The number of cinemas in Germany has only decreased marginally during the corona pandemic. It fell by one percent compared to 2020 to 1,716 in the first half of this year. This is still an increase compared to 2019, when only 1,689 venues were registered. The number of individual cinema companies has also increased from 1,186 to 1,223 on balance compared to the pre-Corona period. The number of screens decreased by 37 to 4,892 in 2021, as announced by the FFA film funding agency in Berlin. "The much feared death in the cinema has not yet taken place," said FFA board member Peter Dinges. It is good to see that the measures and aid programs of the federal and state governments have had an effect, said Dinges.
The two federal states of Bremen and Hesse suffered the greatest loss of venues in the current year. In Hesse four out of 130 cinemas gave up, in Bremen two out of thirteen. The number of cinemas remained constant in six federal states, and even rose slightly in Saxony, Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia. The biggest loss in absolute numbers was recorded by Bavaria, where there are only 279 venues instead of 285 as in the previous year.
Because of the corona lockdown, which for most cinemas did not end until the beginning of July, only around eight hundred thousand tickets have been sold since January. In 2020, despite the lockdown in the spring, it was still almost twenty-six million, in 2019 just under fifty-four million. The turnover of the cinema industry plummeted in the first six months of this year by more than ninety-seven percent to 6.4 million euros. The last major slump in the industry was three years ago, when sales fell from 518.5 to 439.6 million euros. At that time, many experts associated this development with the increasing number and expanded range of streaming platforms.