The most-watched films in French cinemas last year were a feelgood comedy featuring a cast of non-professional, disabled actors and a swashbuckling three-hour costume drama based on a 1,500-page novel first published in 1844.
Both were made in France, where, according to 2024’s box office figures from the national film board, CNC, more people saw them than watched Disney and Pixar’s Inside Out 2, the most successful animated film of all time and global blockbuster of the year. In fact, almost half the cinema tickets sold in France in 2024 were for French films.
Nearly 130 years since Louis and Auguste Lumière held the world’s first commercial film screening in the Grand Café, Paris, on 28 December 1895, France’s love affair with the cinema shows no signs of abating – especially if the film is French.
Outside Les 5 Caumartin, one of 73 cinemas in a city that has the highest cinema density in the world (as well as one of the most-visited multiplexes, in UGC Ciné Cité Les Halles, and the biggest cinema auditorium in Europe in The Grand Rex), Geneviève Escande, 63, was not surprised.
“We’re a nation of cinephiles and I think film as an art form has always been respected in France,” she said, emerging from a screening of En Fanfare (The Marching Band), a tearjerker about two long-separated biological brothers who bond over music.
“In the past, many French films were seen as a bit pretentious or a bit vulgar,” said Escande, a retired geography teacher who goes to the cinema twice a month. “Now we seem to be making really good films of all kinds that appeal to big audiences.”
French cinemas sold 181.3m tickets in 2024, the CNC said, a standout performance compared with other European countries including Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK where numbers fell by up to 7%.
France’s 6,000-odd screens have also recovered better from the post-Covid slump, with the gap between attendance in 2024 and the 2017-19 average down to 13% (3% over the past eight months) against 16% in the UK, 17% in Germany and 22% in Spain.
Most striking of all, however, was that while 37% of French cinemagoers last year watched a US-made film and 19% saw one produced elsewhere in the world, the largest share – 44.4%, the most for 15 years – bought tickets for French movies.
Along with the fact that for the first time in a decade France’s most-watched film of the year was French, it showed France’s “globally unique” cinema audience growth was being driven principally by the country’s own films, the CNC said.
“Today, French cinema can do it all,” said Olivier Henrard, the interim president of the CNC, a government agency tasked with supporting French film production. “Every kind of genre and every kind of story, for every kind of audience.”
The “diversity and uniqueness” of French film, from “historical drama, musicals, social comedies and documentaries to animated films”, explained the rise in overall attendance and a market share for national output that was “unrivalled”, he said.
France’s “model of cultural exception”, a government policy devised after the second world war to protect French cultural products, such as film and music, from being steamrollered by mainly English-language rivals, had shown its worth, he said.
To the surprise of many, Un P’tit Truc en Plus (A Little Something Extra), a comedy about a father and son on the run from the police who hide out in a holiday camp for young adults with disabilities, was watched by 10.3 million cinemagoers to take top slot.
In second place, with 9.1 million, was Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte-Cristo), based on Alexandre Dumas’ classic, complete with dashing hero, despicable villains, foul prisons, dramatic escapes, hidden treasures and pistols at dawn.
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A third French film, (L’Amour Ouf), Beating Hearts, an operatic crime romance, sold 4.7m tickets to finish fifth in the rankings behind the Hollywood blockbusters Inside Out 2 and Moana 2, but ahead of Despicable Me 4, Dune Part Two and Deadpool & Wolverine.
Between them, the top three were seen by more than 25 millioncinemagoers, a first since 2011, while another eight French films – including the quadruple Golden Globe winner Emilia Pérez – passed the million mark and 21 exceeded 500,000.
Key to the French industry’s performance is its state-organised subsidy system, the bulk of which is run through the CNC which collects just under 11% of the price of every cinema ticket sold in France and redistributes it to French productions.
The biggest Hollywood blockbusters can therefore end up co-funding the smallest of French independent films. Since 2010, streaming channels such as Netflix also have to contribute, as do TV channels, through what amounts to advance screening rights.
Other cash can come from promotion-hungry regional councils and tax credits. Of the €6.2m (£5.2m) budget of Anatomie d’une Chute (Anatomy of a Fall), which won the 2024 Oscar for best original screenplay, for example, roughly half came from public funds.
While its director, Justine Triet, complained of the creeping commercialism of French cinema, her film got €1.2 million in tax credits, €500,000 from the CNC, between €90,000 and €270,000 from three regional authorities, and €450,000 from public television.
Back outside the 5 Caumartin, Antoine Petersen, a 26-year-old, once-a-month cinemagoer and student, said he had no doubt cinema’s exception culturelle française was at risk from pro-business governments seeking more ways to reduce public spending.
“But I think there would be an immense public outcry,” he said. “French people are big fans of film in general and of French films in particular. I think French cinema is one thing about France that most of us are proud about.”
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