The Spanish film exhibition: an industry in recession that has lost its hegemonic position

Abstract

The Spanish exhibition managed to place since the mid-nineties until 2005 as one of the most developed industries in the European Union, but unduly linked to the «housing boom». With the advent of the economic crisis, to which was added, ironically, the continuous rise in the price of tickets, attendance at the meeting collapsed and Spanish cinema lost in a few years over forty million viewers.

Today, two thirds of the park cinemas in Spain are not profitable, so it is understandable that a deep reorganization of the exhibition sector occurs, with more closures of cinema complexes and new merger and absorption between operators, to foster greater concentration in a sector very diversified and in which regional groups had achieved «atomization» property, unrivaled in the large countries of the European Union.

However, the most serious and worrying fact is that, today, and after the loss of more than seven hundred screens in these years of crisis, more than 40% of Spanish territory has no cinemas where films can be seen, so we’re back to the situation in the early eighties when much of provincial capitals and towns with less than one hundred thousand people had lost all their theaters.