In the week that saw the Italian Parliament vote for the President of the Republic, confirming Sergio Mattarella for re-election, Italian citizens have evidently stayed at home in front of the TV, as the cinema box office grosses have dropped compared to those of the previous week. This week’s ranking only sees one film that exceeds the €500,000 mark (€556,949). As in the previous week, the film is The Fair of Illusions – Nightmare Alley, the American neo-noir psychological thriller film written and directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett, which for the second consecutive week since its debut is at the top of the Italian box office.

Similarly, the second and third positions are once again held by the Canadian production The Wolf and The Lion (that last week grossed €432,605 for a total of €1,669,686) and Spider-Man: No Way Home (€321,355 for a total of €23,987,236 since its release on December 15).

In fourth position, climbing one place in the ranking (thanks partly to the disappearance from the chart of Ennio, the docufilm about Ennio Morricone, which had been released for a weekend-only preview: the film will be showing in all theaters in March), we find King Richard (€161,513 – total €1,278,701). The first surprise of the week comes only at position number five: the Italian production Me vs. You – The film: Lost in Time, which this week takes in €134,410,  overtaking Scream, and reaches a total of €3,276,087 since its release day. Scream thus loses a position, and drops to number six with a weekly gross of €109,604, totaling €1,015,483. The bottom end of the chart features House of Gucci (€68,838 – a total of €5,245,319), The Matrix Resurrections (€57,601 – a total of €2,621,207), The King’s Man (€56,208 – a total of €1,195,931) and Sing 2 (€49,428 – a total of €2,234,296).

Next week will see the release of highly anticipated international films such as Death on the Nile, by Kenneth Branagh, and Italian films such as Ice, by Fabrizio Moro and Alessio De Leonardis. Ice is the first film by singer-songwriter Fabrizio Moro, who recently delighted everyone at the Sanremo Festival with the single “Sei Tu”. He brings to the screen a story set in suburban Rome in the late 1990s, where we find the young boxer Giorgio (Giacomo Ferrara, well known for playing Spadino in Netflix tv-series Suburra) and his coach Massimo (Vinicio Marchioni).

Taking a more general look at the situation of gross returns and tickets sold by Italian movie theaters and making a comparison with the month of February 2019, the last pre-pandemic February, we can clearly see the level of the current crisis: the first weekend of February 2019 saw Dragon Trainer: The Hidden World in the opening weekend alone exceed €3 million gross – six times the box office, in the same period, of this year’s The Fair of Illusions – Nightmare Alley.