Status: 15.01.2024, 19:00 PM
By: Bastian Amann
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Boom thanks to Barbie: The Hollywood film has also given the cinemas in the district of Freising a "surprisingly good" year, reports Karin Glück from the Cineplex Neufahrn. © Dpa
There is a small cinema boom in cinemas in the district of Freising. The Cineplex in Neufahrn is even above the national average. But operators are already facing new challenges this year.
Even though "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" were of course not the only films to be shown in German cinemas in 2023, this phenomenon - keyword: "Barbenheimer" - already had a large share of the increasing number of visitors. According to the Main Association of German Film Theatres (HDF), an impressive 87.2 million tickets were sold last year - an increase of 18.5 percent compared to 2022. Sales thus amounted to just under 860 million euros, which corresponds to an increase of 23.7 percent.
In the district, too, the number of visitors went up in the first year completely without Corona restrictions. While the cinemas in Neufahrn and Moosburg are rejoicing, the Freising Cineradoplex is rather skeptical.
Playing with numbers
"For me, it's all numbers games," says Peter Schafft, who runs the cinema in the Schlüterhallen together with his brother Andreas. "You just can't compare 2022 and 2023." Schafft is alluding to the last Corona rules, which were still in force in cinemas two years ago. According to the Cineradoplex boss, the focus must be on 2019, the year before the pandemic – "and we are still miles away from the figures".
Since the effects of the (now ended) strike of screenwriters and actors in Hollywood are having an impact this year, he also predicts a difficult start to the new year: "It's not just that we won't have any good US films in the foreseeable future – we don't have any at all." Schafft has great doubts that German and European films will be able to compensate for this dry spell ("probably by autumn").
Positive experiences
Verena Dollinger, director of the Rosenhof-Lichtspiele Moosburg, is also aware of this problem. "For the first few months, we will have to rely on German films," she says. But as a smaller cinema, they have already had positive experiences with local films in the past.
And she can only speak positively about the past year: "It went surprisingly well." It was not foreseeable that blockbusters like "Barbie" or "Oppenheimer" would push each other in such a way. In contrast to Peter Schaffen, she is quite optimistic about the new year, trusting productions such as "Dune II" or "Kung Fu Panda 4" to attract the masses to the cinemas.
Press spokeswoman Karin Glück can announce figures that are even above the German trend for the Neufahrner Cineplex: "We had 2023.20 percent more visitors in 9 than in the previous year. And the increase in sales was 28 percent." But of course, she also knows that the actual comparison must be made with the pre-Corona period. "And we calculated an average value from the years 2015 to 2019." The cinema on Römerweg is still 22 percent away from this.
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It will not be easy to reduce this difference further this year. "The days of one big and two smaller blockbusters coming to the cinema every week are over for the time being," says Glück, referring to the effects of the Hollywood strike. But: "Now the domestic market can prove itself." The Cineplex is also increasingly relying on alternative offerings such as broadcasts of concerts or e-sports events.