Office

Something has gone terribly wrong in the French box office, for the first time in 33 years. But are there reasons to be hopeful for French cinema attendance ...

At the same time, the US box office recorded a 33.8% drop in revenue. In 2022, "the entire audience returned to theatres, but was more selective," Eric Marti, a specialist at Comscore, told AFP. At the end of November 2022, according to estimates, Italy recorded a 52.7% drop in entries. [Avatar: The Way of Water](https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/12/16/euronews-cultures-film-of-the-week-avatar-the-way-of-water) led the chart with estimated French grosses of $93.7million (approx. After two sluggish years due to the pandemic, French cinemas have recovered a large part of their audience in 2022. French cinemas have recovered three quarters of their pre-Covid attendance, with an increase of 59.2% compared to 2021. Admittedly, they are far from the 200 million annual admissions that France has been exceeding since 2014. The trend was the same in Spain (-40.7%) and Germany (-31.6%), compared to a 27.5% drop for France in the same period, versus the 2017-2019 average. American films were a "driving force" when, on the French side, only films "with a certain originality" resisted, to the detriment of big French comedies. What we learn from this is that the French box office was almost exclusively dominated by US studio movies, and that blockbusters have a lunatic reliance on colons - eight out of the top 10 in the 2022 chart (over)use the punctuation. The next French entries are Simone: A Woman of The Century (Simone, le voyage du siècle) ($17 million - €15.8 million), the Simone Veil biopic about the Auschwitz survivor who became health minister of France and championed the 1975 law that legalised abortion in France. The highest-grossing French film, Serial (Bad) Weddings 3, (Qu'est-ce qu'on a tous fait au Bon Dieu?) which underperformed and came in 12th among the year’s releases with a total gross of $17.5 million (€16.3 million).