UK box office running 10% ahead of last year

Total UK box office revenue for October was £75.6m, up 3% year on year, according to the latest figures from Comscore.

Year-to-date, the UK box office is now running 10% ahead of the equivalent period in 2022, a significant turnaround for an industry that has struggled to recover from pandemic-era lockdowns.

Before July, box office revenues were dragging 9% behind 2022. Cinemas have thus seen a resurgence in the latter half of the year, thanks to the likes of Barbie and Oppenheimer in the summer and a more diverse slate of genre films this fall.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (Concert) event film collected the second-largest box office haul in October (£10.7m), behind Dreamworks’ animated sequel Trolls Band Together (£10.9m).

Swift’s hit also set a record for opening box office for a concert film, ahead of One Direction: This Is Us (£8.0m) and Michael Jackson’s This Is It (£9.7m).

A number of horror films also performed modestly well in October, including Five Nights at Freddy’s (£7.3m in its first week alone) and The Exorcist: Believer (£5.6m). A number of September openers like A Haunting in Venice and Saw X also continued their runs with decent Octobers.

Martin Scorsese’s anticipated three-and-a-half-hour epic Killers of the Flower Moon charted at #5 for the month of October, grossing £6.6m to date. Its opening week haul of £2.3m was the third-highest of any Scorsese film in the UK, behind Gangs of New York (£2.6m) and The Wolf of Wall Street (£4.6m).

Cinema advertisers will look to see whether such box office momentum can stay hot into the holiday period. In November, Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall, Nic Cage comedy Dream Scenario, and Marvel film The Marvels all debut on 10 November.

Disney’s latest animation, Wish, opens at the end of the month alongside Ridley Scott’s historical epic Napoleon.