French box office dips in August but local titles save three-month summer period

The French box office dipped 7.5% in August year on year to 14.3 million admissions but the three-month summer period was up on 2023 thanks to a strong June and July, according to CNC figures. 

Pathé’s epic Alexandre Dumas adaptation The Count Of Monte-Cristo, released June 28, continued its reign in August, topping the charts for the second month in a row with 2.1 million more admissions added in August. It has helped the box office to tackle its slow start to the year garnering 7.6 million admissions in total. 

If it reaches 8 million as expected, it will be the first time since 1998 three films have surpassed that total in year, alongside Artus’ A Little Something Extra (Pan Distribution) that has now sold 10.3 million tickets and is the highest grossing film of the year and Disney’s Inside Out 2 that is at 8.1 million and is the second-biggest film.

A Little Something Extra has notably broken records as the most ticket sales for a first feature in the country’s history, and the most successful run for a local title in the past decade.

US blockbusters rounded out the top films of the month with Disney’s Deadpool vs Wolverine adding 2 million admissions to its 3.3 million total, Universal’s Despicable Me 4 selling another 1.4 million tickets for a total of 4 million, and Inside Out 2 adding 895,000 more in August.

Disney’s August release of Alien: Romulus landed in the top five with some 750,000 admissions and Sony’s domestic abuse drama It Ends With Us sold more than 600,000 tickets.

Last August’s box office was fuelled by the double success of Barbie and Oppenheimer, and late August release of Palme d’Or winner Anatomy Of A Fall.

Pathé’s Cannes prize-winning Emilia Perez, directed by Jacques Audiard, was released on August 21, and had sold 408,000 tickets as of September 2.

Other hurdles to moviegoing in August included the Paris Summer Olympic Games that wrapped on August 11 that saw most locals leave town and the centre of the city monopolised by the event.

Summer boost

The June-August summer total of 46.2 million admissions was up from 44 million for the same June-August period in 2023.

The summer surge has helped turnaround a slow start to the year with ticket sales down from January through March then plummeting by 36% in April. Admissions reached 117.8 million for the first eight months of the year, down only a slight 5.7% from 2023.

It has been a particularly strong year for French titles. The market share for the first eight months of the year for local films was particularly high 44.1% and that of American titles particularly low at 38.8%. This compares to 37.2% for French films and 44.4% for US films last year in 2023.

Olivier Henrard, the CNC’s deputy managing director and acting president, called the figures “the best proof of the excellence of our ‘cultural exception’ model,” citing a “diversity of films. 

September is typically the weakest month of the year in France as school begins, but there may be some surprises this year with the release of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, released by Warner Bros, on September 11, followed by Francis Ford Coppola’s Megelopolis (Le Pacte) and Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle (Pathé) on September 25.

Some well-received titles from Cannes will also begin to trickle into theatres like Laetitia Dosch’s Dog On Trial (The Jokers) and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed Of The Sacred Fig (Pyramide).

• UK’s National Cinema Day sees admissions reach one million, down a third year-on-year