When Europeans go the cinema, what do they watch?

An interactive exploration of cinema-goers' habits in Europe based on twenty years of data (1996-2016) on 40 996 films. Click on indicators in the bottom-right corner to navigate ↘
You can swipe on touchscreen devices, or use keyboard arrow keys.
 *Data are not complete for all countries/all years. In the following graphs, “European” refers to countries that are members of the “European Audiovisual Observatory”

All of the top-10 most watched films in Europe are US productions or co-productions involving the US.

Film series such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter feature prominently.

If it is not produced in the US, it probably involves France.

Here are the top-10 films most watched across Europe, excluding US productions.

Even excluding all cinema tickets sold in France, the top-10 is still filled with French productions.

French films are popular well beyond their home market.

Who watched the most films produced in their home country?

Larger countries have a natural advantage, but size does not explain everything.

In most European countries, Hollywood dominates the market.

US productions
US-European co-productions
Domestic
European productions
Other

Click on a circle to zoom in and see the details for each country, click again to zoom out.

What did we watch in 2016?

This is based on tickets sold in 2016. If you went to the cinema in 2016, you may well be in this graph.
Click on the bars of the barchart to dig deeper.
Click anywhere in the graph to zoom back out.

Who goes most often to the cinema?

There seems to be a North-South and an East-West dimension.

Exceptions to the rule (such as Estonia) may provide hints about which policies bring more people to the cinema.

Some remarkable trends

Estonia’s case is particularly remarkable, as cinema-going has increased substantially in the last two decades.

In France, this figure has remained relatively stable.

In Spain, it has apparently followed the trajectory of the economy.

In Romania, cinema-going decreased through the 1990s, but has picked up in recent years.

Sources

Data have been extracted from the Lumiere database maintained by the European Audiovisual Observatory in collaboration with various specialised national sources as well as the MEDIA Programme of the European Union.

Data are not complete for all countries/all years. Details on sources and comprehensiveness of data are available on Lumiere's website.

Data processing and visualisations by Giorgio Comai/OBCT.

This is a product by the European Data Journalism Network and is distributed under a Creative Commons license (BY). All source code is available on GitHub.