FECE reiterates that 2025 “has not been a good year” for theaters and urges Culture to distribute aid “balanced”

Movie theaters in Spain registered in 2025 an 8% drop in attendance compared to the previous yearwhich represents the second consecutive year of decline, despite reaching 65 million viewers and a total collection of 453 million euros, according to the annual dossier ‘Movie theaters: 2025 data’ of the Federation of Cinemas of Spain (FECE), presented this Tuesday at the CEOE headquarters in Madrid.

“It has not been a good year for the exhibition. After a slight setback in 2024, we experienced a second consecutive year of decline in attendance marked above all by the second semester, which registered a pronounced decline of 16 percentwith months like August, October and November, clearly below their usual figures,” said the general director of FECE, Almudena Fernández.

In a year marked by this decline, ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ It was the best international premiere and ‘Father there is only one 5’ led the national box office. Spanish cinema repeated a market share of 19 percent, the same percentage as in 2024, and a total of 30 different productions reached weekly number one throughout the year.

In this sense, the films that remained in that first position the longest have been ‘Mufasa: The Lion King’, ‘A Minecraft Movie’ y ‘Weapons‘ who managed to be at the top for four consecutive weeks.

As for the cinema theater census in 2025, Almudena Fernández-Golfín has celebrated that it remains “stable”, with 760 cinemas and 3,562 screenswhich, according to the director of FECE, reflects the “resistance capacity of the exhibition.” At the business level, the film exhibition brings together 418 companies, of which 83 percent are microenterprises, which generate 6,483 direct jobs.

The report breaks down territorially the variation in the number of screens, viewers or the collection achieved. Thus, La Rioja, the Basque Country and Cantabria recorded the smallest drops in attendance, while Andalusia, Navarra, Ceuta and Melilla led the declines. In relation to the evolution of screens, although at a national level the number of theaters remains “stable”, there are territorial adjustments, such as in the Canary Islands (-13), Navarra (-9) or Castilla-La Mancha (-5) where screens have been lost.

On the contrary, Andalusia is the one that has gained the most screens by adding 22 new screens, followed by Catalonia (+4) and Castilla y León (+3). In terms of screen density, La Rioja (114 per million inhabitants) heads the list, followed by the Basque Country (89) and Murcia (80).

DIRECT AID TO CINEMA THEATERS

In 2025, the ICAA allocated a direct aid item to movie theaters for an amount of 8.5 million euros nationwide. In this regard, Fernández-Golfín has denounced the “administrative fragmentation” suffered by companies that operate in more than one region and the “significant differences between territories” generated by the current criterion, which distributes funds according to the number of stores and not by screens.

In 2025, Aragón, Asturias, Extremadura and La Rioja did not distribute the aid, leaving these cinemas without access to this line of support. On the other hand, when carrying out a comparative analysis between the amounts distributed for each autonomous community, with the cinema screens registered in each of them, large differences appear in the distribution that make no sense.

While Madrid has received aid of 1,782 euros per screen or Andalusia 2,277 euros per screen, cinemas in Cantabria have received 3,807 euros per screen and cinemas in Navarra 3,632 euros per screen.

“The criterion of distribution between autonomous communities does not reflect the economic reality of movie theaters. In the redistribution to the exhibitors in their territory, the majority of the autonomous communities have opted for a fairer criterion and the majority have resolved a distribution based on the number of screens.”

For this reason, FECE has conveyed to the ICAA the need to move towards “a more balanced and more adjusted distribution system” to the real structure of the theater park, based on the number of screens and not on the number of premises. “If the current criteria are maintained, communities such as Madrid or Andalusia, which concentrate a very relevant part of the screens and the spectators, will continue to be harmed without objective reasons for this,” warned Almudena Fernández-Golfín.

EUROPEAN REGULATION COMPARISON

Likewise, the director of FECE has compared the regulations of Spain, France, Italy and Germany, the four main European countries at the cinematographic level, and which have also registered decreases in attendance, except for Greece and Germany.

In this regard, the dossier reveals that Spain is the only country where the exhibition window is not regulated by law, and it is also the only one that does have a screen quota imposed by law.

“Imposing and sanctioning compliance with the supply obligation does not guarantee greater consumption and there are more effective alternative models. We believe that the time has come to rethink the film promotion model, betting on incentives for consumption and the generation of audiences, and leaving behind mandatory mechanisms such as screen quotas that do not offer the desired results,” Fernández-Golfín stressed.

FILM LAW

Finally, Almudena Fernández-Golfín has pointed out that the future Cinema Law represents an “opportunity”, although its current text reflects “a continuous approach” that “does not fully adapt to the current reality of cinemas.” “After years of processing, the text arrives in many aspects outdated with respect to the context in which the sector operates today. The strengthening of cinema is not achieved by imposing supply, but by stimulating demand“, he pointed out.

In this sense, he has urged us to be “brave” and undertake the necessary changes to build “a more effective framework aimed at strengthening Spanish and European cinema, in line with the European experiences that work best.

For his part, the president of FECE, Álvaro Postigo, has assured that an “opportunity” to move forward with the law has been lost and has shared his pessimism that it will go ahead in this legislature. “There is less and less left and we have serious doubts that it will come out. They need to pay attention to what we want to change from the current text,” He pointed out before finishing by saying that he prefers that the Cinema Law “come out better than come out soon.”