EXCLUSIVE: WTFilms has snapped up international sales rights for Dutch directorial duo Steffan Haars and Flip Van Der Kuil’s English-language debut Krazy House following its world premiere at Sundance.
16.01.2024 - 09:21 / deadline.com
French cinema saw its fortunes rise at the international box office in 2023 after three difficult Covid-19 and post pandemic years, according to the annual report of export agency Unifrance released on Tuesday.
The new figures showed that worldwide admissions for all feature films involving a French partner generated 37.4M admissions in 2023, representing a 38.5% rise year-on-year, for a 37.8% jump in receipts to $256M (€234M)
Within this, entries for majority French productions rose 74.7% to 29.7M. French language features saw a 53.6% rise in spectators year-on-year to 30.1M spectators.
Across 2023, 220 new French films hit the international market in 2,800 separate release campaigns.
Animated feature Miraculous The Movie by Jeremy Zag led the charge drawing 7.15M spectators in 26 territories for a gross of $34.8 (€31.8M) as of December 31, 2023.
In terms of admissions, it was followed by Guillaume Canet’s Astérix And Obélix: The Middle Kingdom, with 2.74M entries for a $19.9M gross and feature animation Epic Tails, with 1.76M entries for a $11.3M
Costumes dramas Jeanne du Barry and The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan drew 1.72M and 1.65M spectators respectively for grosses of $9.3M and $9.9, with the latter movie playing in an impressive 58 territories.
Cannes Palme d’Or winner and awards season frontrunner Anatomy Of The Fall, which is still on release in multiple territories, also made it into the 2023 charts. It had achieved 1.55M admissions for a $14.6M gross as of December 31, 2023.
In spite of the encouraging numbers, overall admissions were still some 18% lower than the pre-pandemic 2019 figure of 45.9M, and way off the record years of a decade ago when they routinely topped the 100M mark.
The Unifrance report
EXCLUSIVE: WTFilms has snapped up international sales rights for Dutch directorial duo Steffan Haars and Flip Van Der Kuil’s English-language debut Krazy House following its world premiere at Sundance.
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Good afternoon Insiders, Jesse Whittock back with you. So much news to get through this week — here’s a pick of the biggest and best stories. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Watching the science-fiction space thriller I.S.S., I couldn’t help but get the feeling that maybe this claustrophobic and talky material might be better suited as a stage play than as a movie, where audiences might be anticipating something a bit more compelling along the lines of a Gravity or an Alien.
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