Despite a new year affected by the Covid-19, 2021 still had its great successes in the cinema. And it’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, released in mid-December, which rose to the top of the box office in France with 4,604,615 admissions. He is thus ahead of two other big American productions: the James Bond To die can wait (4,003,023 entries) and Dune (3,163,453 entries).
Three French people have found their place in the Top 10 most viewed films of the year: Kaamelott – First Stream (2,652,314 admissions), the Marseille detective film North Bac (2,218,308 admissions) by Cédric Jimenez and the popular comedy The Tuche 4 (1,938,949 entries). In this list, we also find Encanto, the fantastic Madrigal family (2,187,435 entries), Fast & Furious 9 (2,025,112 entries), Conjuring: under the influence of the devil (1,887,284 entries) and Black widow (1,717,172 entries).
96 million spectators despite the pandemic
French cinemas limited the breakage in 2021, with 96 million spectators despite the Covid-19 pandemic, an increase of 47% compared to 2020, according to figures released this Thursday by the National Cinematography Center. Despite the months of closure and sanitary measures, dark rooms seem to have their heads above water with attendance down by only a quarter (23%) over the only months of opening if we compare it to 2019, last year without a pandemic, and “the recovery momentum was accentuated at the end of the year,” notes the CNC.
The figures are difficult to compare from one year to the next, 2021 having been marked again by the pandemic: the cinemas remained closed until May 19, then subject to gauges and curfews, and finally to presentation of the health pass. But in the month of December alone, attendance is “close to normal”, with 20.43 million admissions, against 22.68 million in 2019.
According to figures from the box office company Comscore stopped on December 21, “France is the country which shows the least significant drop in cinema attendance among the 5 major European countries, just ahead of Great Britain and the Spain. It is also less important than that observed in the United States ”, further underlines the CNC.