European, UK 2020 Box Office Down 70 Percent
While it has been widely understood that, because of the pandemic, 2020 was a terrible year for the cinema business, a new report from the European Audiovisual Observatory documents just how bad it really was. The theatrical market collapsed in 2020 with cinema attendance in the EU and the UK plummeting by 70.2 percent to an estimated 300 million tickets, down from more than one billion admissions in 2019 (the highest level since 2004). Gross box office earnings dropped correspondingly from Euro 7.20 billion to Euro 2.13 billion (US 2.4 billion), down by 70.4 percent from 2019, as the average ticket price in the EU remained stable at Euro 7.1 (USD 8.1).