This year MEDIA Salles again continues their survey on the presence of Italian films in cinemas abroad.
We publish the main results available up to now, pointing out that the large amount of added content, especially of a cultural nature, is partly due to the digitization of projection that has taken place over the past few years.

Top domestic films

In a year like 2020 that was quite out of the oridinary, marked by the pandemic and its consequences - closure of cinemas, limitations to access, postponement of releases or releases of new films re-directed onto digital platforms, domestic productions, often together with added content, have often represented a safety net for theatres and audiences alike. More or less everywhere in 2020 the market shares of domestic films achieved higher quotas than in 2019 and in most European countries these shares came in first or second place in the 2012-2021 decade, coming to more than 20%.

In 2021 the performance of domestic films confirmed a substantially good result in Western Europe, where it generally remained higher than in 2019, though with the exception of Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and the Ubited Kingdom. In Central and Eastern Europe, instead, domestic films achived lower market shares than in 2019 in several countries, especially in Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, the Slovak Republic and Turkey.

The figures available up to the present seem to re-confirm that domestic films bring to cinemas an audience that is not so attracted by international blockbusters. Less encouraging is the fact that the success of domestic productions is often linked to few titles, even only one or two with wide popular appeal.