Cinema Festival: Cold snap at the 40th edition
The 2025 Film Festival attracted 3 million spectators to theaters between June 29 and July 2. The heatwave and the absence of cinematic powerhouses explain the decline in attendance compared to 2024.
The Fête du Cinéma celebrated its 40th anniversary across the country between June 29th and July 2nd. Created in 1985, this celebration of film culture has since become a staple of French culture. For this 2025 edition, it attracted more than 3 million people to movie theaters. These figures are a bit disappointing, especially considering that last year the event attracted a record 4.65 million spectators.
Despite this mixed statistic, the National Federation of French Cinemas is satisfied. In a press release, it wrote: "The French have reaffirmed their pleasure in rediscovering their primary cultural pastime in the cool of darkened cinemas."
Skip the adHow can we explain this slight drop in attendance between 2025 and 2024? Last year, the film festival benefited from three formidable locomotives, the comedies of Artus: A Little Something Extra , Inside Out 2 and The Count of Monte Cristo based on Alexandre Dumas, readapted by the duo Alexandre de la Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte and carried by a very convincing Pierre Niney. And another reason may also have had an influence: the weather. The three days of the festival corresponded to the heatwave, which made all of France and of course its movie theaters sweat. This Pyrrhic victory should also be put into perspective with the attendance figures for June: nearly 11 million admissions, a drop of 23% compared to the same period last year.
Also read: F1, 13 Days 13 Nights, Once Upon a Time in Gaza... Films to see and avoid this week
Every year, the cinema festival offers the French the opportunity to discover cinema culture at a low price, that is to say €5 in some 6,000 participating theaters throughout France. In 2025, several major productions have scheduled their releases to coincide with the dates of the event: F1 with Brad Pitt as a returning driver, M3GAN 2.0 for fans of horror films or 13 Days, 13 Nights , a French blockbuster in which Roschdy Zem replays the evacuation of the French embassy in Kabul, which was exceptionally released on Friday, June 27.
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