After two years of strong post-pandemic recovery, UK cinemas saw box-office momentum slow down in Q1 2023.
Following the calamitous impact of the pandemic in 2020, UK and Ireland box office rose by 85% in 2021 and then another 64% in 2022 — albeit to a total that remained stubbornly just below £1bn ($1.24bn). This represented a 28% shortfall on the £1.35bn ($1.67bn) grossed in pre-pandemic 2019.
But if exhibitors and distributors imagined 2023 would continue the upwards trajectory, finally shaking off any lingering effects of the pandemic and returning business close to 2019 levels, then the first quarter of this year has delivered a sobering corrective.
Total UK and Ireland box office for the first 13 weeks of the year is reported at £225m ($280m) — a tiny increase of less than 0.1% on the same period of 2022, suggesting the recovery has ground to a shuddering halt.
More bullish industry voices point out that Q1 this year was missing a giant release equivalent to last March’s The Batman, while the quarter also suffered because none of the awards-season titles released in January or February — such as Babylon, TÁR, The Fabelmans and The Whale — matched the commercial impact of the previous year’s Belfast.
In their place has come a range of films that have all connected with audiences, including Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (£25.3m/$31.4m at press time); Creed III (£13.9m/$17.3m); John Wick: Chapter 4 (£12.9m/$16m); M3GAN (£7.2m/$8.9m); Cocaine Bear (£5.6m/$7m); and A Man Called Otto (£5.3m/$6.6m).
“It has been a weird mix, but a good weird mix,” comments Andy Leyshon, CEO at trade body Film Distributors’ Association (FDA). “When people start talking about the dearth of films that are in that in-between range, there’s been a fair few that have outperformed what you might have expected.”
At Odeon Cinemas Group, chief commercial officer Chris Bates points to strong results for the company in Europe, with Q1 business up 14% on the same period of 2022, in particular growth in Germany and Italy. He adds that the UK and Ireland enjoyed relatively robust — and quicker — recovery in 2022, so “we’ve got different businesses, different rates of recovery”.
Doing a Top Gun
Moreover, adds Bates, whose company is the largest circuit in Europe with 286 sites, “We are not overly worried about it, because I think there’s some good periods to come for the UK.” Speaking to Screen before the release of Universal’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, he lists nine 2023 franchise titles that all have the potential to “do a Top Gun”, including the Illumination/Nintendo animated videogame adaptation, which in the event debuted at UK and Ireland cinemas with a very encouraging five-day gross of £15.7m ($19.5m). “It’s hard to predict exactly which ones, but any of them could break out.”
July - which sees the release of Paramount’s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, Warner Bros’ Barbie and Universal’s Oppenheimer, with Disney’s Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny landing on June 30 — could be golden. “We’re anticipating this July is going to be the biggest month since July 2019,” says Bates.
While streaming is usually seen as a threat to cinema exhibition, Bates points to the franchise-record success of Q1 titles Creed III and John Wick: Chapter 4 as evidence of the opposite. “The accessibility to be able to see the previous films in the franchise on streaming is playing a helpful role to build excitement around the new version,” he says. “People want to see the new version on the big screen before they end up back on streaming later down the line.”
Bates’ overall optimism is echoed by Phil Clapp, CEO at trade body UK Cinema Association (UKCA). “The real action of the year kind of starts from now,” he suggests, listing April and May titles including The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 and Fast X. “The slate looks much stronger this year than it did last year, in terms of quality, frequency and diversity,” he adds.
Ongoing challenges
Clapp’s positivity is tempered by regret that recent months saw the closure of independent venues Edinburgh Filmhouse and Belmont Aberdeen, with London’s Riverside Studios and Penrith Alhambra announcing they are at risk of closure. “A number of smaller operators are currently really hurting,” he says. “The hope is that they can hold on to the time when summer business starts to do the numbers.”
At Odeon, Bates acknowledges some challenges for the exhibition sector including rising interest rates, the impact on consumer confidence of the cost-of-living crisis, energy prices and staff costs. “They’re all headwinds that we’re experiencing,” he says. “The energy cost has been particularly brutal — although this first quarter of 2023 hasn’t been quite as bad as we expected, so you take those little wins. But given all those headwinds, I think we’re showing quite how resilient we are, because we’ve still got our head above water.”
At press time, the heavily indebted Cineworld Group said it had received majority approval from creditors of the company’s debt restructure proposal — a move that would leave the Greidinger family in charge of the company, and follows the lack of attractive bids for the assets. Meanwhile, the imperilled state of such a large exhibitor — which ranks second in Europe with 230 sites, and includes the UK’s Picturehouse chain — has had an effect on the whole sector.
Prior to the pandemic, Odeon, which itself is owned by beleaguered outfit AMC, was regularly rolling out Luxe cinemas — new openings or conversions of existing venues — in partnership with landlords. “We’ve got good relationships with a lot of landlords, but some of them have been spooked by what’s going on,” says Bates. “Therefore their willingness to put big sums of money to invest in our locations together is taking a while to win back.”
In the past year, Odeon opened Luxe cinemas in Bridgend, Wales and Acton, west London, and has theatres for Portugal, Italy and Sweden in the 2024 plan. “There are pockets of investment,” says Bates. “But in the UK, it’s definitely slower progress on that front. As much as we tell landlords we are in good health and the recovery is stepping up nicely, they’re not quite over the line yet in terms of writing cheques.”
National Cinema Day
Bates says Odeon supports another National Cinema Day in 2023 — repeating the single-day price promotion that brought 1.5 million customers to UK cinemas on the first Saturday of September 2022. It was the brainchild of UKCA, FDA and cross-sector body Cinema First, reviving a format that had last occurred in the UK in 1998.
Clapp and Leyshon confirm that talks are ongoing for a 2023 edition. “As ever, the trick is in the timing, and getting consensus on when is the right time to do it,” says Bates.
As Clapp explains, “A particular distributor won’t want it to take place on a weekend when they have a big film coming out, and they don’t want to be the sacrificial lamb in front of this. But they understand the value, and a lot of the discussion around the dating is also to see where it has most value for the customer.” Currently, films dated for the first weekend of September include Sony’s The Equalizer 3, and the subsequent weekend has Universal’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 and Studiocanal’s likely arthouse hit Past Lives.
UK cinema
Outgoing FDA president David Puttnam, in his address to the association’s membership in April, celebrated the success of National Cinema Day, while also sharing broader concerns. “During the pandemic, cinemas and our distribution sector were forced to recognise their over-dependence on a single supplier — that is to say, Hollywood,” he lamented, going on to encourage the audience “to find a way of energising British independent cinema and its distribution… As a nation, we badly need to find our voice.”
At press time, a bumper crop of 20 films released in Q1 2023 had grossed at least £3m ($3.7m) at the UK and Ireland box office, of which only three — cross-cultural romantic comedy What’s Love Got To Do With It? (£4.7m/$5.8m), Sam Mendes’s drama Empire Of Light (£3.8m/$4.7m) and Alan Bennett stageplay adaptation Allelujah (£3.2m/$4m) — are British. UK titles for 2023 with bigger commercial potential include Kenneth Branagh’s latest Hercule Poirot adventure A Haunting In Venice for Disney.
While the UKCA’s Clapp acknowledges the outcome of Q1 could have been better, especially if one or two of the awards-season titles had caught fire with audiences, he believes that in three months’ time observers will be having “a very different conversation” about UK box office.
Film tech company Gower Street remains cautious. At the start of 2023, the company’s analysts forecast £1bn ($1.24bn) annual box office for UK and Ireland, a negligible rise on 2022’s £979m ($1.21bn). And there it remains.
“We are sticking with our previously mentioned £1bn estimate for the year,” says Gower Street director of theatrical insights Robert Mitchell. He adds that this is based on the current 2023 release calendar, as well as anticipation of some additional smaller and mid-sized titles dropping in, plus “the potential for some titles to outperform initial expectations”, as has been seen with The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
“Obviously we are seeing a more packed May to August slate, but also therefore more potential cannibalisation and less certainty about whether there’s a Top Gun: Maverick-sized breakout in there,” explains Mitchell. The fourth quarter, which in 2022 was buoyed by Avatar: The Way Of Water, “is currently not looking quite as strong as last year”.
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