Box office sales are down. See how your local cinema is faring

Thousands of people will this weekend sit down at a Vue multiplex to watch Ridley Scott’s highly anticipated blockbuster sequel Gladiator II.
There’s a lot riding on the movie. Overall ticket sales across UK and Ireland cinemas were down 8 per cent at £830 million in the year to September, analysis of industry-circulated figures shows. The takings relate to approximately 81 per cent of the cinemas in the UK. The remaining 19 per cent are not collated.
The downturn comes at a time when the industry was supposed to be recovering from the devastating effects of the pandemic.
Figures also reveal that Vue has leapfrogged larger rivals Cineworld and Odeon for the first time. Its annual ticket sales were £206 million, compared with £199 million for Cineworld and £196 million for Odeon. However, Vue revenues actually fell by 1 per cent, while Cineworld and Odeon were down 15 per cent and 12 per cent respectively.
The picture is repeated at individual cinemas across the country, as you can see in the map below:
This year’s figures were up against tough comparatives: 2023 was boosted by the Barbenheimer phenomenon — the simultaneous release of box-office hits Barbie and Oppenheimer last summer.
Some of Vue’s relative success against its rivals this year may be down to its pioneering use of artificial intelligence to monitor the habits of its customers. This means that film schedules can be tailored to suit their needs.
The result is that every one of the chain’s 93 cinemas in the UK and Ireland follows different schedules every day, based on a complicated algorithm that forecasts admissions and predicts spending right down to popcorn and seat selection.
Even so, like its rivals, Vue is still reliant on “the slate” — the menu of film titles coming up for release. This pipeline of new movies has been devastated by the actor and screenwriter strikes in Hollywood last year, which led to a leaner summer in 2024. Of that leaner crop, there have been flops, such as Joker: Folie à Deux, the musical-thriller sequel to Joker that grossed $200 million (£160 million), compared to more than $1 billion taken by the 2019 original; and Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s science-fiction epic, which grossed $9.2 million against a reported budget of $120 million.
“It’s hard to overemphasise the impact [of the strikes],” said one industry executive. Add in the rise of Netflix and at-home streaming, alongside a cost of living crisis, and it seems the heyday of the silver screen is over.
Yet amid the gloom, there is cause for optimism — especially among smaller operators and independent theatres. Everyman, for example, has bucked the downturn over the past year, with its revenues swelling by 7 per cent. Picturehouse has grown its top line by the same percentage and Curzon — which was sold last week to private equity firm Fortress, owner of Majestic Wine — boosted takings by 2 per cent.
The resilience of the so-called indie sector — or non-multiplex operators — is in part due to smaller theatres doing better when the film slate is more fallow. Fewer screens per site means they have the pick of the fewer movies.
They are also freer to supplement takings. Take the Depot in Lewes, Sussex: not only has it sprinkled a bit of Hollywood magic on patrons in recent weeks by welcoming Privileged star James Wilby and Oscar winner Tilda Swinton, but it is one of a clutch of venues meeting the demands of theatre enthusiasts.
“People used to travel to London a lot to go to the National Theatre,” said Carmen Slijpen, co-founder of the Depot. “We have taken some of that audience away because they don’t travel to London anymore; they watch the theatre on our screens. It’s a cinema screening of live performances. We do charge a little bit more — but it sells out every time.”
On the face of it, the indies’ gain could signal pain for the multiplexes, many of which sprung up on out-of-town sites in the 1990s.
John Sullivan of leisure sector consultancy The Big Picture pointed out that the independent operators are better at satisfying the demands of a more discerning public who see the value in enjoying a film in less sterile surroundings with a glass of wine and a £7 sausage roll. Nowadays, a good film is only one part of the overall experience, he said. “If you are going out, it has to be something special. Many of the multiplexes were built when there were only four channels on TV.”
But David Hancock, chief analyst for media and entertainment at the consultancy Omdia, thinks larger cinemas will still play a huge role for years to come. “The multiplex is not dead, but it does need to adapt a bit,” he said.
Figures show that the big three multiplex operators — Vue, Cineworld and Odeon — are responsible for about 70 per cent of all box-office takings in the UK and Ireland. Removing them from the equation simply isn’t an option for film makers. “For big box-office hits, you need the masses. And to get the masses, you need multiplexes,” said one senior industry executive.
Getting films to the masses is easier, however, thanks to a plethora of streaming options — as first proved by the release of The Irishman in November 2019. The Martin Scorsese gangster epic grossed just $1 million at the box office, according to Box Office Mojo. Yet when it was released on Netflix later the same month, about 17.1 million people watched the film within five days.
Coupled with cinema closures during Covid lockdowns, it was the start of a trend that quickly gathered momentum. “The great era of movies — the great entertainment form, which was going out to the movies — is dying,” said British director Sir Sam Mendes in 2023. “I look back at my films and I think American Beauty, Revolutionary Road … these would all go to streaming now and that makes me sad.”
Yet, as one senior investment banker pointed out, if every film were streamed instead of going to cinemas first, distributors would simply not make enough money for blockbusters’ budgets. After all, The Irishman left its producers with hefty losses, even if some of them were footed by Netflix.
And in a world where people prefer to spend their money on experiences rather than goods, Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at investment firm PP Foresight, reckons “the streaming pandemic party is over”.
“Households clearly still value sought-after experiences,” he said. “The cinematic theatrical experience is still hard to replicate at home, even though some people have forked out huge sums for big TVs and best-in-class audio.
“Yes, the streaming providers would like to push more exclusives via their own services, but … they’ve quickly realised that it is hard to replicate, copy and paste Netflix’s proven formula.”
Furthermore, it has been suggested that streaming and cinemas are complementary. Research in 2021 by the consultancy FAME found that people who had more streaming devices were more likely to go out regularly to see a film.
The industry is still at a crossroads, however. “I don’t think streaming is going to kill cinema, but cinema could kill itself,” said Hancock.
A stronger pipeline of films will help, and there are already two as-yet untitled Marvel Studios movies slated for release in 2026, as well as Avengers: Doomsday and Spider-Man 4. But in a world where national insurance contributions and the minimum wage have risen, cinema operators must increase revenues significantly just to maintain profit margins.
Dynamic pricing, where the cost of a ticket fluctuates depending on availability, could become more common, along with greater use of AI.
Vue claims that such tailoring allows it to show the same number of films in an eight-screen theatre that would typically be provided by a 14-screen rival. It has also led to 45 per cent of its nationwide listings being foreign-language titles.
Another challenge is that cinemagoers will no longer accept uncomfortable ironing-board seats. Nowadays, they want recliner chairs or immersive IMAX showings, experts say. The problem is that transforming what is on offer will cost money — and this is in short supply. Vue, Cineworld and Odeon all went through painful restructuring processes to survive the pandemic.
In this regard, the Depot has an advantage. Thanks to the generosity of advertising tycoon Robert Senior, Slijpen owns the freehold and has no rent to pay. As a result, she will almost grudgingly be showing Gladiator II as well as Paddington in Peru.
“When they talk about the slate, they talk about the blockbuster films. My programme is very eclectic. At the moment, there are too many films that come out every year. I don’t need a better slate,” she said.
The big multiplexes, by contrast, certainly do.