After losses in April, cinemas returned to pirated screenings of Hollywood premieres

According to RBC, networks have resumed the practice of screening premieres from Hollywood studios that have abandoned the Russian market. Now pre-show service has returned in at least seven cinemas in the capital, as well as chains in St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Khabarovsk Perm and other cities.

Previously, the Association of Cinema Owners (AVK) proposed supporting domestically produced films and rejecting pirated screenings of foreign films for three weeks. And at the end of April, the Ministry of Culture did not issue any distribution certificate for Guy Ritchie’s new film.

Then, the big film distributors – Central Partnership, Carro Prokat and Atmosphere of Cinema – threatened the chains with blocking access to the exhibition of legal Russian films if they did not remove foreign releases from their posters.

As a result, the film “One Hundred Years Ahead”, on which they relied to implement this initiative, was only able to collect 1.2 billion rubles in three weeks in the absence of foreign competitors. At the same time, Cheburashka already collected 2 billion rubles in the first five days of its release, despite the fact that cinema chains did not reject foreign films at that time.

As CinemaPlex already wrote, cinemas expected to receive 2.5-3 billion rubles.

In early May, representatives of the networks told the trade publication “Film Distributor’s Bulletin” that public interest in the film “One Hundred Years Ahead” turned out to be so modest that the major chains used the May holidays for reconstructions and cleaning general.

The head of the Lumen network, a member of the board of directors of AVK, Pavel Ponikarovsky, told RBC that in April the company posted losses for the first time in recent months. In May, for now, the indicator chart also remains negative.

“In March, when there was no “promotion”, cinemas earned 4.2 billion rubles from Russian content. And only 2.3 billion rubles, in April, when the bet was made on the powerful premiere of “One Hundred Years Ahead.” For the first 12 days of May, with a large number of free days and the absence of alternative content, the collections are very sad: 1.1 billion rubles,” Ponikarovsky shared in the statistics.

However, the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, Olga Lyubimova, discovered other trends in the results of movie theaters. According to her, since the beginning of the year the seventh Russian film has grossed one billion rubles at the box office. The minister considers this mark an indicator of “how many young people enjoyed going to see our films during the holidays.”