Plans by Norway's three largest cities - Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim - to sell large stakes in their municipally-owned local exhibitors have stalled.

Oslo City Council has not managed to secure the price it wanted from any private cinema operator for a 66% of its stake in the municipally-owned Oslo Cinemas, which operates with 11 cinemas and 31 screens and attracted 3 million admissions last year. The planned sale of Norway's largest exhibitor, which controls 25% of the country's cinema market, has therefore been put on hold.

The administrators of Bergen Cinemas - the country's second largest exhibitor - have also given up looking for a private strategic partner. Norway's third largest exhibitor Trondheim Cinemas, which planned to sell 49% of its stake, did not accept any of the three bids that came in.

While private exhibitors have been running movie theatres for decades in other Scandinavian countries, Norwegian municipalities have regulated the number of theatres as well as their ownership structure in Oslo since 1913.

Several Scandinavian exhibition majors - among them Schibsted's Sandrew Metronome, Bonnier's Svensk Filmindustri and Egmont's Nordisk Film Biografer along with local cinema chain Kino 1 expressed interest in Norway's largest exhibitors.