The overall ranking of films at the Italian box office for the first half of the 2021/2022 season is out. A hard blow for Italian productions: only one Italian film managed to gain a space in the top ten: Me contro Te, released last August, a teen comedy starring the two young YouTube stars Sofia Scalia and Luigi Calagna. The film is #10, with 5.1 million euros in the box office.

Not much compared to the leader of the season, Spider-Man, which took home 24.6 million euros.

After two difficult years for the film industry, Italy looks to 2022 to regain audience (and revenue). There’s great expectation for the upcoming Gli idoli delle donne (The idols of women), directed and acted by the popular comic duo Lillo & Greg. With a plot on the verge of the surreal, self-irony towards Italian clichés, and a cast of all respect, the comedy has the credentials to be the next big thing. Corrado Guzzanti, master of Italian humor, stands out, playing a South American drug trafficker with an accent “inspired by the speech of Pope Francis,” said the actor.

Gli idoli delle donne, due out on April 14, could be the new number 1 in next week’s chart and hopefully attract an audience in the theaters. With the exception of the new entry Sonic the Hedgehog 2 which conquers the first position, with a weekly gross of € 1,529,410, last week’s performance has been generally poor. Morbius (€ 863,550 for a total of 2.5 million) loses one spot and lands at #2, The Bad Guys #3, The Batman #4, and Corro da te (the only Italian film in the ranking) ends in the fifth place. Riccardo Milani’s romantic comedy starring Pierfrancesco Favino and Miriam Leone, in theaters since March 17, took home € 220,000 this week, for a total of € 2,148,600.

But not all cinema comes through the big screen. The eight episodes of the TV series Le fate ignoranti  (The Ignorant Angels), based on the 2001 film of the same name by Italian director Ferzan Ozpetek, will arrive on April 13, 2022, on Disney Plus. The highly anticipated product is the first Italian Disney original series with a star-studded cast: Cristiana Capotondi and Eduardo Scarpetta leading the project, along with Luca Argentero, Paola Minaccioni, and many others. The series takes up the plot of the film: a woman who, after the sudden death of her husband, discovers his secret homosexual relationship, establishing a deep friendship with her deceased husband’s lover. With respect to the 2001 version, Ozpetek said: “When I shot the original film in 2001, there was a desire for openness, and our story was perfectly placed at that moment. The same story, 20 years later, finds itself placed in a very different time, of closure towards others. The world depicted in the film, which at the time seemed to be a cheerful invitation to diversity and novelty, is now a raft in defense, ready to resist the new winds of restoration that blow, more or less explicitly, in the world”.