What does the future hold for our cinemas?

Despite some huge hits, including Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine, 2024 was not a good year financially for films, says Charles Gant, the awards/box office editor at Screen International.

“There was a feeling that we would get back to pre-pandemic levels relatively quickly [but] it became apparent it wasn’t an instant recovery,” he says.

“The recovery has completely stalled and that is to do with the release calendar, which was impacted by the Hollywood strikes.”

In 2023, both writers and actors in the United States took industrial action, which halted the production of several major films and delayed their release.

“We haven’t had consistent releases of big tentpole films until we got to November,” says Mr Gant.

Richard Clifford, programmer at the two-screen Northampton Filmhouse, agrees and says 2024 was “a challenging year in general for the industry”.

He says the November releases of Gladiator II, Wicked, and Paddington in Peru “certainly helped every cinema around the world”.

Mr Clifford, who has also worked for Cineworld and Vue, adds that audiences “haven’t seen the wider range of films” with fewer documentaries, British films and foreign films released.

Phil Clapp, chief executive of the UK Cinema Association, says: “Some cinemas which would’ve been economic to run before the pandemic, before recent [financial] challenges, are no longer economic and so they’re being closed in many cases.”

Some of those will be reopened by other operators, he says, “but inevitably it will mean that some communities lose their local cinema, [which] really does have an impact”.