First quarter receipts up 15%

11/04/2006

2006 got off to a very good start for French cinemas. There were 52.03m admissions in the first quarter, 15% more than for the same period in 2005, according to figures published Monday by the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC).

After a slow start in January (+0.2%), box-office figures literally exploded in February (+36.5%) and continued their positive growth in March (+4.7%). April also starts off on excellent footing with Francis Veber’s The Valet (see news), drawing over 1.2m cinemagoers in its first week, while Ice Age 2 boasted admissions of 1.8m in the first five days of screening – the second best ever opening in France for an animated film.

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French films took 51% of the market share in the first quarter, while US titles accounted for 39%. Of the former – aside from the winning trio of early 2006 still in theatres (Les Bronzés 2 [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Orchestra Seats [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and You Are So Beautiful [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) – other box office successes include Daniel Duval’s A Year in My Life [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (500,000 admissions in 4 weeks), Thierry Ragobert’s and Thierry Piantanida’s The White Planet (373,000 in 2 weeks) and Pierre-François Martin-Laval’s Try Me [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (462,000).

Other strong performers were A Comedy of Power [+see also:
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film profile] by Claude Chabrol, with over 1m admissions in 6 weeks, One Fine Day by Philippe Le Guay (470,000 in 3 weeks) and Renaissance [+see also:
film review
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interview: Aton Soumache
interview: Christian Volckman
film profile], with admissions peaking at 225,000.

Top performing UK productions in the first quarter of 2006 were Kirk Jones’ Nanny McPhee [+see also:
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film profile] (765,000), Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice [+see also:
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film profile] (485,000) and, on a more modest scale, Separate Lies by Julian Fellowes (a Celador production backed by the UK Film Council).

Meanwhile, Italian feature Crime Novel [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Michele Placido
film profile] by Michele Placido (see Focus) drew in almost 300,000 admissions in 3 weeks.