Faced with the fall in box office in France, the CNC launches an emergency plan to help cinemas

The CNC will inject immediate cash into the most vulnerable circuits.

The latest French box office figures are quite alarming. There has been no (for the moment) Monte Cristo or Little extra thing to boost attendance in 2025.

The CNC made an uncompromising observation at the end of the recent Operators Congress at the end of September: “The year 2025 sees cinema attendance down by 15% at the end of August compared to the previous year and by 27% compared to the average for the years 2017 to 2019. The last four months, from May to August, are particularly disappointing, with attendance down by almost 25%.”

Nine consecutive months of decline: unheard of since the pandemic. And this time, the crisis is hitting small independent cinemas as well as the giants of the sector. After a record year in 2024 which had raised France to the rank of the strongest market in Europe, the turnaround is brutal.

An unprecedented emergency plan

Presented at the end of September in Deauville, the rescue plan imagined by the CNC aims to inject immediate cash into the most vulnerable circuits. The beneficiaries? Independent operators experiencing liquidity difficulties or on the verge of bankruptcy. Notable feature: these advances will not come from the state budget, but from a fund already funded by ticketing revenue, which the CNC collects and keeps for the operators. In other words, these will be repayable advances taken from the “savings” of the sector.

“We are missing between 15 and 20 million spectators”

For Richard Patry, president of the National Federation of French Cinemas (FNCF), the urgency is absolute. “We are in a very difficult period for cinema. I have never seen such a long and severe crisis in so many years in the business,” he confides to Variety. “Before mid-September, we were in an uninterrupted eight-month sequence of drop in attendance, of the order of 15%. We are missing between 15 and 20 million spectators.”

Since July, the FNCF has received alarming testimonies: “We are told ‘I can’t do it anymore, I’m going to have to file for bankruptcy, I risk liquidation’. These messages have been multiplying for months.”

The most exposed remain the independents who invested heavily before the pandemic, between 2019 and 2020, when the market still seemed solid. Today, these operators find themselves over-indebted and strangled by the drop in attendance. But large groups are not spared. Pathé and UGC, the two main French circuits, recently opened their capital to new investors such as Rodolphe Saadé, or the Canal+ group, owned by Vincent Bolloré.

“Their arrival proves that they still believe in cinema, but if these large groups bring in shareholders today, it is also because they experience the same difficulties as the independents,” observes Patry.

With attendance down 25% over the summer and millions of spectators gone, the CNC plays a crucial role in saving the diversity of the French network, and its unique network of 2,000 theaters.