Small European Film Markets: Portraits and Comparisons

Performance Indicators / Distribution

Distribution

By Marius Øfsti

This section considers the number of active distributors in the CresCine ecosystems and the number of domestic and foreign titles they have in distribution (see Methodology: Distribution). Distribution in the CresCine markets is a fragmented sector. Few distribution companies are involved in production, and few operate across multiple markets. Most distribution companies are mostly active in local distribution of international titles, and their connection to domestic film production is limited. The lack of proper distribution for local titles is highlighted as an issue in all CresCine markets except Denmark.

No attempt has been made to define a distribution company and the following considers all companies listed in the Lumiere Pro database as distributors, regardless of whether the company’s main activity is distribution, production, or otherwise. Companies listed with name variations have been consolidated (see methodology section Distribution for details).

The number of distributors that released at least one premiere title varied between the markets. Ireland and Flanders averaged at 68 and 52 active distributors respectively, while Denmark averaged 18 and Croatia had 15 active distributors. This includes companies that only released a single title. These, along with companies that only released a small number of domestic titles, are likely examples of independent distribution rather than full-time distribution companies. The share of single title distributors across the 2014-2022-period ranges from 7% in Denmark to 20% in Estonia.

In all CresCine markets, most distributors did not release domestic titles. Ireland and Flanders had the lowest share of distributors with at least one local title, on average 14% and 16%. Portugal had the highest share of distributors with at least one domestic title at 48% on average. In most markets, the share of distributors that only released domestic titles was below 10%. However, in Portugal 36% of all distributors only released domestic titles, while in Estonia and Lithuania the shares were 20% and 17% respectively.

The total number of premieres in each market averaged from 400 in Portugal to 195 in Croatia. Despite Ireland’s high number of premieres – 395 on average – the high number of Irish distributors meant that they only released five titles on average. In contrast, the low number of distributors in Croatia resulted in an average of 13 premieres per distributor. However, as the next section shows, the average is skewed by one dominant distribution company.

By Marius Øfsti

This section analyses the market shares of individual distribution companies, their owners’ country of origin, and their levels of integration (see Methodology: Distribution). The section points to a general dominance of domestically or European-owned distributors as well as differences in levels of concentration in the distribution market.

While US movies dominate in the overall admissions of all markets (see: Admissions and market shares), US-based distributors only have the majority market share in Ireland and Belgium. Ireland also has the highest number of US distributors with a direct local presence. United International Pictures (UIP) and Disney also have a sizeable share of admissions in Denmark, but none of the other markets feature local branches of Hollywood distributors.

In the CresCine markets, most of the non-domestic European distributors are based in neighbouring countries, such as Swedish SF Bio in Denmark and UK-based Entertainment in Ireland. Several companies, notably ACME and Forum Cinemas, operate across the three Baltic states. The only market where non-national European distributors hold the largest market share is Croatia, where the German company Blitz has a dominant position with an average market share of 50% of total admissions.

Along with Croatia, Portugal has one particularly dominant distributor: Nos Lusomondo holds an average market share of 60%. Both Blitz and Nos Lusomundo are also the major cinema owners in their respective markets. Ireland is the most fragmented market, where no distributor has more than a 20% share.

In all markets except Ireland national distributors release the majority of titles, though this majority is very narrow in Croatia. Other European distributors also have a larger share of the titles released than their market share in terms of admissions. Nos Lusomondo and Blitz remain the distributors with the largest share of their market, with an average of 34% of all released titles.

By Marius Øfsti

This section considers distributor’s positions, their roles in domestic admissions and levels of integration (see Methodology: Distribution).

Looking at domestic admissions only, we find that all markets except Ireland and Croatia had one dominant distributor across the whole period 2014 to 2022. Year on year, however, the changes are significant for most markets as national admissions are very dependent on a single title. For example, in 2014 the production company Kinokultas took a third of the Lithuanian domestic admissions by self-distributing its hit film Redirected (LT, GB 2014).

The only companies that remained domestic admissions market leaders in all years from 2014 to 2022 were Kinepolis in Flanders and Nordisk Film in Denmark. Both companies have a national final owner, and both are vertically integrated with a local cinema chain. Nordisk Film also had a production division, as well as ownership interest in several other production companies.

Kinepolis and Nordisk Film were also among the domestic market leaders that had the majority of their admissions from domestic titles across the whole period 2014 to 2022. Nordisk Film was the only company that had the majority of admissions from domestic titles and also the market leader in both overall and domestic admissions. Irish Wildcard had close to all their admissions from domestic titles. The Croatian domestic admissions leader, 2i Films, was acquired by the German distributor and market leader Blitz in 2020 (see: Distributor market shares). 

In most of the CresCine markets, however, the distributor that had the largest overall share of national admissions (see: Distributor market shares) got most of its admissions from non-national titles. In Portugal, national titles only represented 4% of the total admissions for Nos Lusmondo, even though Nos Lusmondo had 75% of all domestic admissions in the period.

In Lithuania, films distributed by production companies hold the majority of domestic admissions both overall and in every single year except 2022. Vabalo Filmai had the highest overall domestic admissions with eight domestic titles released in just three years, from 2016 to 2019. In other years, production companies Kinokultas, Singing Fish, and Nord Play achieved the highest share of domestic admissions from one or two titles. The only other companies that achieved the majority of domestic admissions from a single title were Estonian Taska in 2015 and Croatian KEK in 2021.

By Marius Øfsti

This section considers the experience of distributors with domestic film (see Methodology: Distribution). As the previous sections highlight, the majority of CresCine markets distributors deal mainly with international titles (see: Active distributors). These titles come with prepared marketing strategies and materials and in the case of many Hollywood productions’ set release dates. When releasing local titles these materials and strategies must be created by the domestic distributors and/or the production companies (Øfsti 2023). The amount of experience distributors have with local titles is therefore a potentially relevant factor for domestic performance.

There are considerable differences in the number of national titles that distributors release in each market. In all seven markets, most distributors that released a domestic title released less than one per year on average. However, in Denmark 8 out of 17 distributors with domestic titles released more than one per year on average, while only three out of 28 distributors did so in Estonia.

In Croatia and Estonia, no distributor released more than three domestic titles on average from 2014 to 2022, while no distributor averaged more than two national titles in Lithuania. Denmark was the only country where a distributor, Nordisk Film, averaged more than eight titles, while Nos Lusomondo in Portugal and Kinepolis in Flanders averaged between six and eight titles yearly. Irish Wildcard averaged five domestic titles yearly.

By Cathrin Bengesser & Marius Øfsti

This section considers the share of features from CresCine markets exported, the markets the CresCine features export to, as well as how many admissions films from the specific ecosystems achieve in c.50 markets across Europe and in selected important non-European territories, including the US, Mexico, and Korea (see Methodology: Export markets). These indicators showcase the different levels of export orientation in the seven selected ecosystems and highlights how important (individual) international markets are for the revenues and reach of their feature productions.

Looking at their total fiction and documentary productions released theatrically between 2014 and 2022, about half of fiction productions and 40% of documentaries from the CresCine ecosystems achieve theatrical export. While most Irish fiction films and documentaries achieve export, Portugal and Estonia export the lowest share of their feature output. Denmark has the highest number of both fiction and documentary features in international circulation, but still a lower share than Ireland, which has a lower level of 100% national and majority co-productions (see: Production volume).  

On average, the CresCine ecosystems export films to 15 different non-domestic markets per year. Danish films spread to most territories (30 different foreign markets per year), but looking at the average individual reach of films, Irish films travel to slightly more countries (4.88 on average). In addition to English as a language of advantage, the more pronounced co-production orientation of Ireland compared to Denmark may serve as an explanation here, since co-productions can be expected to circulate in all co-producing countries (see also Top performing films). The films from the countries with the lowest levels of production (Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania) also travel to the lowest number of foreign territories, but Croatian and Lithuanian films nonetheless on average circulate in more markets per title than Portuguese films.

Looking at where the films produced between 2014 and 2022 on average achieved the most admissions, it is evident that domestic markets are the most important for Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania and Portugal. For Flanders, too, Belgium is the nominally biggest market with over 1 million admissions per year on average. Yet, Flemish film also achieves about 650,000 admissions in the neighbouring Netherlands and France; the former sharing the same language as Flanders and the latter sharing a language with Flanders’ frequent co-producing partner, Wallonia. In Ireland, however, the domestic market is only the fourth most important market in terms of admissions, surpassed by the US, Mexico and France. This trend is based both on Ireland’s high number of films exported, but also on the comparatively low domestic market share (see: Admissions and market shares).

When only considering export markets only, it becomes evident that France, the US, Russia, Mexico, the Netherlands and Poland are important export markets for films from the CresCine ecosystems, though not to the same degree for each ecosystem. In general, the large European markets (France, Germany and Poland) play a significant role as export markets for the small CresCine ecosystems. For Croatia, neighbouring Italy is an important export market, as well as its small neighbours Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia. Large same language markets are important for Ireland (US), Flanders (France/Netherlands) and Portugal (Brazil). Except for Irish films, the US is not a significant source of foreign admissions.

The importance of exports to the total admissions of CresCine films from the individual ecosystems and thus the importance of exports for their revenues can be summed up in the share of foreign admissions in their output’s total cinematic admissions. Irish films achieved 85% of their admissions between 2014 and 2022 outside of Ireland and the share of foreign admissions is relatively stable across the years. This shows that exports are vital for the sustainability of the Irish film industry. For Flanders the share of foreign admissions in total admission is 42%, however this share fluctuates between 93% in 2020 and 8% in 2015, which highlights that the export performance of Flemish film is very dependent on individual titles. Lithuania and Estonia are the least export-oriented markets in the CresCine sample. Nevertheless, the fluctuations in the share of foreign admissions in total admissions indicates that individual films can make a significant difference to the performance of less export-oriented markets. The section Top performing films considers the internationally top performing titles for each ecosystem.

By Cathrin Bengesser

This section considers the circulation of CresCine features (2014-2022) on European (EU27+UK) VoD services (see Methodology Circulation on VoD). The presence of films in VoD catalogues provides opportunities for long-tail revenues for producers and distributers, as well as European audiences’ potential exposure to films from small markets. However, presence in VoD catalogues does not equal prominence and easy discoverability and revenues from VoD sales are not necessarily competitive with revenues from cinematic release (see Øfsti, 2020).

Around two thirds of the feature films produced by CresCine ecosystems are in circulation on European VoD services. While in Denmark, Ireland and Flanders close to all titles are in VoD circulation, a considerably smaller share of features produced by the remaining ecosystems circulate on VoD. Beyond the more pronounced export-orientation of these three markets (see Export Markets and international distribution), the high VoD circulation of films from Denmark, Ireland and Flanders also relates to the high development of their domestic VoD markets (see VoD infrastructure).

On average CresCine features circulate in 7 of the 26 European countries for which catalogue data was considered. While Irish movies tend to circulate in most countries (9 on average), Lithuanian movies circulate in under five countries. There are clear geo-linguistic patterns in the VoD distribution of films from countries which achieve high levels of VoD circulation. Irish and British catalogues have the same number of Irish titles available; Sweden and Finland have the most Danish titles available on VoD. For Flemish titles, the whole of Belgium, the Netherlands and France – a frequent co-producer – are the main markets for VoD circulation. For Portugal, neighbouring Spain is an important VoD export market. Beyond geo-linguistic neighbours, the big European markets are important targets for CresCine features on VoD, which is likely due to their greater number of VoD services.

Looking at the top 20 feature films circulating on VoD per country in October 2023 reveals an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, there are international box office hits such as the well-travelled Flemish animation films The Queen’s Corgi (BE, US 2019) and Robinson Crusoe (BE, FR, US 2016), often also with high international festival/awards recognition as in the cases of Oscar winners Druk (DK, SE, NL 2020) and Room (IE, US, CA, GB 2015). On the other hand, there are films that have not had large domestic or international cinema audiences but feature internationally recognizable celebrities and talent like Guy Pearce in The Infernal Machine (PT, GB, US 2022) or Ben Kingsley in Trahison d’Etat (DK, CA, US 2018) and/or cater to a genre-film audience, such as the horror film Vivarium (IE, BE, DK, CA 2019) or sci-fi Vesper (LT, FR, BE 2022). The importance of genre fiction for VoD services is evidenced not only by the emphasis global VoD services place on genre when presenting and organising their content in catalogues (see Netflix’s genre tags), but also by the range of VoD services catering to genre niches like the horror-focused Shudder (see Balanzategui et al., 2022).

When considering the presence of CresCine features on the globally operating SVoD platforms as of October 2023, it becomes evident that there is not a great diversity of films from small markets on Netflix, Disney and Apple TV+, while they feature strongly on Amazon Prime. The numbers reported in this graph indicate the number of distinct CresCine features available across all the localized catalogues of the service. Denmark, Ireland and Flanders – the ecosystems with most of their features in VoD circulation – also dominate the picture on global SVoDs. While Amazon Prime offers a large number of CresCine titles, only 65 different CresCine features were present in the 26 Netflix catalogues in the data sample on 1st October 2023. Some titles like Flemish Brabançonne (BE 2014) or Estonian Sangarid (EE, FI, LV 2017) circulate in over 20 European countries on Netflix, but not all the CresCine titles that have been licensed to Netflix are distributed across all its European catalogues.

By Cathrin Bengesser and Marius Øfsti

This section considers the development of revenues from rentals and physical sales to compare them to revenues through transactional video-on-demand (TVoD) in the seven CresCine markets. Furthermore, it tracks the availability of domestic CresCine features in domestically available TVoD catalogs (see Methodology: Physical sales, rentals, and TVoD revenue).

Despite being the most important source of revenue for Hollywood studios since the mid-1980s (Epstein, 2010), data on revenue generated from home entertainment is scarce and usually limited to the market overall. Global data from the MPAA indicate that physical home entertainment generated more than US$30 Billion in 2013, which was reduced to US$6.5 Billion by 2021. In the same period, the overall global home entertainment consumer spending rose from about US$41 Billion to US$78 Billion (MPAA 2018, 2022). Yet, this number includes SVODs which are predominantly US-based. As data on domestic market shares or revenue generated by domestic industries from home entertainment markets is generally not available, it is difficult to assess the importance of physical sales, rentals, and TVoD for local industries.

For the CresCine markets on average, the revenues gained through physical sales and rentals in 2014 amounted to 61.5% of the gross box office revenues, which showcases its importance for the audiovisual industries also in small markets. By 2022 this relative importance of the physical market had declined to 11.9%.

The historic significance of physical sales and rentals differs across the CresCine markets. In the small Baltic states, physical revenues amounted to less than 10% of the box office in 2014, reaching 15.4% in Croatia. While there is a lack of data on rentals in Estonia and Lithuania across the years, the available data points, indeed, to the limited significance of physical sales and rentals in the Baltics and Croatia. In 2018, which is the only period for which rental revenues have been reported by the EAO for the Baltics, they only amounted to €114.6 thousand in Estonia and €27,000 in Croatia, showing how insignificant this mode of revenues really is for the markets. In Lithuania €1.86 million were generated by physical rentals in 2018, amounting to 81.8% of the physical revenues reported for this year. While this indicates that rentals have played a role in the country’s physical market, the overall revenues generated there are, however, low compared to the 22.5 million Euro of gross box office revenue in Lithuania in 2018.

The VoD market in Europe has undergone rapid development since the early 2010s, which is visible in the rise of the share of households in the seven CresCine ecosystems subscribing to VoD services (see: VoD infrastructure). The TVoD market has also grown in this period, but TVoD is not substituting for the decline in physical revenues in the small markets where the latter was of significance. The revenues from physical sales and rentals in the seven CresCine markets have declined by 82% between 2014 and 2022. While revenues from VoD rentals and sales have surpassed physical revenues around 2019, their 2022 average for the CresCine markets only reaches about one-third of the physical revenues achieved in 2014. For Ireland, the TVoD revenues continue to be lower than the rapidly declining physical revenues that were nearly on par with the gross box office in 2014.

Beyond the low revenues for physical retail/rentals in Estonia, Croatia, and Lithuania, the low TVoD revenues may also be connected to a lower readiness to pay for streaming indicated by the low share of households subscribing to a VoD service (see: VoD infrastructure), as well as by piracy. High levels of film and television piracy are documented in Lithuania, where 33% of the population claims to watch mostly pirated content. Similarly, Croatia stands out as a market with a very high share of internet access to films through illegal streaming services and torrents (Bornas Cayuela & Wajsman, 2023). Most of this illegal streaming documented by Bornas Cayuela & Wajsman (2023) is access to TV content through illegal IPTV services, while rates of illegal access to film are more evenly distributed across the CresCine markets, as well as the rest of Europe.

Revenues generated on the physical market and TVoD as reported above include sales/rentals of non-domestic film. While it is not possible to isolate the significance of the rental/retail market for domestic film in terms of revenues, we can estimate in which markets circulation on TVoD is of potential significance for domestic films by looking at the circulation of domestic films on domestically available TVoD catalogues. The data presented below considers the circulation of domestic CresCine features in domestic VoD catalogues by October 2023 (see Methodology: Physical sales, rentals, and TVoD revenue).

Lithuania, Estonia, and Croatia stand out as markets where hardly any of the films produced between 2014 and 2022 achieved circulation on TVoD. In the three most highly developed VoD markets in the CresCine sample, Denmark, Ireland, and Belgium (see: VoD infrastructure), over half of the films produced between 2014 and 2022 circulate on TVoD as of October 2023. The numbers of domestic films available by TVoD (slide 2 in visualisation) evidence how the local or regionally specific TVoDs stand out as purveyors of domestic content. In Denmark, the Scandinavian/Nordic players SF Anytime and Blockbuster carry a high number of Danish films for the Danish audiences. In Portugal, the Spain-based service Filmin offers more Portuguese film on TVoD than any of the other players, including the local telecom operator’s service MEA. In Ireland, Volta offers Irish and international independent films, while the British telecommunications player Sky also provides Irish films on TVoD. Apple and Google offer a sizeable number of domestic films in the three most highly developed VoD markets in the sample, Denmark, Ireland, and Belgium, but do not offer much domestic content to the other small markets. Considering these figures, the domestic TVoD window appears to be insignificant for Estonian, Lithuanian, and Croatian films. For Portuguese film only the local/regional TVoD players Filmin and MEO have significance. In contrast to this, the domestic TVoD window on both local/regional and global TVoD services contributes to the circulation of domestic film in Ireland and Denmark and to a lesser degree for Flemish film.

Income from TVoD is generally based on revenue sharing, and as such presence in catalogues does not necessarily have any economic impact (Øfsti, 2023). Neither does the availability of domestic films on TVoD allow for conclusions about the visibility or consumption of domestic content. The European Audiovisual Observatory’s research into the promotion of content on TVoDs highlights that recent films with high commercial potential gain the most visibility on the platforms and that the multi-country players promote European film less broadly and less intensely than TVoD services with a national focus. Therefore, the presence of CresCine films on the local/regional TVoDs may be of higher importance to their visibility in the market and their potential revenues on the TVoD window than the presence on the global players’ sites.

While no studies on the economic importance of home entertainment revenue for local industries are available across the CresCine markets, studies from Denmark (2013, 2023) and Norway (Gaustad, 2019) indicate that digital revenue has not replaced the lost physical home entertainment sales for the domestic industries and resulted in theatrical releases once again becoming by far the most important source of revenue for Norwegian films. Together, these trends in the physical and digital rental/sales market reinforce the importance of theatrical revenues (see: Box office and ticket prices) for the sustainability of the film industries across the CresCine markets.