BOX OFFICE Sweden
20% market share for local films
by Annika Pham
30/01/2009 - General admissions in Sweden increased by 1.5% in 2008, to 15.1 million, pushed upwards by studio tent poles such as Mamma Mia! [trailer], seen by a record 1.8m viewers. Swedish films, however, saw a 1.5% drop, to end the year with 3 million admissions and 20% of the market, against 21.6% in 2007.
According to preliminary figures just released by the Swedish Film Institute, only two Swedish mainstream movies managed to compete with US blockbusters in the Top Ten: the epic film Arn: The Knight Templar [trailer] and its sequel, Arn: The Kingdom at Road’s End, produced by SF, which garnered over 500,000 admissions each.
Other Swedish films among the Top 10 best local films included Ella Lemhagen’s Patrik Age 1.5 [trailer] (325,538 admissions); animated film Mamma Moo & Crow, selected for the Berlinale’s 2009 Generation KPlus section (147,708); and Tomas Alfredson’s critically acclaimed Let the Right One In [trailer, film focus] (129,6653).
After US and Swedish films, British films were the most popular with Swedish audiences (6.4% of the market), followed by French films (1.3%) and Spanish films (1.1%).
This year should be a better year for Swedish films, starting with Lukas Moodysson’s first English-language film Mammoth [trailer], which opened strong last weekend with 31,000 admissions from 56 screens for SF. Other potentially big local films set to open include the adaptation from Stieg Larsson’s first Millennium novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (February 27 release by Nordisk Film) and the fourth instalment of the Pettson & Findus children’s film.
