 4%.

Overall, global admissions in 2024 were one-third lower (a 68% recovery rate) than before the pandemic, in 2019. Compared to this average, Europe has a higher recovery rate (75%) and Latin America is doing slightly worse (66%), even though Brazil is significantly above the average.

In 2024, as in the past six years, growth in the number of global screens was driven by China, which accounted for 42% of the worldwide total, followed by Europe (20%) and the USA (18%). In Europe, France and Ireland stood out for having both the highest screen density and the highest cinema-going rates.

Manuel Fioroni, film analyst at the Department for Market Information, shared the estimated relative distribution of admissions around the world, based on the country of origin of the films, from 2019-2024. “We see that the vast majority of them – 81%, to be precise – are linked to movies produced in only three countries. I’m talking about US, Chinese and Indian films,” he stated. The first of these three owe their success to being distributed in almost every country, whereas Chinese and Indian flicks are mostly watched only in their national markets. European films, on the other hand, accounted for 8% of global admissions in 2024, but even in this case, 86% were sold within Europe. On the continent, the highest number of films watched were US titles (63%), but they nonetheless suffered a decrease that allowed European productions to rise to 33% of the total. “This was the best result in four years, and even ten, if we exclude the atypical year that was 2020, in the middle of the pandemic,” Fioroni commented.

Within the top 20 films in Europe for 2024, while the ten top performers were big US productions, with eight spots being taken by sequels, two French movies managed to secure a place in the list: A Little Something Extra and The Count of Monte-Cristo [+see also:
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