Vue CEO Tim Richards is anticipating more hardship ahead for the exhibition sector in 2024 but he said he is optimistic 2025 will be a “bumper” year.
“Next year is going to be really, very, very tough,” he said, while speaking at the British Screen Forum Conference, held in London yesterday (November 22). Richards said he anticipated it will be “worse, potentially even significantly worse, than this year”.
While the Barbenheimer phenomenon sparked a remarkable summer at the box office – something he said they are trying to figure out “how to bottle and replicate” – Richards was concerned about a “lack of small and medium-sized films that are hurting admissions”.
Richards is the founder of the largest privately-owned exhibitor in Europe and is also the outgoing chair of the British Film Institute (BFI).
He noted Italy, Poland and Germany had all had “some unbelievable successes with small independent films”. But that audiences had “not come back as quickly as we would have liked in the UK. I’m hoping that will change over the course of the next six months.”
The British Screen Forum Conference was held in a week in which there was more news of cinema closures around the UK: the Showcase Cinema de Lux in Bristol announced it will be closing its Cabot Circus site due to rising rents; as will the Cineworld in South Bristol.
Further cinemas to experience financial troubles of late have included the Empire cinema chain, which went into administration in July, and Cineworld – which also owns the Picturehouse cinemas, and entered administration in June. The Light House in Wolverhampton, the region’s only independent cinema, closed last year, and the Edinburgh Filmhouse has raised £189,217 (as of November 23) with its online fundraiser to re-furbish and re-launch. In addition to £300,000 from Screen Scotland, Filmhouse has around half of its £1.25m target.
According to a survey by the Independent Cinema Office (ICO), around 45% of the UK’s independent cinemas will be operating at a loss by the end of the 2023/24 financial year.
Richards revealed his own cinema chain “managed to escape bankruptcy, but barely scraped through [after the pandemic], we took off £1bn scraped from our balance sheet last year”.
He suggested the problem does not lie with audiences not having an appetite to come out but with the lack of films for them to come out for. He described it as a “supply issue – not demand”.
Richards pointed towards sequels released post-pandemic that out-grossed their predecessors as examples of audiences wanting to get out into cinemas again, including John Wick Chapter 4 (£17.5m 2023 vs £10.4m for Chapter 3 in 2019) and Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (£30.8m 2023 vs £10.8m for Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse in 2019). He also felt buoyed by the 2025 release slate, which has an “incredible wealth of movies”.
The 2025 release slate includes Wicked, The Batman Part II and Sonic The Hedgehog 3.
“Streamers have had their day,” he suggested. “Audiences want to come out, they are looking for an excuse to come out. Wall Street has recognised that, and that’s why all the streamers have been trashed the way they have been.”
Richards also questioned common terminology around how we define cinemas, stating: “There’s no such thing as an independent cinema. Independent cinema terminology came historically when cinema circuits were tied to studios, or other content producers. That does not exist anymore. We are all independent cinemas.”
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