Key Trends 2023/2024 is the European Audiovisual Observatory’s yearly digest of what’s hot in European media: TV, film, and VOD. This new edition outlines again the big picture of the European audiovisual sector.
The Observatory’s data highlight the increasing concentration of the cinema box office and the growing importance of production incentives in the financing of films while the share of direct public funding is tending to decrease. This is probably the origin of the recurrent debate on the number of European films produced, and, logically, on the support strategy of the film funds, which, with the exception of France, play a leading role in their financing. Should the film funds support fewer films but more intensively? To shed some light on the debate, other data from the Observatory suggest that the discussion is probably a matter of point of view: lowgrossing films cumulatively account for more admissions to European films than European blockbusters and are therefore key to the visibility of European works in cinemas and to cinemas’ revenues. Conversely, this long-tail effect comes at the expense of the profitability of many of these low-grossing films.