Balance The irruption of women revolutionizes Spanish cinema in its best year of the century
Report Cinemas survive, grow and reproduce... at the cost of marginalizing auteur cinema
Box office Spanish cinema recovers and sells one in five tickets in 2022
Long before the catastrophe genre took over in the 1970s, cinema was already a mess.
And it's not so much a moral judgment as, if you will, a fact.
The cinema has lived in crisis since practically its invention.
For external reasons, such as the arrival of television, or their own, such as the appearance of sound, the industry, like art, has been forced to reinvent itself over and over again and many more times than is reasonable.
To combat the threat of the talking appliance, he multiplied the colors, widened the screen, added another dimension to the flat reality and even made the scenes smell to the viewers.
And long before, and thanks to people like Samuel Roxy Rothapfel, cinemas went from being poorly conditioned theaters to air-conditioned palaces to flood the basements of cities with rooms of all kinds.
And so on until reaching the current moment in which, through platforms and a pandemic, cinema lives trapped in the most perfect of its crises.
And now the question: what will happen in the immediate future?
What will happen in 2023 that is upon us?
The data, far from guiding and indicating a path, confuses.
First, the box office.
According to the forecast of the prestigious consultancy Gower Street Analytics made public recently,
the world exhibition market will grow by 12% in 2023.
The figure handled and which gives its name to this increase is 29,000 million dollars.
Said like that, it seems like an enormity and, in truth, it is not so much.
"It seems a reasonable figure and there are two ways of reading it: positive or negative," says
David Rodríguez
as general manager of Comscore Movies, the company in charge of precisely counting the box office.
And he continues: "That means that we are still below the excellent figures that were registered just before the pandemic in 2019 and the emergence of the platforms that COVID brought us.
We are 27% worse than the average of the last three years before we confined ourselves.
However, the good thing is that it has not stopped growing. Maybe not at the rate we would like, but upwards".
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Indeed, the report of yore that all the trade magazines have greeted as May water (the fears were even greater) foresees that it
will be in 2024 when normality will be reached
(not the new one but the old one).
And why is it going so slow?
And the good news (or the not so bad) follow.
According to the consultant and most of the experts who have come to analyze the study from 'Variety' or 'Hollywood Reporter' to 'Deadline', the causes are circumstantial, not structural.
In other words, it is not that we have definitively replaced the movie theater with Filmin or Netflix or that the big studios like Warner or Disney have thrown in the towel in favor of their respective platforms.
No. Or not at the moment.
For the sector, the problems have been the same as for everyone:
inflation, the war in Ukraine that has blocked the booming Russian market and the rebound in COVID infections in China that, directly, has left the most important cinema plantation on the planet without oxygen.
If we add to this the so-called "self-inflicted injuries", as has been the absence of real bets in the year that is ending due to simple fear, we would have an almost scientific explanation for the laziness of the numbers.
"If we look at it from the Spanish point of view," continues Rodríguez, "everything fits. Right now, the 40% delay that we are in is not as bad as that of Italy (54% less) nor as good as the French case or the from the United Kingdom, which are at the world average of -30%. What will happen now? For now, we have not panicked. In addition, and from the other side, there are many studies that are now backing down from their policies so aggressive releases on platforms.
Both Warner, about to merge with Discovery, as well as Disney itself or even Netflix seem to be aware that hurting theaters too much ends up hurting them...
We'll see".
From more modest perspectives, from the point of view of an independent distributor and exhibitor, the change that is being experienced is radical enough to make use of the most recurring of expressions: paradigm shift.
"It is clear that things are happening, but perhaps it is too soon to draw conclusions," says
Enrique González Kuhn,
manager of Caramel, the distributor of, for example,
'Simone, the woman of the century'
or '
RMN
'.
These two films specifically illustrate that transformation that he talks about.
"What we have been observing is that there is an audience that after the pandemic has not returned to theaters.
They are the oldest.
And then another, who is younger and a great consumer of audiovisuals, who not only hasn't stopped going but is going more now", he says without providing more information than an intuition backed by decades of experience. '
Simone
...' , a film for the general public, is the one that, according to his reasoning, loses, and the film by Romanian Cristian Mungiu, a regular on the festival circuit, wins.
"We are in a complicated situation where the public is going to see either the very big like '
Avatar
' or the very small...", he says, taking a second and wondering: "What will happen this coming year? It is complicated. Everything is too confusing. We have reached a point where the viewer does not know if a film can be seen in theaters or on a platform, the premiere guides have disappeared from the kiosks, the kiosks themselves no longer exist and in Internet information circulates without any order. The classic media that prescribed no longer have the power of before and people before looking at the criticism look at the noise of their networks.
The paradigm is another"
.
We have arrived.
For the distributor, the urgent thing would be to clarify the issue of the exploitation windows (that is, what time must elapse between a theatrical release and a platform release) and adapt it to each film.
"It's going to be hackneyed, but everyone's help is required, starting with the administration," he concludes.
To add confusion to the panorama, from the Federation of Cinemas of Spain (FECE) not so long ago, in the middle of the year, the count of cinemas was made public and, against the intuition of the doomsayers and against the onanism of melancholics,
there is more! cinemas than before!
In 2022, the number of premises, rooms and seats increased, in order, by 3.7%, 1.8% and 0.9% in relation to 2021. Let's say that the decrease that occurred since 2019 due to the pandemic ( from 723 to 706 rooms) has stopped (there are 732 rooms).
Can an industry that, although limping, grows be in crisis?
"The important thing is to continue cutting the difference", answers
Luis Gil Palacios concisely,
as a spokesman for FECE.
In the last edition of Cannes, a large group of directors led by
Guillermo del Toro
tried to answer the already routine question about the future of cinema.
Del Toro refused to talk about the future of cinema going through only discussing how to consume it, whether in a theater or at home.
"The change is deeper: you have to talk about the size of the ideas, not the size of the screen."
Well that.
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