After a quiet summer at the box office, the third annual National Cinema Day hasn’t given venues the boost they might have been expecting…
If you took advantage of the flat £4 ticket price in UK cinemas for National Cinema Day on Saturday, you might have been one of a rather elite few. The event, which for the last two years has provided venues with a nice little admissions boost, has seen a massive drop in the number of tickets sold, from 1.56m in 2023 to around 1m this year, according to Screen Daily.
The weekend itself was notably lacking in new releases, with Entertainment Film Distributors’ French-language The Count Of Monte Christo the only new film opening in more than 100 locations (for context, the previous week’s biggest release, Zoe Kravitz’s Blink Twice, opened in more than 300).
As a result, the film which unexpectedly returned to the top of the UK box office seven weeks after its release was Illumination’s Despicable Me 4 – buoyed by the last weekend before schools in England and Wales reopened on Monday.
August always provides a bit of a dry spell for new releases, but this summer the drought seems more extreme than most. Alien: Romulus, It Ends With Us and Trap led a muted month which saw studio efforts like Borderlands and The Crow go down like a pair of wet socks. And where 2023 had the advantage of great holdover business from July’s Barbie and Oppenheimer, Marvel hits like Deadpool & Wolverine tend to be more front-loaded in their box office returns (it dropped 53% on its second weekend, compared to 29% and 24% for Barbie and Oppenheimer respectively).
Last year’s National Cinema Day also coincided with the release of Denzel Washington vehicle The Equalizer 3 – which easily topped the weekend with a late-summer hit. Though plenty of great low-mid budget films have come out in the last few weeks this year (Cuckoo, Blink Twice, Kneecap), none seem to have stuck around in enough cinemas for long enough to take advantage of the closest thing the industry has to Black Friday.
It’s possible, too, that the increased price from previous years was a factor – in both 2022 and 2023, tickets were reduced to £3 each (which I will admit looks better on a poster, though I can’t logically explain why). Or maybe the novelty of a whole day of super-cheap cinema trips has somehow started to wear off…
National Cinema Day was first established by Cinema First in 2022, and despite this year’s figures, has historically been a rousing success. Here’s hoping the scheme carries on in 2025 – if nothing else, we want our money’s worth for the office Cinema Tree (it’s made of nitrate film and is VERY flammable).
