Cinema delivers a scorching school holiday season with a sizzling 10.7 million admissions across the summer

• The 2021/22 school holiday season sizzled with impressive 10.7 million admissions across 16 December 21 – 30 January 2022, driven by an incredibly strong slate of epic content.

• Spiderman: No Way Home smashed local and global box office forecasts, becoming the 3rd biggest movie of all time in Australia with 4.1 million admissions to date.

• The hard-to-reach 18–39-year-olds were a key audience segment, representing 45% of the summer admissions, with youth attendances doubling year on year.

• The latest SMI results released yesterday (1st Feb 2022) reported December 2021 cinema spend up 153% on prior year, reaffirming advertiser confidence in the cinema environment.
  

The 2021/22 school holidays proved that big just got bigger with admissions exploding to 10.7 million. Driven by a strong slate of highly anticipated big-name films such as Spiderman: No Way Home, Sing 2, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, House of Gucci, and The Matrix Resurrections all releasing across 16 December 2021 – 30 January 2022, cinema audiences eclipsed the comparable 2020/21 school holiday period by 60%.

Spiderman: No Way Home transformed box office and audience records, taking out not only the top result of the summer and the entire year, but the film has become the third biggest film in Australian box office history. Crowds of almost half a million flocked to cinemas across its opening day, with a total of 4.1 million admissions for the film across the entire school holiday period.

Family favourite Sing 2 became the second-biggest film of the summer school holidays pulling in 1.3 million Aussies to the big screen, while the highly nostalgic Ghostbusters: Afterlife captured 665,000 admissions.

Summer audiences skewed towards young, affluent 18–39-year-olds, eager to immerse themselves in entertaining and exciting experiences. An incredible 45% of total admissions came from this hard-to-reach segment, with summer 18-39 attendances doubling year on year. Alongside these audiences were other high-value categories such as families and AB’s which presented an incredibly valuable opportunity to advertisers at such a crucial time of the year.

Guy Burbidge, Managing Director of Val Morgan Cinema, said “The performance of cinema over the Christmas and New Year school holiday period has been nothing short of outstanding, led by a record-breaking audience delivery from Spiderman: No Way Home. This summer proved that both the consumer and advertiser confidence in cinema is strong, delivering impressive audience results across the board and our largest revenue month since December 2019. The time is now for brands to start capitalising on the impressive slate of content coming out this year.”

Further proving the value advertisers place in cinema, the latest SMI result released yesterday reported December cinema spend up 153% on prior year, with all major categories including automotive, retail, and financial services returning to the big screen.

The stellar start to the 2022 blockbuster slate is set to continue in the coming weeks and beyond, with a diverse range of films on the horizon with the likes of action-packed adventure film, Uncharted, starring Tom Holland releasing on February 17, and one of this years most anticipated films, The Batman, starring an all-new Batman, Robert Pattinson, releasing on March 3.

“We’re confident that 2022 will be an outstanding period for cinema, as the combination of the world’s greatest content combined with the unparalleled experience that cinema offers, draws cinemagoers and brands back to Australia’s #1 cultural activity,” said Burbidge.

Source: CineTAM 2021/22. // Standard Media Index Dec 2021