A story in need of a happy ending

The evo­lu­tion of films screened in cin­e­mas over the last five years in Cat­alo­nia and around the world seems to fol­low guide­lines taken from a Hol­ly­wood script, an ac­tion film of highs and lows. With close to record viewer fig­ures in 2019 (18.8 mil­lion), Covid saw them plum­met (4.9 mil­lion in 2020) and now, four years later, they stand at 13.8 mil­lion.

Over­all, the panorama has im­proved in Cat­alo­nia, but there is still a long way to go to reach the sit­u­a­tion of five years ago. “Cin­ema-going is still 25% or 30% below pre-pan­demic lev­els,” says Francesc Vi­lal­longa, pro­fes­sor on the Bach­e­lor’s De­gree in Au­dio­vi­sual Com­mu­ni­ca­tion at Ramon Llull Uni­ver­sity and mem­ber of the man­age­ment team at the Truf­faut cin­ema in Girona. “In that re­gard, the Op­pen­heimer and Bar­bie phe­nom­e­non has un­for­tu­nately not con­tin­ued. A num­ber of fac­tors have played a part, like the writ­ers’ and ac­tors’ strike, and 2024 doesn’t re­ally look very good. I think cin­e­mas will suf­fer a lit­tle, be­cause the con­tent that was sup­posed to be there has partly been post­poned until 2025 and 2026.”

There have been clo­sures, es­pe­cially in Barcelona: the Icària (15 screens) and the Comèdia (5) cin­e­mas have shut up shop. On the other hand, Texas with its two screens has re­opened. But the bal­ance re­mains neg­a­tive: 18 screens have been lost. “I don’t think there is a re­gres­sion of cin­e­mas,” says Vi­lal­longa, “it has more to do with com­mer­cial dy­nam­ics rather than whether cin­e­mas work or not.”

In­de­pen­dent cin­ema has had an ex­cep­tional year, help­ing to im­prove the fig­ures for 2023 a lit­tle. But to re­turn to pre-pan­demic fig­ures, Vi­lal­longa says Hol­ly­wood would have to renew its con­tent: “After the phe­nom­e­non of Bar­bie and Op­pen­heimer, I’m not sure if the major Hol­ly­wood stu­dios have un­der­stood that what peo­ple want is new con­tent, orig­i­nal­ity, dif­fer­ent sto­ries, and not this stretch­ing out of fran­chises and uni­verses, which are clearly show­ing very wor­ry­ing symp­toms of ex­cess. And chang­ing this model will take more than a year or two, if it changes at all.” In­deed, the poor re­sults of Mar­vel block­busters seem to high­light this ex­haus­tion of the for­mula.

One strat­egy that has been used for years now is the film fes­ti­val. In 2023, fes­ti­vals at­tracted 53,741 view­ers in Cat­alo­nia and 2.2 mil­lion in Spain as a whole. Vi­lal­longa ex­presses doubts about their real ef­fec­tive­ness, how­ever, even if he thinks it is im­por­tant to main­tain them: “We’ve done it for many years and I’m still quite scep­ti­cal, but any­thing that en­cour­ages peo­ple to go to the cin­ema is fine with me. It got com­pli­cated and the fact it has been sim­pli­fied is good news.”

fea­ture CIN­EMA