Nordic box office: mixed fortunes in 2023

Cinemagoing numbers are up across Nordic countries according to box office figures for 2023 provided this week by national film agencies. The “Barbenheimer” effect has been strongly felt throughout the region, but cinema ticket sales are still lagging a long way behind pre-pandemic numbers, and analysts have picked up on some worrisome and contradictory trends.

The best news came from Iceland, the smallest Nordic market, but one in which box office was at its highest since 2018, up 32.5% on 2022, and where three Icelandic titles made it into the year’s top10. Elsa María Jakobsdóttir’s comedy drama Wild Game (Villibráð) was number two for the year, ahead of Oppenheimer. Erlingur Thoroddsen’s Cold (Kuldi)and Óskar Thór Axelsson’s thriller Operation Napoleon were the other two top 10 hits, and the Icelandic national market share almost doubled, from 9.2% in 2022 to 17% in 2023.

Total admissions in Sweden in 2023 also rose, according to Sveriges Biografägareförbund. They were at 11.2 million, up (8%) from 10.4 million in 2022. However, numbers are still down 29% compared to 2019, before the pandemic. The Swedish market share was 17.1%, a drop on the 19.4% achieved in 2022.

Only one local film, Ted Kjellsson’s family comedy Håkan Bråkan, released in late 2022, made it into the Swedish top 10 for the year.

Torkel Stål, analyst at the Swedish Film Institute, explained why the national market share has dipped: “One reason is that we had very few major Swedish films in the first half of the year, and very many in the second half. There was competition between titles in the fall and in the winter, but too few major films during the first six months.”

Warner Bros’ Barbie and Universal’s Oppenheimer were the two most successful films of the year at the Swedish box office. The top five local pictures were Håkan Bråkan; another family comedy, Nelly Rapp - The Secret of the Black Forest (Nelly Rapp - Dödens spegel); the romantic drama Second Act (Andra akten), starring Lena Olin; the action comedy The Final Race (Ett sista race); and Per Fly’s biopic Hammarskjöld, starring Mikael Persbrandt.

No auteur-driven hits matched the success achieved in 2022 by Ruben Östlund’s Triangle Of Sadness.

In Denmark, annual cinema admissions were at 10,032,151, slightly down on the 2022 figure, 10,224,124, although the Danish Distributors’ Association (FAFID) has been celebrating admissions over 10 mn two years in a row. “It is still a way off from the 13 million visitors in 2019, but film distributors and cinemas agree that the market is on its way back,” an FAFID spokesperson observed. Local market share slipped to 24.88%, down from 29.86% in 2022, although four local Danish titles did make it into the top 10 – The Land of Short Sentences (Meter i sekundet), Before It Ends (Når befrielsen kommer), The Promised Land (Bastarden), and The Kiss (Kysset).

The Norwegian national market share rose from 24% last year to 27% this year, a more encouraging trend. The top local films were the family drama Christmas on Cobbler Street (Den første julen i Skomakergata) and the war picture Narvik: Hitler’s First Defeat (Kampen om Narvik), respectively the fourth and fifth top grossing pictures of the year.

Meanwhile, in Finland, admissions were at 7.2 mn, 24% higher than in 2022 (but still around 15% down on pre-pandemic figures in the 2015-2019 period). However, thanks to rising ticket prices, the box office revenue was at €93.5 mn, close to pre-pandemic revenue levels.

In Finland as in other Nordic markets apart from Iceland, Barbie and Oppenheimer topped the year’s box office charts. Barbie was a phenomenon, attracting more than 680,000 viewers and in the process becoming the 11th most-watched film in Finnish cinema history. Oppenheimer had 395,000 viewers. The most-watched Finnish film of the year was fourth on the annual list: Aki Kaurismäki's Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet), which posted 255,000 admissions (and also performed strongly abroad and did decent business in other Nordic countries).

The most-watched non-American or non-Finnish film of the year was the Japanese animation The Boy and the Stork,directed by Hayao Miyazaki. The film, which premiered at the end of the year, gathered 68,253 viewers.

As the Finnish Film Foundation’s Statistics Specialist Petri Peltonen pointed out, the biggest surprise of the year was Lapua 1976, the debut feature from Toni Kurkimäki. This film, about the explosion of the Lapua Cartridge Factory, was made without production support from the Finnish Film Foundation or even the involvement of a well known production company, but still became a runaway hit, ending up 9th on the 2023 box office chart, and outperforming Mission Impossible and Guardians Of The Galaxy in the process.

On a less positive note, Nordic films have generally been experiencing very mixed fortunes in other Nordic countries. In Norway, for example, the most successful non-Norwegian Nordic title was the Swedish animated family film Who Are You, Mamma Moo? (Vem är du, Mamma Mu?), which ranked 85th for the year.

“I think we feel like we’re watching a lot of each other’s TV shows, but Norwegian, Danish and Swedish films travel very badly across state borders,” suggests Jens Skavdal, analyst at the Norwegian Film Institute. “The general consensus is that we are not able to sell our films within the Nordic countries. Norwegian films sell better to other European countries or even continents than on average to Sweden or Denmark.”