South African cinemas miss out

With cinemas struggling with box office revenue at a time when video-on-demand has become a dominant form of entertainment, Ster-Kinekor seems to have missed out on a significant opportunity.

Warner Bros. has denied Ster-Kinekor the chance to re-release Interstellar for the film’s 10th anniversary in IMAX format.

Several South African cinemagoers complained about the situation on Reddit and posted the responses they received from Ster-Kinekor when they asked about it.

“We completely agree that IMAX would have been the perfect format for the re-release of Interstellar. Unfortunately, Warner Bros. declined our request,” Ster-Kinekor told customers.

IMAX recently announced that the film, directed by Christopher Nolan and first screened in 2014, would be re-released on 6 December 2024.

To the dismay of many South Africans, this would not include any local IMAX cinemas.

MyBroadband asked Ster-Kinekor why it was not granted the IMAX re-release, to which it responded that the local distributor had not planned for it to feature in the format.

“Warner Bros. locally did not have ‘Interstellar‘ lined up for Ster-Kinekor to release in IMAX,” Ster-Kinekor told MyBroadband.

Ster-Kinekor recently screened the film in its regular theatres as part of its Throwback Cinema promotion and told MyBroadband it was its best-performing title of the campaign thusfar.

“Interstellar has been the overall best-performing Throwback Cinema title to date,” Ster-Kinekor chief marketing officer Lynne Wylie said.

Ster-Kinekor launched its Throwback Cinema offering in May 2024, with the first rotation of titles including Chicago, Meet Joe Black, Notting Hill, and Back to the Future 1.

It aired one of these titles each week between early May and June 2024 and charged R50 per ticket.

Interstellar was screened in early January this year.

“This campaign allows us to bring back some of those unforgettable movies for our customers to enjoy at an affordable ticket price,” Wylie said.

“We’ve had a wonderful time going through the catalogues to select the films, and we are sure everyone who books a ticket will have a similar experience while watching it.”

Because of its success, Ster-Kinekor plans to continue its Throwback Cinema offering until at least the end of May 2025, with various classics lined up over the next four months.

Good news for cinemas

PwC’s Media and Entertainment Outlook for 2024 to 2028 forecasts that Box office revenue in South Africa will eclipse pre-Covid-19 levels by 2028.

In 2019, revenue generated from ticket sales sat at roughly R1.25 billion, according to the report.

However, due to the pandemic that caused a national lockdown at the beginning of 2020, box office revenue plummeted to below R250 million.

While revenue has steadily been recovering since then, cinema chains have experienced several other hindrances to ticket sales.

One of these was load-shedding, which deterred customers because some cineplexes had no backup power and cut films short when the power went off.

Another was the Hollywood Writers Strike in 2023, which lasted for 118 days after actors and writers protested about compensation issues and assurances that AI tools would not replace them, creating a significant delay in content releases.

The effects of the strike were particularly noticed in the 2024 box office revenue.

Cinemas saw a steady increase in ticket sales from 2021 to 2023. However, revenue increased only marginally in 2024.

Ster-Kinekor told MyBroadband that this was because major blockbusters arrived later than expected, with release dates being pushed out by 12 to 18 months.

The rapid adoption of streaming services during the pandemic also influenced consumer behaviour.

“If you got onto the drug of watching a streaming service at home, and you’re worried about travelling through traffic lights that don’t work to a cinema that may or may not be on, it does become a bit of a disincentive to go,” Ster-Kinekor CEO Mark Sardi said.

However, PwC predicts that box office revenue should be restored to pre-Covid levels by the end of 2027 and will surpass that generated in 2019 by the following year.

The graph below shows actual box office revenue in South Africa from 2019 to 2024 and forecasted revenue from 2025 to 2028, according to PwC.