For the second year in a row, the Covid pandemic has strongly affected box office returns in Italy, where the emergency forced movie theaters to shut down for four months in 2021, from the beginning of January to the end of April. And in the last part of the year, due to the sudden increase in the number of infections, an extremely large number of people were quarantined in their homes, thus impacting the numbers for the holiday season.

Inevitably, 2021 has been a hard year for Italian cinemas. The total box office has been around € 170 million, with 25 million tickets sold, for a 71% decrease in grosses and a 73% decrease in admissions compared to the average of the three-year period 2017- 2019. The percentages however rise to 51% and 53% respectively comparing only the months that the theaters have been actually open. This is a slightly lower result than that of 2020 (-7% receipts and -11% attendance). The reason lies in the fact that the first months of 2020, before the outbreak of the pandemic, had been extremely successful, one of the best starts of the year ever recorded in Italian cinemas.

The three films with the best domestic box office results in 2021 have been Spider-Man: No Way Home (over € 19 million in box office), Eternals (€ 8.4 million in box office), and No Time To Die (€ 8 million in box office). The three Italian films that grossed the most were Me contro Te – il mistero della scuola incantata (€5 million), Come un gatto in tangenziale – ritorno a Coccia di Morto (€3.2 million) and Freaks Out (€2.6 million).

With regard to Italian productions, including co-productions, the grosses were over € 36 million for about 5.6 million tickets sold, and a share of about 21%  of total box office, in line with the average (between 20% and 21% of domestic productions) in the three-year period 2017-2019. More than 430 new titles (including new films, re-releases, and special editions) were released during the year, a figure also in line with the average of about 415 to 420 titles for the same period in the 2017-2019 triennium.

During the final week of the year and the first days of 2022, the box office was still dominated by Spiderman – which in Italy has grossed a total of € 20 million – followed by the new entry Belli Ciao by the comic duo Pio and Amedeo. Released on January 1st, the film grossed almost € 1 million on its first day in cinemas. House of Gucci is still in third place, with a total box office of over € 4 million.

Last week, two interesting films were aired on TV, both on Rai 1 (and available on the online platform RaiPlay). With 3,944,000 viewers (20.3% share), I Fratelli De Filippo by Sergio Rubini, which aired on December 30, was one of the biggest hits on the small screen during the holiday season. On December 27, another gem aired, the film Gianni Schicchi, directed by Damiano Michieletto, based on the opera of the same name by Giacomo Puccini with a libretto by Giovacchino Forzano, inspired by Canto XXX of Dante’s Inferno. This is the first film with opera sung live on the set; well-known Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini has the role of the cunning fixer Gianni Schicchi. Regarding Netflix, the most viewed series in Italy is Incastrati (by the comic duo Ficarra and Picone), followed by Cobra Kai, the sequel to Karate Kid, and in third place, the film Don’t Look Up by Adam McKay with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.