Yo-yo first half of the year at French box office in which admissions slumped 23.6% in April and rocketed 35.7% in June to give overall decrease of 6.1%.

French cinema admissions fell by 6.1 percent in the first half of 2011, with theatres registering 97.26 million entries against 103.56 million in the same period in 2010, according to figures released by National Cinema Centre (CNC) on Monday.

“It marks a modest drop on last year but you’ve got to take into account that 2010 was a record year, the like of which had not been seen since 1967,” Benoit Danard, director of research at the CNC, told local news agency AFP.

The French box office was particularly strong last year in large part thanks to Avatar, which was released at the end of 2009 but generated more than nine million entries in 2010 alone.

Attendance for the first six months of 2011, meanwhile, was erratic. In January and April, entries fell by 24.9% and 26.3% respectively, in the first instance partly due to bad weather conditions and in the second instance due to exceptionally fine weather.

But in June, attendance rocketed by 35.7% to 14.7 million entries with the help of studio pictures such as Kung Fu Panda 2 (1.3 million) X-Men: First Class (1.89 million) and The Hangover 2 (2.26 million) as well as surprise art-house, box office hit A Separation [pictured], which had attracted some 384,113 by the end of the month.

June’s exceptional figures had already been presaged by the results of the annual Fete du Cinema, offering cut price cinema tickets from June 25 to July 1, which last week announced a 16% hike in spectators (3.7 million) against 2010.

The CNC figures also showed that the box office share for French films fell slightly to 36%, against 50.8% for American pictures, representing a 4% increase for films hailing from the United States.

On the basis of the data for the first six months, the CNC projected an overall box office for 2011 of just over 200.03 million, 4.4% lower than 2010 with 209.30 entries.

Exhibitors and distributors are predicting a bumper second-half of 2011 on the back of studio fare such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Cars 2, Super 8 and Green Lantern as well as local pictures such as Maiwenn’s Cannes Jury Prize winner Polisse, EuropaCorp animation A Monster in Paris and Mathieu Kassovitz’ action thriller Rebellion (L’Ordre et La Morale).

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