European Audiences for European Films

The infographic shows the ten top exporters of films within Europe by admissions made abroad. Italy holds position number five. Despite it is in the high part of the ranking, Italy is the last one among the so called “big five”, that are the main Western countries with which Italy is usually compared. Moreover, between 2007 and 2016 France made abroad a number of admissions which is 16,5 time higher than what Italy did, the UK 8,4 and Germany 2,8. The weak success of Italian films abroad in terms of admissions could be partially related to the fact that Italian is not spoken outside Italy, but this is true also for Spanish (and Spain comes before Italy in the ranking).

Another element that emerges from the infographic is that in the investigated period Belgian films made the same number of foreign admissions than the Italian ones, despite traditionally Belgium has production volumes lower than Italy. The Belgian performance is probably related to the high number of international co-productions made by Belgium; it is well known that international co-productions travel abroad much more than national films.

In conclusion, the infographic highlights a weakness of Italian cinema: despite its films are widely exported (see other infographics), they are less able to attract foreign moviegoers than films made by other European countries. The constant performance of Italian films between 2007 and 2016 (without the ups and downs that can be found for French and English films), suggests that this problem concern the whole Italian film production, without exceptions.