UK screen industries grew 5.6% in 2023; with 10.8% growth in home entertainment

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Barbie

Source: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

‘Barbie’

The total value of the UK screen industries rose 5.6% in 2023 compared to the previous year, to a £12.5bn total, according to figures provided by the British Association for Screen Entertainment.

The figure includes SVoD, premium AVoD, TVoD, physical, pay TV and cinema value, in the year when the UK-Ireland box office topped £1bn for the first time since the pandemic.

Scroll down for the top five titles across each format

The home entertainment sector rose by 10.8% year-on-year to a £4.9bn value, including SVoD, digital and disc sales, following a 14.3% rise in 2022.

Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster Barbie led the way across theatrical and home entertainment, with a £95.6m UK-Ireland box office and £9.9m home entertainment spend following its October 2023 physical release. This made Warner Bros the leading transactional distributor for the second successive year, across both physical (30.6% market share) and digital (19.4% market share) – in a year when it was also the leading theatrical distributor.

Consumer uptake of subscription services was the major driver of the home entertainment value increase. There were 56 million UK subscriptions across 2023, a 5.4% year-on-year rise. 19.3m UK homes had access to an SVoD service in Q3 2023 – an increase of 500,000 on the previous quarter.

With several streaming services including Netflix adding extra levels to their pricing structures, ad-supported tiers are expected to add £200m to the UK home entertainment market in 2024; while UK premium video revenue will be up 20% to £1.6bn this year.

Barbie recorded 770,000 transactions across digital and disc, of which 402,000 were sales and 368,000 were rentals. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was the biggest Blu-ray release of the year, with a £1.1m value on that disc alone.

Avatar: The Way Of Water led the way in Electronic Sell Through (EST – where consumers download and keep their digital title) and Disc transactions, with 560,000 units sold across digital and physical ownership.

The number one DVD title was Warner Bros’ Black Adam, selling 80,000 units in 2023.

EST remains the biggest transactional format by market share with a £172m value; although this was down significantly from £231m in 2022.

The global visual entertainment market (not including music and gaming) is forecast to be $753bn for 2023, at 75% of the global entertainment market. This is estimated to rise to $1tn in 2024.

“Visual entertainment began and remains a content first industry: from Premium Transactional windows, through digital and disc releases and on to Pay TV and SVOD, our industry exists to create films and TV shows that audiences connect with, and which they return to again and again,” said Robert Marsh, BASE chair and vice president, international account management/sales, & UK home entertainment at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

“Our new releases should rightly be celebrated, but it is the almost unlimited breadth of the transactional market through our catalogues that truly anchors the appeal of our market in the UK, representing three quarters of all disc transactions, and well over half of EST transactions. Visual entertainment is perhaps now more than ever one industry.”