The UK’s National Cinema Day generated nearly £4.65m at the box office from almost 1.56 million admissions on Saturday, September 2 – a 6% increase on last year’s edition.
Tickets were heavily discounted to at least £3 at over 630 cinemas across the country. The most popular films on the day were Warner Bros’ Barbie with £860,812, Sony’s new release The Equalizer 3 with £753,335 and Universal’s Oppenheimer with £412,509, according to box office analysts Comscore.
Further titles to draw audiences included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Elemental, The Meg 2 and Blue Beetle. Also in the mix was the recently re-released 30th anniversary edition of Jurassic Park.
On Sunday (September 3), the box office was £2.23m. Given the average ticket price of £8, this equates to approximate admissions of around 280,000. The previous Saturday (August 26) generated £3.35m box office and around 420,000 admissions, during a Bank Holiday weekend.
It follows last year’s reboot edition, the first National Cinema Day in almost 30 years, which generated £4.4m from nearly 1.5 million admissions.
The scheme was developed by cross-industry body Cinema First and is supported by the Film Distributors’ Association and the UK Cinema Association.
Early findings from a nationwide survey revealed that three quarters of attendees said that they were likely to return to the cinema in the coming weeks.
After a moderate first half of the year, July and August have seen the UK-Ireland box office perform strongly through the success of Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Box office is the UK is currently 10% higher than in 2022 at the same stage, meaning cinemas are getting closer to pre-pandemic levels.
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