Broadcasting5.02.2025

Good news for cinemas in South Africa

Box office revenue in South Africa is expected to eclipse pre-Covid-19 levels by 2028.

This is according to PwC’s Media and Entertainment Outlook for 2024 to 2028, which analyses revenue trends in South Africa’s media space over the next four years.

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 a number of other hindrances to ticket sales.

One of these was load-shedding, which deterred customers because some cineplexes did not have access to 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 major 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 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.

Credit: PwC

South Africa lagging behind the rest of the world

While countries worldwide took similar knocks to their box office industries as South Africa did, local cinemas have not been as lucky with the increase in ticket sales.

Similar to South Africa, cinemas in the US also saw more than 80% decrease in ticket sales from 2019 to 2020, dropping from $11.4 billion to $2.1 billion, according to IMDb.

Since then, box office revenue has increased by roughly 305% or $6.4 billion. On the other hand, the revenue generated from ticket sales in South Africa has only increased by approximately 220%.

European cinemas did not experience as hard of a hit as those in South Africa and the US, only seeing a 66% decrease in revenue from 1.2 billion euros to 400 billion euros, according to a 2024 International Union of Cinemas (UNIC) report.

However, by 2023, box office revenue had been restored to 80% of pre-COVID levels, and many European countries, such as Austria, Belgium, and France, had reached 2019 revenue levels by this point.

Many countries, such as Albania, Georgia, and Serbia, were also found to have surpassed their average revenue levels from 2017 to 2019 by 2023.

The report expected all European markets to return to 2019 revenue levels by 2026.

The rate of recovery in Europe and the US could be due to the supply and, therefore, the affordability of cinema visits.

Omdia, which collaborated on the report with UNIC, noted that Africa and the Middle East have an average of 9.9 cinemas per million people as opposed to 55.2 in Europe and 105.3 in the US.

Visiting a cinema can also be expensive for the average South African, with 2D ticket prices at the country’s top two cinemas, Ster-Kinekor and Nu Metro, costing R129.50 and R135, respectively.

Therefore, two people visiting a cinema and purchasing snacks can cost anywhere north of R300, whereas a monthly Netflix Premium subscription costs R199.

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