10/01/2005 - The finishing year has been a positive one for film industry. But Italian films did not really benefit from market increase

The finishing year has been a positive one for Italian film industry. According to figures from Cinetel -which registers admissions from around 2.700 screens in 454 cities across Italy-, 2004 saw a total of 97.866.2312 tickets sold for a total box office gross of €577.502.769.

Italian films did not really benefit from 2004’s market increase as their share slid by nearly 1.5% compared to 2003. Even US titles that usually take the lion share of the Italian market, saw a 3% decrease in their share. But other nationalities, in particular European, ended up gaining from that situation.

Based on figures from previous years published by Cinetel and other statistical agencies such as Siae which provides data for the whole Italian market place, admissions should reach 118 million in 2004, a rise by 6 to 8% from 2003’s 105 million.
US films took 61.37% of the market-share while Italian films took 20.50% the rest of the world 18.12%. In 2003, the shares were 64% for the US, 22.05% for Italy and 13.96 for the rest of the world.

According to Cinetel, the biggest grossers of the year were Medusa’s The Lord of The Rings: The Return Of The Ring (€22.89m) followed by Eagle’s The Passion Of The Christ (€19.9m) and Columbia’s Spiderman 2 (€18.9m).

In terms of distributors’ market share, BVI was number one with a 15.06% market share and 14.7m tickets sold), followed by Medusa (14.69% and 14.3m admissions) and Warner ( 14.41% and 14m admissions).

Another interesting data for 2004 was the cut in the average ticket price by almost 9% from € 6.60 in 2003 to €5.98 thanks to new marketing strategies applied by exhibitors.

(Translated from Italian)