IHS Technology and Rentrak followed up their successful 2014 publication, Event Cinema in European Cinemas, with an update that it and the Event Cinema Association presented last month at CineEurope in Barcelona. Event cinema has experienced double-digit annual growth in Europe and the market should reach $1 billion in annual revenue by 2019, the report said.
“There is still much growth to come in this sector from its current level to our forecasted $1 billion by 2019,” said David Hancock, IHS Technology’s director film and cinema, “and as the digitization of cinemas comes to an end and the VPF financing mechanism system winds down, the true extent of programming flexibility will become apparent. Event cinema has an integral part to play in re-defining the cinema experience, assisted by new experience-enhancing technologies.”
Melissa Cogavin, managing director, Event Cinema Association added, “The publication of reports like this is vital to enable a young industry to gain credibility and facilitate its growth. Rentrak are doing great work in collecting this data and we’re delighted to see more territories being added to this initiative every few months. Therefore the ECA is very happy to support and endorse the work of IHS and Rentrak, and can happily announce that the report findings will be available in the Members Area of our website shortly.”
The second edition of this report focuses on event cinema data collected by Rentrak for the first time, and examines the growth of this phenomenon in cinemas across several key markets brought together for the first time: France, Italy, Netherlands, UK & Ireland, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand.
Initiated by the ECA in 2013, whose mandate to support the event cinema industry includes calling for industry data and statistics to be made public, the first report examined the growth of the event cinema sector using data collected from ECA members themselves; the ECA and IHS established a research partnership with a view to making this data more visible. The report was welcomed at the time by the press and the cinema industry, and was heralded as an industry first.
Since then the industry has seen countless world records set and broken in this sector; the Dr Who Day of the Doctor 50th Anniversary episode (BBC Worldwide), the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Richard II (Picturehouse), Billy Elliot The Musical Live (Universal) and more recently, One Direction (Arts Alliance) are just a few of these. So the time was ripe for a revisit of these statistics, and IHS and Rentrak this time collaborated to provide a global perspective of event cinema in 2014.
Most surprising was the sheer increase in revenue since our last report a year earlier. IHS estimated that revenues have increased worldwide by a staggering 35.2 percent in just two years. In addition, the total revenue of the sector stood at nearly $300 million in 2014 (the report covers countries accounting for 37 percent of these), an incredible number for a new industry barely ten years old.
The report is available to members of the Event Cinema Association on its website. http://www.eventcinemaassociation.org/