Admissions fall 33.1% in Germany in 2022 compared to pre-pandemic levels

Cinema-going in Germany in 2022 was down 33.1% to 73.5m compared to pre-pandemic attendance figures of 110m in 2019 - and 23.5% below 2018’s total of 96.1m.

The German box office grossed €694m in 2022, down 28.1% on pre-pandemic levels of €964m in 2019. This was up 92.5% on 2021.

The year’s top film - Disney’s Avatar: The Way Of Water - opened in Germany on December 14 and had been seen by over 5.3m cinema-goers by the end of the year, generating more than € 72m in box-office takings.

The first month of 2023 saw the film continue to dominate the box office charts as it passed the 6m and 7m admissions mark and was heading for 8m by the end of January. 

Moreover, this release single-handely attracted more than 60% of the total box office of € 111m for December.

With the exception of Leonine’s release of the German family film School Of Magical Animals 2 - the 10 biggest films of 2022 were all US titles.

Released on September 29 and seen by over 2.5m cinemagoers, School Of Magical Animals 2 helped to propel Leonine to Germany’s top independent distributor, an honour usually bestowed on Constantin Film. The company achieved a total box office market share of 5.8%.

Based on market share, German films posted their second- best performance for the last five years. In addition to School of Magical Animals 2, Wunderschön, the comedy Guglhupfgeschwader, the latest instalment in Constantin Film’s Bavarian detective franchise based on books by Rita Falk, as well as Fatih Akin’s rapper biopic Rheingold, and Sönke Wortmann’s comedy of manners Der Nachname helped the local industry to secure a 19.9% share of the overall box office for 2022 and 23% of the total admissions for the year.

Indeed, Akin’s film - released by Warner Bros. on October 27 after a world premiere during Filmfest Hamburg - has now become his most successful film ever at the German box office, with around € 10m in takings and 1m tickets sold by the end of January 2023.

Reasons to be cheerful

The arthouse cinema collective of the AG Kino/Gilde deutscher Filmkunsttheater trade association noted the most successful title on their screens was Alamode’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle Of Sadness which had grossed € 3.9m from 406,000 tickets sold by the end of the year.

Other popular titles with arthouse audiences included two German titles, Karoline Herfurth’s Wunderschön and Lars Jessen’s Mittagstunde as well as Everything Everywhere All At Once, Belfast and Elvis.