Attendance at movie theaters has increased by 26% in 2023 compared to the previous year, reaching 74.9 million spectators and a box office of 487.5 million euros, according to Comscore data up to December 29.
For the third consecutive year, theater attendance rises again and cuts the difference compared to the average figures before the pandemic, from 2015 to 2019, by 16 points, going from -40% at the end of the 2022 financial year to -24% in 2023.
The best premiere of the year has undoubtedly been Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which hit theaters on July 21, with 5.1 million euros in its opening weekend. In total, the film about the famous Mattel doll has raised more than 33 million. Oppenheimer, by Christopher Nolan, also landed that day in Spain, giving rise to the Barbenheimer phenomenon, which drove record takings at the Spanish box office. The biopic about the man known as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ has accumulated more than 20 million in Spanish theaters.
The best weekend of the year also coincided with both premieres, achieving a collection of 11.8 million euros, from July 21 to 23. At a general level, Barbie has emerged as the highest-grossing film of the year, followed by Super Mario Bros (27.4 million) and Avatar: The Sense of Water (24.2 and released at the end of 2022). Oppenheimer is in fourth place and Fast
The week of the year with the highest attendance of spectators was recorded in the month of July, from Friday the 21st to Thursday the 27th (film week) with a total of 3.8 million spectators, the highest cinema attendance figure recorded in a week since 2019.
The 10 provinces with the highest number of spectators were: Madrid (20.2%), Barcelona (13.7%), Valencia (6.5%), Alicante (4.3%), Málaga (3.9%) , Seville (3.7%), Murcia (3.4%), Cádiz (2.8%), Balearic Islands (2.6%) and Vizcaya (2.5%).
Regarding Spanish cinema, the film Campeonex, directed by Javier Fesser, is placed at number one on the list with nearly 12 million grosses and 2 million viewers. It is followed by Summer Vacation, with 7.4 million, and Eight Moroccan Surnames, which in less than a month after landing on the big screen has already earned 7.2 million euros.
The collection of Spanish cinema reaches a total of just over 78 million euros and 12.6 million viewers with Comscore data collected by the Ministry of Culture until December 24. These are numbers that are below the 82.8 million euros of last year, a 2022 that surpassed the ridiculous amounts of the 2021 and 2020 pandemics, although far from the more than one hundred annually that it accumulated from 2014 to 2018.