June box office grows 7% to cap a hot H1
June box office totalled £76.7m, a 7% year-on-year increase from last year.
In the first half of the year, box office revenue surpassed £530m, 18% ahead of 2024 and 9% ahead of 2023, as the film industry has experienced its strongest H1 since the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted cinemagoing.
Tom Linay, content business director at cinema sales house Digital Cinema Media (DCM), estimated UK admissions grew 19% year on year for the month of June and are up 12% year on year in H1. Official admissions figures will be released later in July.
“Nothing really popped off this month, but it was a good mix of films for a range of audiences”, he told The Media Leader.
The top film in June was DreamWorks’ live action remake of How To Train Your Dragon (£16.7m). It was followed by horror thriller 28 Years Later (£11m after just two weeks in theatres) and Apple’s racing film F1 (£7m in its opening week).
May holdovers Lilo & Stitch (£7.6m in June), Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (£6.4m in June) and The Salt Path (£4.6m in June) also performed well throughout the month.
Linay called The Salt Path a “big success” in particular; its lifetime £7.6m gross makes it up-and-coming distributor Black Bear’s third-largest release behind Longlegs (£8m) and Conclave (£9.9m), with the film attracting interest from advertisers looking to target mature audienes.
For DCM, the UK’s largest cinema ad sales house, the first half of the year has seen eye-popping growth in ad revenue, driven in part by growing audiences but also tools developed to allow advertisers to compare cinema audiences to TV ratings.
According to DCM CEO Karen Stacey, more brands have begun considering cinema as the “launch spot” for their AV campaigns.
Linay told The Media Leader DCM’s Q2 revenue was up 17% year on year, with H1 revenues increasing 26%.
Such growth has “exceeded expectations”, according to Linay, with increased investment from automotive and FMCG brands, as well as the Government, helping to drive the upswing.
July preview: Blockbusters aplenty
The open question is whether cinemagoing will continue its strong momentum into H2, particularly as it brushes up against tougher comparables from last autumn.
July provides a strong slate of blockbusters, including Jurassic World Rebirth next Wednesday. A pair of highly-anticipated superhero flicks, Superman (11 July) and The Fantastic Four: First Steps (24 July) also headline later in the month.
July is rounded out by the release of black comedy Friendship (A24), slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer (Sony), and a reboot of the Smurfs franchise (Paramount), among others.
Looking further ahead, August provides a more diverse film slate, with releases such as romance The Materialists, comedy reboot The Naked Gun, Darren Aronofsky crime thriller Caught Stealing, Ari Aster action comedy Eddington, and satire The Roses.
As Linay summarised: “July is big blockbusters, August is a wider variety of films”.