German box office rises year on year by almost 25%

German box-office takings in 2023 rose by almost 25% compared to the previous year, according to provisional figures collated by Comscore.

Ticket sales for the period from January 5, 2023 to January 3, 2024 totalled €859m, up 23.7% on the result for 2022, while total admissions increased year-on-year by 18.5% to 87.2m. 

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When comparing the cinemas’ performance in 2023 to that before the pandemic, Comscore reported box-office takings were 11% below the level for 2019 and 20.7% fewer admissions were registered in the past year than in 2019.

Warner Bros’ Barbie was the year’s most successful release with a gross of €55.3m, closely followed by Universal Pictures’ The Super Mario Bros. Movie with €51.7m. Disney’s December 2022 release of Avatar: The Way Of Water grossed a further €48.5m in 2023 to claim the third spot.

The long life of James Cameron’s blockbuster and other releases such as the third outing of Guardians Of The Galaxy, Elemental, Wish and The Little Mermaid ensured Disney was again the distributor with the largest market share 21.1% (2022: 22.4%) in 2023.

Universal was not far behind, - with a market share of 20% (up from 2022’s 17.9%), while Warner Bros retained third position with 16.1% (a slight drop from 2022’s 16.8%).

Just three of Germany’s highest-grossing 20 films of 2023 were non-US productions: Constantin’s Rehragout Rendezvous, the latest instalment in its Bavarian comedy crime franchise, Sony Pictures’ family film Die drei ??? - Erbe des Drachen, and Til Schweiger’s comedy Manta Manta - Zwoter Teil, produced and distributed by Constantin.

US-German co-productions John Wick - Chapter 4 and The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes, which both largely on location n Germany, also cracked the top 20.

Superhero films fell out of favour with German cinema-goers during 2023 with Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 the only one to make any impact at the box office, ending the year as the fifth most successful release with a gross of €23.3m. The Christmas release of Warner Bros’ Aquaman: Lost Kingdom restored a modicum of confidence in the genre by grossing €11.3m in its first three weeks of release.

Meanwhile, German films’ market share of 19.1% for 2023 was 4.6% down on the previous year - with just four releases (Rehragout Rendezvous, Die drei ??? - Erbe des Drachen, Manta Manta - Zwoter Teil, and Sonne Und Beton) posting more than a third of the total €139m takings for local titles between them.

The highest grossing international films werer Studiocanal’s French musical animated film Ladybug & Cat Noir (€ 9.9m) and Warner Bros’ Spanish computer-animated comedy Mummies (€3.7m).

German exhibitors and distributors may have hoped 2023 would have seen cinema attendances recover fully to pre-pandemic levels, but the six -weeks heatwave during May and June and another bout of unusually high temperatures in October put paid to these expectations as potential cinemagoers opted instead to make the most of the fine weather .

On a positive note, the launch of the KulturPass app in June offering all 18-year-olds living in Germany a budget of € 200 to spend on cultural activities had resulted in more than € 2.5m worth of cinema tickets being bought at one of the 740 participating cinemas up to the end of December.

In addition, the second edition of Germany’s KINOFEST, modelled on France’s Fete du Cinéma initiative, attracted around 1m people into the cinemas in September, with future editions already planned for this year and 2025.

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