As the Venice Film Festival, now in its 90th year since its founding and its 79th installment, heads into its conclusion amidst films and many celebrities, theaters have been experiencing a rather unimpressive week. The first weekend of September, with cities once again bustling with students and workers, saw a slight drop in revenue compared to last week (-8 percent), although compared to 2021, a +7 percent holds steady. As an incentive for moviegoers to see movies in theaters, from September 18 to 22, tickets for motion pictures will cost 3.5 euros in most Italian cities.

For the third week in a row Minions 2 – The Rise of Gru continues to lead the Italian box office. The animated film from Aug. 29 to Sept. 4 grossed another € 2,183,248, a slight contraction of 37% and a total take that updates to € 12,069,480. Numbers that propel it to the third position of the best 2022 results, just behind Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Top Gun: Maverick.

Falling behind is another highly anticipated animated title: DC League of Super-Pets, the film, released on Sept. 1, which tells the adventures of Superman and Batman’s dogs, earned € 760,030 in its first days of programming and is in third place in the top ten. It is set to rise in the coming weeks, but will it be enough to counter the yellow tide?

Coming in second place is Bullet Train with Brad Pitt: € 818,540 (-26%) in the week and a total take of 1.6 million.

In fourth place comes Crimes of the Future, which grosses € 233,810, while Top Gun: Maverick holds on to the fifth place. With another € 151,000, the Tom Cruise sequel comes close to touching 13 million total in Italy.

New entries include the French drama Un’ombra su la verità (L’homme de la cave) which grossed € 63,000 and the entertaining British indie comedy Brian and Charles, with € 47,000, in ninth and tenth place on the chart, respectively.

The second half of September promises to be more eventful, at least on the front of Italian productions, great absentees, or almost absent from movie theaters (excluding festivals) this summer.

At the end of the month, the long-awaited Siccità, Paolo Virzi’s latest film, will be released in theaters. The film premiered at the Film Biennale on Thursday, August 8 to tepid reviews. A choral drama, starring Silvio Orlando, Max Tortora, Claudia Pandolfi, Tommaso Ragno, Monica Bellucci, Valerio Mastandrea, and many others, it transports viewers to the capital of Italy, Rome, hit by a drought lasting more than a year. A film about the despair, rebellion, and hope of characters against the backdrop of the dried-up Tiber river, in a climate of social tension not too dissimilar to what is happening now in Italy because of the energy crisis caused by the Russian offensive in Ukraine.

Also in Venice, a great master of Italian cinema, Franco Zeffirelli – whose 100th birth anniversary falls in February 2023 – was celebrated with the documentary Franco Zeffirelli Conformist Rebel, directed by Anselma Dell’Olio.