09/01/2006

The German box-office for 2005 is the sad paragon of a phenomenon which concerned all Europe, that is, the drastic decrease of the number of admissions. Indeed, the German public only bought 121.3 million tickets —20.4% less than the 152.4 million spectators registered in 2004 (according to the figures kinozeit took from the Nielsen EDI report). The revenues dropped by 18.1%, falling from 879.1 million euros in 2004 to €720.1M in 2005.

Their are several explanations to that phenomenon. Reuters mentions unemployment, the success of DVDs, and piracy. However, the main cause of this decrease is the lack of good German films —a shortage not compensated by the extremely sporadic release of Hollywood-made blockbusters. The role of this factor is made even more obvious by two a contrario examples: first, the fact that the UK was spared thanks to a good selection of local (co-)productions, and secondly, the good results obtained in 2004 in Germany, a performance owed to the success of such local productions as the sci-fi comedy (T)Raumschiff Surprise - Periode 1 (over 9 million admissions) and Downfall, nominated for an Oscar. In comparison, 2005 is a year of disillusions. Indeed, despite its critical success and its many prizes, Sophie Scholl – The Final Days [+see also:
trailer
film profile] did not perform very well in the box-office. Nor did the most successful German movie of the year, The White Masai, which sold little more than 2 million tickets.

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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, released in December, certainly helped redress the downward curve and cheer some film-professionals up, such as Johannes Klinsporn (chief executive of the German association of film distributors), who claims that 'Looking forward, we can see quite a few very hot numbers,' and Thomas Negele (chairman of the Federation of German Filmmakers), who is not worried by the ups-and-downs of an inherently 'cyclic business'. However, according to industry experts, optimism will not prevail: German audiences are expected to spend on average a mere 0.4 percent more every year at the box office from 2005 to 2009 while most other Western European consumers could spend 4.4 percent more on the cinema over the same time span. As Frank Mackenroth (of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Hamburg) explains: 'We won't see another year as bad as 2005 (...) but in the medium term, we are set to see stagnation in Germany while we expect fairly stable growth across western Europe.'

(Translated from French)