Cinema visits take a hit in 2011

An 18 percent drop in cinema attendance in the Czech Republic in 2011 is more a slanted reaction to the box-office success of the 2010 blockbuster hit Avatar than a reflection of a decline in filmgoers, a local cinema director says.

The director of the Lucerna independent cinema, Bedřich Němec, said strong sales of tickets to Avatar in 2010 was nearly the sole cause of a huge increase in visitors to cinemas, most of whom did not bat an eyelid at paying some 240 Kč ($11.88/9.29 euros) to see the film in 3-D.

"This created an artificial rise in visitors, which is understandable, and unless we have Avatar 2, we cannot approach the 2010 figures," Němec said.

While 2010 saw cinema sales grow by 246 million Kč to a record 1.5 billion Kč, the number of visitors to Czech cinemas last year dropped 2.16 million year on year from just over 12 million in 2010 to 9.9 million between January and November 2011, according to Film Distributors Union (UFD) statistics. Cinema revenues from ticket sales dropped to 1.1 billion Kč in January to November 2011 from 1.4 billion Kč in the same period of 2010.

While overall admission prices at cinemas remained "virtually the same" in 2011 as in 2010, 3-D films, of which Avatar was the pioneer, continued to generate more revenue through higher admission costs, Jaroslav Pecka from the UFD said.  

The current economic crisis, an increase in illegal downloading of films - mainly by the younger generation - and the attractiveness of particular movies all contributed to the decline in filmgoers, the UFD findings showed.

Lucerna, which in 2011 experienced a 33 percent increase in ticket sales from the year before, attributed its success to film festivals because the films screened were not available for download online.

While last year was the first time Oscar-nominated films were leaked online with good-quality subtitles, this did not affect sales, Němec said.

"The film is released much earlier in the United States and then it leaks online. But people who saw Black Swan or The King's Speech online and liked it realized that watching it on your laptop is not satisfying enough, and they came anyway," he said.

Lucerna mostly targets the middle-aged female demographic, Němec said, with 62 percent of visitors being women.

The independent cinema intends to boost its numbers by hosting more film festivals in the coming year. Němec also said the caliber of films was a big influence on cinema attendance.

"We expect the new film with Meryl Streep - The Iron Lady - to be a box-office hit, as well as Les Misérables at the end of the year," he said.

While predictions for this year's cinema attendance are "problematic," Pecka also said "it all depends on the movies and the social economic atmosphere".

- Klara Jiřičná contributed to this report.

Laura Burgoine can be reached at
lburgoine@praguepost.com