Not the greatest week for German cinema: only one film reached six figures in ticket sales, all the others in the top ten hovered around half a million.

Matt Reeves’ The Batman brought in € 1,24 million and was the sole film that had more than 100.000 people in theater seats. Not giving up the number one spot, the popular movie has now reached a total of € 13 million and 1,3 million tickets.

Number two and three remained the same with Pierre Perifel’s Die Gangster Gang and Ruben Fleischer’s Uncharted.

Michael Bay did it again – storming the charts with his newest action-thriller Ambulance. How does he do it? He sticks to his widely successful formula. In this, his films have no date. They could have been made 15 years ago or 15 years from now. What’s new is that this one is the remake of the Danish film Ambulancen, the story of two bank robbers who carjack an ambulance to make their getaway. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is trying to pay for his wife’s lifesaving surgery but being a blue-collar guy from a poor Los Angeles neighborhood, he is unable to. When his con-artist friend, played by Jake Gyllenhaal suggests he could help him with a major bank heist of $ 32 million. As expected from a film like this, everything goes wrong starting with a courageous cop (Garret Dillahunt) who gets shot in the commotion. The two criminals are trapped as the SWAT teams move in and decide to steal an ambulance. Unbeknownst to them at first, it is the exact first responder vehicle that was sent to pick up the injured police officer. They take the man and the medic (Eiza González) hostage in this action-packed thriller that in typical Michael Bay style does not leave out massive explosions and wild car chases. Blowing stuff up is a Bay trademark, after all.

The rest of Germany’s Top 10 does not show much movement with one notable exception. While Wunderschön, Bergen and Jackass Forever hold steady in the fifth, sixth and seventh spot, German audiences once again prove that a good opera will always bring them to the cinemas. After all, a movie ticket is only the fraction of the price of admittance to the real opera house, and in this case, it was a live-streamed MET-performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Don Carlos”, directed by David McVicar and starring Sonya Yoncheva, Elina Garanèa and Jamie Barton who drew in the fans.

Family fare Die Häschenschule – Jagd nach dem Goldenen Ei and the Canadian wilderness epic Der Wolf und der Löwe round out the Top 10.

In Austria the charts were shaken up a bit more. Even though The Batman remained in first place, a brand-new homemade new release stomped into second spot, bringing in only € 25.000 less that the dark knight. Willkommen in Siegheilkirchen, a biopic about Austrian caricaturist Manfred Deix whose uncensored drawings have delighted newspaper readers and fans for decades drew in almost as many people as the US-mega blockbuster. Clearly it was not the same demographic. While The Batman still mostly appeals to 25 and under, the film about Deix with a title that is a wordplay on Hitler’s Nazi slogan, a topic that the liberal protagonist has taken aim at his entire life, drove an older audience to the theater.

The rest of the Top 10 somewhat resembles that of its German neighbor with Die Gangster Gang in third, Ambulance in fourth and Uncharted in fifth place. The rest is a mix-up of Jackass Forever, Wunderschön, Bergen and the two family movies.