Madrid (EFE) .
So far this year, attendance has accumulated a 32% drop compared to the average of the five years prior to the outbreak of the covid (2015-2019), according to data from the Comscore consultancy.
The twentieth edition of the Film Festival, a joint initiative of the main federation of exhibitors (FECE) and distributors (Fedicine), will be held over four days, from Monday to Thursday, and will have the participation of 326 cinemas from all over Spain, that add up to a total of 2,932 screens.
On those days there will be large commercial productions such as “Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3”, “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves”, “Super Mario Bros. The Movie”, “John Wick 4” or the Spanish comedy “¡ What a vacation!”
But also independent proposals such as “The Eternal Daughter” by Joanna Hogg, starring Tilda Swinton; the action thriller “Siege”, with Natalia de Molina; the award-winning in Berlin “20,000 bees”, on ‘trans’ childhood, or the author’s documentary “La mala familia”, among others.
Since the beginning of January, the average weekly attendance at cinemas in Spain has been around 68% compared to the average for the 2015-2019 period. Only one week, from April 7 to 13, coinciding with the premiere of “Super Mario Bros”, the 100% barrier was exceeded -up to 109%-, that is, there were more viewers than in the reference period.
The following week with the highest attendance was just the previous one, with 97%, coinciding with the premiere of the latest installment of the “Dungeons and Dragons” saga and the third, with 83%, from April 21 to 27, the week in which “Infernal Possession” and “What a vacation!” were released.
This event to encourage attendance at movie theaters as a social and cultural habit was held for the first time in June 2009 and from 2011 it became biannual, only interrupted by the pandemic.
The last edition, last October, registered 1.3 million viewers in four days, 82.2% more than that of a year ago, the first post-pandemic, which had 704,927 attendees in three days.