Many questions arose in the mind of Italian cinema-goers when confronted with the latest Covid measures. Since May 1st face masks have become “highly recommended” rather than mandatory in all social activities, from eating and drinking in restaurants and clubs, to shopping or visiting a museum. Everywhere but a movie or live show theaters, where FFP2 masks will be required at all times, resulting in a dark International Workers Day, especially for those involved in the motion picture distribution and exhibition business. Revenues took a nosedive with a meager € 2 million 600 thousand total gross resulting in a catastrophic – 48% in the box office compared to last weekend. With the summer heat on its way, going to the movies will be even less appealing, especially for younger audiences, theaters owners fear. Their national trade union (Anec) has marked the new regulations “Unacceptable”. “Movie theaters are the only ones paying an incomprehensible and unsustainable penalty,” Anec says. The general discontent turned into open protest on the 3rd of May when a multitude of movie theaters across Italy decided to give out free lollipops to their customers to invite them to keep their masks down.

While in Europe box offices are thriving, and revenues are catching up with the pandemic setback, the motion picture industry in Italy is experiencing one of the most serious crises in its history.  Most of the programming, with the exception of a few international blockbusters, has been postponed until October – so far at least 120 Italian finished or almost finished productions don’t have a release date, thus jeopardizing the future of Italy’s independent film business. Last week Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, kept the first place despite losing 63%. It grossed €642,766 touching 7 and a half million euros in total, a good result given the times.

In second place was Downton Abbey 2, which grossed €420,000, making Leonardo Pieraccioni’s Il sesso degli angeli slip into third place with just €269,000 and a total in two weeks of €1 million 228,000. Pieraccioni is an example of the detachment of the public: his easy comedies have always attracted a lot of attention at the box office, and although they have never reached the record of his Il Ciclone (1996), the seventh highest-grossing Italian movie of all time, they have never recorded such low figures.In the rest of the top ten, not even those films designed for a young and very young audience fared well.

The Northman ranks fourth with € 228,746, Sonic 2 drops to fifth position (€227,854), The Lost City stops at number 6 taking in € 195.219, while Official Competition, with Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz, barely scrapes over a hundred thousand euros and sits at number 7. The animated Belgian film Chickenhare And The Hamster Of Darkness only took home € 67.619; the German animated film The School of the Magical Animals is number 9 with € 56.117 and at the bottom on one of Italy’s poorest box office weeks is another animated feature, The Bad Guys, which grossed only € 44.639.