Gross revenue of the filmed entertainment market in the UK 2016-2020, by platform

In 2020, the gross revenue of the filmed entertainment market in the United Kingdom amounted to approximately 2.64 billion British pounds, down 24 percent from the 3.46-billion-pound revenue recorded a year earlier. While the turnover of the theatrical subsegment declined by over 75 percent to 307 million pounds, the revenue of the digital video market grew by about 40 percent to more than 1.35 billion pounds in 2020. Meanwhile, the revenue of UK's film industry amounted to 18.75 billion pounds in 2019.

The slow recovery of British cinemas

Movie theaters across the UK continued to struggle to fully recover their finances after the COVID-19 outbreak. In 2021, the British box office gross amounted to almost 557 million pounds, an increase of 88 percent compared to 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Yet the figure amounted to less than 45 percent of the 1.25-billion-pound box office revenue recorded in 2019. Similarly, the number of movie tickets sold in the UK grew by nearly 70 percent in 2021, standing little above 74 million. But that amounted to 42 percent of the 176 million cinema admissions counted in 2019.

A movie star on the global stage

Despite the slow recovery, the UK remains a solid film market. In 2021, it recorded the fourth biggest box office revenue worldwide, at around 800 million dollars, tying with France. The British cinema industry is also one of the pillars of an even larger market: Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). Since the pandemic, that region's box office gross surpassed the United States and Canada, collectively known as the North American movie market. That was the first time this happened since 2014.