European film has had a banner year. The nominees for the 37th European Film Awards (EFAs) feature many of the buzziest movies of 2024: Jacques Audiard’s transgender crime musical Emilia Pérez, Edward Berger’s Vatican thriller Conclave, Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror comedy The Substance, Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Queer, and Mohammad Rasoulof’s Iranian drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
At the box office, through, European films are struggling. As audiences trickle back to theaters post-pandemic — European box office in 2023 topped $7 billion, up 22 percent, though still off record pre-pandemic figures — they are returning for U.S., not European, movies. American films accounted for 70.1 percent of total ticket sales in Europe last year, a new all-time record. Barely a quarter of tickets sold (26 percent) were for homegrown cinema.
To reverse that trend, Matthijs Wouter Knol, CEO of the European Film Academy, which hands out the EFAs, believes the local industry needs to change how European films are promoted and released. It is still the norm for a European film to roll out over two to three months across the continent — Conclave opened in Hungary on Oct. 31, but it won’t hit Swedish theaters till Dec. 20 — with independent distributors in each country designing their own bespoke marketing campaigns. For European cinema to reach its full potential, says Wouter Knol, the industry should take a page from the U.S. studios.
Why is there such a gap between the quality of European cinema and the awareness of it among European cinemagoers?
At core, it is the difference between the way European films are being promoted, which is done in a very fragmented way. You have an approach in France, in Germany, in Benelux [Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg], in Scandinavia. Whereas with U.S. titles, you see advertisements everywhere. Here in Berlin, if I read a review of Gladiator II on my phone, I look up and I can see the billboard on the street, the ads in the subway on my way to work. If we want European film to be seen by audiences in Europe, we need to copy some of the American elements in their promotion. We can’t promote our movies over the course of 12 months at different times in different ways in different territories and languages.
The EFA is trying to push for more pan-European releases — you have the month of European cinema preceding the EFAs where you screen European films in theaters across the continent.
We started that in 2021 with just 14 cinemas in Germany, and now we do it in 100 cities across Europe, with around 70,000 people going to these screenings. I feel that’s a great start. I’m very happy with that growth, and I see we could really roll it out much further in the next years.
Is there an online hurdle here? Except for Mubi, there are no pan-national streaming services focusing on European films.
The reality is that rights holders and distributors prefer selling to multiple streaming platforms in different territories. If you can sell a film to 30 different streaming platforms, that brings in more money than selling to one European platform. It’s a catch-22 situation where the revenue benefits from market fragmentation.
How on board are European distributors with your cross-border approach?
That’s the crucial question in Europe. The answer to that question is going to define what will happen to European cinema in the next five to 10 years. We need case studies of coordinated releases that worked. Films like Triangle of Sadness, like Anatomy of a Fall, to convince distributors to break with their old habits. Because the world around us is changing, the media and promotion tools, the expectations and habits of the audience are changing very fast. But if you look at what European film has to offer, I think you can see we have some of the most original and appealing cinema in the world at the moment, made by filmmakers who are still allowed to say whatever they think and choose stories they really want to tell.
This story appeared in the Dec. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
