European cinema statistics

European box office was €6.9bn in 2025, down about 1% year on year, on 863.6 million admissions, down 5.3%. [1]

The previous year, 2024, produced roughly €7.1bn on 934.2 million admissions, itself a 2.6% admissions decline on 2023. [2] So the direction of travel over two years is consistent: revenue broadly flat, attendance falling, yield rising to cover the difference.

The aggregate, though, conceals an unusually wide spread. Several markets grew on both measures in the same year that France fell 13.6%.

A 20-point gap between Germany and France in a single year is not explained by anything structural about those two markets. It is explained by the slate.

France had an exceptional 2024 driven by strong local titles, so 2025 was measured against a hard comparator. Germany had the opposite. This is the single most important thing to understand about national cinema statistics: year-on-year national movements are dominated by what happened to be released and how the prior year performed, not by the underlying health of exhibition in that country.

The practical consequence for an operator is that benchmarking your site against your national figure is close to meaningless in any single year. Your national market moved because of three or four titles. Your cinema moved because of those titles plus everything you actually control. Separating the two requires comparing your own admissions against the national trend rather than against zero, which is a different and more useful calculation.

The Nordics ran against the European trend in 2025. Norway was up 7.7% on box office and 2.5% on admissions, and Denmark was up 4.5% on admissions to 10.3 million. Sweden fell, from 10.3 million admissions to 9.8 million. [1]

Two of the three growing while the continent declined 5.3% is worth more than a footnote. Nordic markets combine high smartphone penetration, near-universal card and wallet payment and strong advance-booking habits, which means the digital channel carries a larger share of the sale than it does in most of Europe. Whether that is a cause or a coincidence is not something these figures can settle, but it does make the region a reasonable place to look for what a mature digital cinema channel does to attendance.

It is also, for what it is worth, the market most of our customers operate in, so treat that paragraph with the scepticism it deserves.

UNIC publishes admissions alongside revenue for its member territories. Most US reporting publishes gross only, with admissions estimated afterwards by dividing by an assumed average ticket price — which is exactly the figure that has no agreed definition.

That makes European data structurally better for answering the question operators actually care about: are fewer people coming, or are the same people paying more? In Europe you can read that directly. In the US you are inferring it through an estimate, and small errors in the assumed ticket price produce large errors in the implied admissions.

If you are building a market model that spans both, keep them on separate methodological footings and say so, rather than presenting a single global admissions number as though it were measured the same way everywhere.

Using these figures

Quote them, chart them, put them in a deck or a board paper. No permission needed and no attribution required, though a link back to this page is appreciated and lets a reader check the working.

If a figure here looks wrong to you, it might be: sources in this industry revise, and some of them disagree with each other by more than you would expect. Tell us what you are seeing and we will correct the page and say that we did.