The head of the Ministry of Culture, Olga Lyubimova, during a meeting with the head of Central Partnership, Vadim Vereshchagin, noted that since the beginning of 2023, films at the Russian box office have collected 21.2 billion rubles, while domestic cinema accounts for 16.7 billion of this amount.
"The greatest contribution was made by the films "Cheburashka" and "Challenge". The distributor of both films was Central Partnership," Lyubimova said in her Telegram channel.
The film "Cheburashka" directed by Dmitry Dyachenko was released on January 1, 2023. In Russia, it was watched by more than 22.4 million viewers. The total fees, including the audience of the CIS, amounted to more than 7 billion rubles As a result, "Cheburashka" became the main box office hit of the Russian box office - the previous "record holder" was the first part of "Avatar" by James Cameron with the amount of fees about half as much. In addition, Dyachenko's film entered the top 15 highest-grossing films of 2023 worldwide.
"Challenge" Klim Shipenko brought 1.6 billion rubles At home, it was watched by 4.8 million people, and in the ranking of the world box office, the tape entered the top 50 highest-grossing films of the year. The tape lost its leadership in the Russian market only in the sixth week of the show - now the rating is headed by the new work of Viktor Shamirov "Directly Kakha: Another Film", which, despite low ratings on aggregators, collected more than 152 million rubles over the weekend.
In addition, this year, such films as "The Righteous" (more than 640 million rubles), "Going" (526 million rubles), animation "Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf-5" (462 million) and others showed themselves well at the box office.
The head of Central Partnership, during a meeting with the minister, said that at the moment the company has 40 films in production, three of which received support from the Cinema Fund: "Doctor of Dinosaurs", "Prophet" and "Wizard of the Emerald City". Vereshchagin also said that this year viewers are waiting for the release of such films as "Serf 2", "Lord of the Wind" and "Empress".
In addition to the already mentioned films, among the potential hits of the Russian box office in 2023 are such films as "The Lord of the Wind" by Igor Voloshin, "One Hundred Years Ahead" by Alexander Andryushchenko, "Breath" by Roman Karimov, "Love of the Soviet Union" by Dmitry Iosifov, the animated film "Three Heroes and the Navel of the Earth" by Konstantin Feoktistov and others.
Despite the impressive successes of 2023, the film industry still has not fully recovered from two waves of crises provoked by the coronavirus pandemic and the withdrawal of Hollywood studios from the Russian market. High fees at the moment help cinema owners to cover the losses of past years.
"Indeed, the bulk of this money was made by Russian cinema. But last year, cinemas went to a loss of more than 40% - everyone forgets about it. What has been earned now has helped to cover at least 70-80% of last year's losses, "said Alexei Voronkov, head of the Association of Cinema Owners, in an interview with RT.
He also clarified that in Russian cinema over the past 10-15 years there has been a tendency to release domestic films "in season" - that is, from November to March, while the summer period was "closed" mainly due to foreign films. Voronkov noted that this year the release of large-scale Russian tapes, which are potential blockbusters, is not planned, despite the fact that the market is not empty. The head of AVC expressed hope that the situation with content production in our country will be reversed by the end of 2025, noting that Russian filmmakers know how to create high-quality content.
A number of cinemas are trying to get out of this situation by introducing "free pre-session service" schemes, when viewers buy a ticket for a short film, and receive a Western blockbuster as a "bonus" to it. For example, in Russia, "Avatar: The Way of Water" was quite successfully "rolled".
"(Avatar-2). - RT) goes well. Officially, at the fees of 500 million rubles, in fact, I think, he has already collected 1,5 billion for sure and will collect more, "Alexei Vasyasin, a member of the Association of Cinema Owners, previously noted in an interview with RT.
On May 29, the head of the Federation Council Committee on Economic Policy, Andrei Kutepov, presented a bill in which he took the initiative to suspend the protection of the rights of copyright holders of foreign films from unfriendly countries, noting that "these measures will allow cinemas to break even, which will preserve this segment both in terms of economic indicators and employment indicators."