The Film Festival reaches its best post-pandemic edition, but one of the weakest in its history

The Film Festival recovers some bellows after the puncture that was the last May edition, in which they gathered just over 700,000 spectators. According to Comscore, the nineteenth edition, held between Monday 3 October and Thursday 6 October, managed to bring theaters to 1,291,799 admissions, 82.2% more than in the first Film Festival this year.

It’s a very positive fact, which also has a kind of trick why this edition lasted four days with tickets at € 3.50, one day longer than normal. And not just any day: Thursday 6 was Spanish Cinema Day, with an extra communication to encourage the public and the powerful premiere of ‘Los renglones torcidos de Dios’ by Oriol Paulo as an anticipated novelty on billboards. The evolution of spectators was as follows: 201,013 people went to the cinema on Monday, on Tuesday it rose to 282,864 spectators, on Wednesday it rose to 408,776 spectators and on Thursday it dropped slightly to 399,146 tickets sold.

The best post-pandemic edition

The total is very close to the 1,339,946 spectators of the Film Festival held in October 2018, which was one of the weakest deliveries in the history of this initiative., which was used to always exceeding 1.5 million entries. However, things need to be seen from a post-pandemic perspective. Not only is this a better figure than in May, but it also easily surpasses the special edition of the Festival, called Yo Voy Al Cine, which was held in October 2021 to celebrate the reopening of cinemas after the coronavirus. But far behind are the October 2019 editions, which had 2,291,606 spectators, and the October 2016 edition, the most successful to date, with an incredible 2,598,958 tickets sold.

In terms of movies the big winner of this edition was ‘Smile’. The horror film was the most watched, followed by the revival of “Avatar” and “Model 77”, which take silver and bronze. ‘Don’t Worry Dear’, ‘Tadeo Jones 3: The Emerald Tablet’, ‘Journey to Heaven’, ‘The Father of Life’, ‘God’s Crooked Lines’, ‘Bullet Train’ and ‘The Wild Girl’ complete the list of the ten most viewed films of this Film Festival. A good year for Spanish cinema with four films in the ranking.