2024: A Year of Celebration in more ways than one

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GFT's Year in Review

David Gattens (our Finance/Commercial Director) reviews the year at GFT – the big hitters and the surprises (both good and bad) alongside some exclusive statistics and the usual scattering of dumb jokes and cinema brain teasers.

SO WHERE WERE WE?

In the end, GFT did slightly better in 2023 than the mid-December estimate I gave in my report for last year. We finished up on 183,000 admissions for the calendar year, which was less than 10% below our normal admissions levels in the late-2010s. (By way of comparison, the rest of the UK/Ireland sector as a whole was still around 25% behind their pre-pandemic norms.)

However, GFT entered 2024 amid reports and forecasts of a contraction in cinema admissions both in the country and worldwide following on from last year’s Hollywood strikes. The industry press and analysts largely agreed that a 5% year-on-year shrinkage in admissions was the most likely outcome.

No one likes to forecast a downturn – least of all, me – and so I set our team off into 2024 with the aim that we do no worse than our 2023 total – 183,000 admissions. I’ll admit it now – that was more of a “goal” than a “forecast”. I was mindful that our 2023 numbers included the spectacular returns from the likes of Oppenheimer, Barbie and Asteroid City and that an early look of the release slate for the year ahead did not appear to offer anything that might match those heights.

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JANUARY - MARCH

While the quarter as a whole is traditionally our busiest of the year, experience tells us that the early weeks of January can be a quiet-ish time at GFT. However, that wasn’t the case this year as two films which opened in the week after Christmas continued to draw in significant numbers into 2024 – Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (thanks partly to some well-attended presentations on 35mm) and Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron. Studio Ghibli titles – Hayao Miyazaki films in particular – have performed very well at GFT for a long time now, but no one expected this latest release to become the studio’s most popular title ever here, and certainly not so quickly. Further, it ultimately claimed a spot on GFT’s all-time Top 20 new releases chart (note to self: I really must get round to publishing that one day), becoming the second-biggest earning animated film ever at GFT, sandwiched between first-placed Isle of Dogs (2018) and The Illusionist (2010) in third.

At the same time, just to demonstrate that gold dust does not fall on every title we play at GFT, Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins did better business at GFT than just about anywhere else, but it wasn’t enough to save it from being sent off for an early bath. There was a similar pattern too with Michael Mann’s Ferrari. But generally, GFT audiences do like sports films, we know that for a fact.

One thing that was very noticeable about the release slate for January and February in particular was how few titles in relative numbers were set to play in cinemas, and so we knew that many of the titles playing at GFT would also be playing at other venues across the city, certainly more than normal. The challenge then was to ensure that GFT was the go-to place to see the winter season's big hitters.

Our first big test came in the shape of Poor Things, the first of two titles this year from director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose previous feature, The Favourite (2019), holds a place on our all-time Top 20 new releases chart. Despite the film’s relocation from Glasgow to London, we still had high hopes for it, especially after our quickly sold-out preview screening back in October 2023. Our audiences did not disappoint. The first seven days of Poor Things delivered the fourth-biggest opening week in GFT’s history – way ahead of any other Scottish venue and in the top three cinemas UK-wide. By the end of its second week, it was already in our all-time Top 10 and on its very last screening here, it claimed the #3 spot on our all-time box office records.

It will come as no surprise – spoiler alert! – then to report that Poor Things was our biggest film of the year. Meanwhile, Yorgos Lanthimos became the third director to have multiple titles in our all-time Top 20. The other two? Have a guess – the answer will be revealed at the end.

The period of mid-January through February normally sees the release of a sweep of much-fancied awards contenders. This year was no different – most notable were Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest and Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. Neither came close to the storming numbers of Poor Things, but they both grabbed a spot on that all-time Top 20 chart (although Haigh’s film was knocked off it just a few months later). Another very solid performer – and one of my personal favourites of the year – was The Holdovers, the latest feature from the ever-dependable duo of director Alexander Payne and actor Paul Giamatti. I really hope that we can give it a shot every Christmas at GFT – two sold-out screenings this Christmas already and more screenings now added doesn’t harm its chances. Meanwhile, American Fiction announced the talent of debutant writer/director Cord Jefferson while confirming the seemingly effortless excellence of Jeffrey Wright.

Given that the director’s recent output has not exactly captured our audiences’ hearts, it was a small – but welcome – surprise to see the fantastic reception for Perfect Days, the latest feature from Wim Wenders. It was clearly a solid “word of mouth” title with its numbers at the end of its run in March (post-GFF) being as strong as its numbers in its first screenings in February (pre-GFF).

And then there was Glasgow Film Festival which ran from 28 February to 10 March this year – our 20th edition and the proper start of Glasgow Film’s Year of Celebration. Overall attendances were 4% up on the previous edition – this was largely assisted by the demand for our really hot tickets. Of course, there were the usual suspects – our Opening Gala (Love Lies Bleeding), the Closing Gala (the world premiere of Janey, where we were honoured to host Janey Godley herself) and the Surprise Film (Drive-Away Dolls, which – alongside Perfect Days – was the only decent performer in the post-Festival weeks of March). We also had two sold-out Cinema 1 screenings of both La Chimera and Billy Connolly: Big Banana Feet – more on them later. Perhaps the hottest ticket – on the basis of general social media excitement and CineCard sales certainly – was for Viggo Mortensen, who attended GFF for both an ‘In Conversation’ chat and to present his latest film, The Dead Don’t Hurt (complete with two Q&As, the second very much unplanned – it’s a long story but a nice one, I’ll tell you some other time).

GFF also saw our best attended Scorsese of the Month screening of 2024 with a preview of the 4K restoration of After Hours. The other big hitters in the Scorsese run this year were Gangs of New York (February) with a post-screening Q&A with actor Gary Lewis and No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (November). Our Scorsese of the Month run came to a close at the end of the year after 31 screenings and well over 4,000 attendees. The best attended Scorsese film of the two-and-a half year run? The answer is revealed below. The gauntlet has truly been laid down for our next long-running season which launches in March at GFF25, Coen Brothers of the Month.

Meanwhile, our free morning retrospective screenings celebrating the films of 1939, 1974 and 2005 under the banner “Our Story So Far” attracted over 1,500 attendees – the biggest draw being Young Frankenstein. Putting on the Ritz, indeed! And I cannot close this section without acknowledging the winner of this year’s GFF Audience Award, the Icelandic football documentary The Home Game. Not only was it the runaway winner, but it also achieved the highest audience score ever in the 10-year history of the award.

In total, we had just over 64,000 admissions at GFT in the quarter. That represented a 14% increase on the equivalent quarter of 2023. It ranked as our fourth-busiest winter quarter ever.

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APRIL - JUNE

If I have a lot to say about the opening quarter of the year, that is because it is traditionally our busiest quarter every year and it’s when our largest titles are normally released. In contrast, our Spring quarter is always our quietest, and 2024 was to be no exception.

Or to put it another way, our biggest films in the months of April and June (Alex Garland’s Civil War and Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast) did fine in relative terms, but neither feature in our final Top 20 box office chart of the year below. June also did see our most popular CineMasters season of the year – four films plus a Dune double bill from director Denis Villeneuve. Incidentally, there was a strong local factor with our next two best-performing CineMasters of 2024 – Craig Armstrong (September) and Lynne Ramsey (April).

So the months of April and June delivered admissions that met our expectations. In that respect, all was good. And then there was May – often our quietest month of the year at GFT, an Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) or two notwithstanding. Well, it wasn’t quiet this year, thanks to our celebration of the twin milestones that month – the 85th anniversary of the opening of The Cosmo on Rose Street and the 50th anniversary of it becoming Glasgow Film Theatre.

We celebrated these birthdays with a special selection of classics – both old(ish) and new(ish) – which GFT has screened over the years. The biggest draws were In The Mood for Love, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cinema Paradiso and Blade Runner: The Final Cut. But really everything we screened over the month as part of our celebrations surpassed expectations. Over the 28 screenings of this birthday season, we exceeded 6,500 admissions.

Even without our anniversary screenings, May would have been a solid month in any case with year-end placings for GFF returnees, La Chimera and Love Lies Bleeding, and Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (which definitely wins my award for best – and most fun – original score of the year). But all of these were outgunned by our biggest title of the month, the re-issue of Murray Grigor and David Peat’s Billy Connolly: Big Banana Feet, which ended up being our biggest reissue of 2024.

Our 37,000 admissions for the quarter were a storming 22% up on the 2023 equivalent, the third-busiest spring quarter on record at GFT. And it all came from what happened in May. You know something? I think we should have a birthday celebration every year!

The whole of the sector of the UK was reporting numbers at the half-year which were 8% behind the same period in 2023 – pretty much in line with industry expectations at the start of the year. In contrast, GFT admissions over the same six-month period were ahead of 2023 numbers by 17%.

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JULY - SEPTEMBER

We were bracing ourselves for a slide in our summer quarter numbers as we all recognised that there was just no way that we could be expected to match what happened in the summer of 2023. You might recall that we had a couple of major titles then: Oppenheimer and Barbie. It would have been nice to report that we knocked those deflated expectations on the head, but sadly we didn’t. Our total admissions for the quarter of just under 39,000 was 10% down on those of the summer of 2023. On the upside, that total matched the target/expectation we set ourselves for the quarter back at the start of the year. So I was still taking this as a small victory.

July was bookended by two stand-out titles which left everything else behind in their wake. At the start of the month, high hopes were held for Kinds of Kindness from that man again, Yorgos Lanthimos. While it delivered decent numbers – more in line with earlier Lanthimos releases like The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) – it fell way short of the director’s last two features at GFT. Indeed, it generated less than a third of what Poor Things and The Favourite had done here – I’m putting this down to an extended running time, a trailer that really gave the viewer no clues as to what the film was about and the absence of Alasdair Gray and Olivia Colman. Meanwhile, at the end of July (and into August) there was Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow, a title that was originally programmed for a relatively small run largely in Cinema 3, but – due to demand – found itself being frequently upgraded to our two larger screens as well as playing over four weeks.

Speaking of extended performance numbers, six week runs for any film are very rare indeed at GFT. But then Kneecap was no ordinary film. It was our biggest title in both August and September. It eventually became our second title of the year to claim a place on GFT’s all-time Top 10 box office chart – displacing The King’s Speech in doing so, which I think the Kneecap guys might take some small satisfaction from. Its final numbers here only just fell short of those recorded by Barbie last year – that’s a measure of how significant it was for us. Remarkably too, we later discovered that GFT had been the top-performing venue across the whole of the UK and Ireland for Kneecap over the course of its run – which (to channel my inner Roy Cohn) really means that we were the best-performing cinema in the world!!!

As for the best of the rest in August, the only other significant performer was the return of the ever-popular My Neighbour Totoro. Meanwhile, September saw the quarter end strongly with a solid opening week of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, Sing Sing starring an excellent Colman Domingo and Lee featuring yet another stand-out performance by Kate Winslet. The combined box office returns of those three films still fell short of Kneecap’s September numbers though.

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OCTOBER - DECEMBER

October saw – after Kneecap – the next two biggest opening week numbers since the winter. First, at the start of the month with The Outrun, directed by Nora Fingscheidt and starring Saoirse Ronan. But its first seven-day total was surpassed at the end of the month by Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands from directors Blair Young and Carla J. Easton, which was – by quite some distance – the best attended documentary to play at GFT this year. (The other top performing documentaries over 2024 were – in descending order – the previously mentioned Billy Connolly: Big Banana Feet and Janey, Mogwai: If the Stars Had a Sound, Your Fat Friend, Wilding, High and Low: John Galliano and Copa 71.)

For the fifth consecutive year, we partnered with BFI London Film Festival to bring the very best of their annual programme to GFT. We only had one screening sell out this year – that was the Palme D’Or-winning Anora (more on that very shortly), but we also had near sell outs from Conclave, Blitz and A Real Pain. Overall, with over 2,200 admissions over 13 screenings, it was our second-best LFF attendance to date. For the record, the best LFF edition at GFT to date was in 2022 which featured six sold-out Cinema 1 screenings. (Can you recall them? Answers below.)

The Scotland Loves Anime weekend returned to GFT for its 15th edition in November and was just a whisker away from setting a new attendance record, just falling short of their 2019 numbers. Its most popular screenings this year were Look Back (with two sold-out Cinema 1 shows), The Colours Within and Ghost Cat Anzu.

Contrary to what you might think, winning the Palme D’Or at Cannes doesn’t automatically guarantee a great box office performance at GFT. Thankfully, it helped that this year’s winner, Sean Baker’s Anora, was just so entertaining – for the record, it’s my own favourite film of 2024 – and clearly gathered strong word of mouth. Its numbers at GFT were higher than those of Baker’s three previous features (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) combined, and it is now our third-best performing Palme D’Or winner ever. (Can you take a guess at the top two? Clue: Both come from the last 15 years – answers below.)

November was also kept buoyant by LFF-returnee Conclave and Small Things Like These starring Cillian Murphy, which almost ended in a dead heat. On the other hand, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English Language feature, The Room Next Door, fell short of the sort of box office numbers we have been accustomed to seeing at GFT from this director. (Final quiz question for the year: what is Almodóvar’s biggest-ever box office hit at GFT? You might be surprised!)

At time of writing, December following the exact same “mixed bag” pattern of recent years – first half sluggish – Anora and Conclave excepted, second half very good. Indeed, we are currently on track for this Christmas fortnight to be our best since 2019. In particular, I am very pleased to see record numbers for The Muppet Christmas Carol and sell-out shows of The Holdovers – a new Christmas favourite in the making, perhaps? Anyway, book in advance to avoid disappointment – but then you should always do that anyway…

Our latest projection for the final quarter of the year is that we’ll achieve around 54,000 admissions, which is just about bang on what we did in the final quarter of 2023.

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IT’S A WRAP

As at time of writing, our latest estimate is that we will close the year on around 196,000 admissions for calendar year 2024 – that’s around 7% ahead of our 2023 total, smashing those bleak industry expectations from back in January. There was also good news for the wider cinema sector too as UK admissions look to have held steady against last year, thanks in particular to a strong closing two months and all that “Moaddington Glicked” business. At worst, national admissions look like they might be just 2% down on the prior year.

We had two new entries into our all-time Top 10 this year – the same number as we had in 2023 – in Poor Things and Kneecap. Last year, we quietly spoke of concerns that audiences were concentrating around a small number of key titles and that GFT may have to rely on those critical titles really delivering for us going forward. But there was a definite shift away from such concentration as the year progressed. The reason our overall audience numbers grew this year was not because of a handful of key titles performed well, it was because those numbers were drawn in across the breadth of our programme.

Things are then continuing to move in the right direction at GFT. So thank you to our audiences for maintaining their support and faith in us, and thank you to everyone working and volunteering at GFT and GFF on another great year.

Unfortunately, it is also the case that GFT continues to operate at a loss despite our healthy admission numbers. While admissions are almost back to pre-pandemic norms, our costs have accelerated over the past five years past our present ability to earn. What all this means is that we continue to eat into our ever-diminishing reserves. During the year, GFT submitted a business plan for more financial support from Screen Scotland under their new Multi-Year Funding regime to address this situation. All eyes are now on the funding announcement due at the end of January.

In the meantime, you can show your support HERE to ensure that GFT can continue to provide Cinema for All. Or you can support us by buying GFT Gift Vouchers or becoming a member through the purchase of a CineCard. CineCard benefits include access to free cinema tickets, ticket discounts, loyalty points and much more!

Thank you to everyone who has supported and donated to us this year. Your generosity is truly appreciated. See you all again in 2025!

THE SCORES ON THE DOORS

GFT's TOP 5 RE-ISSUES OF THE YEAR

5. Ratcatcher

4. My Neighbour Totoro

3. Trainspotting

2. In The Mood For Love

1. Billy Connolly: Big Banana Feet

GFT’s TOP 20 NEW RELEASES OF 2024

20. American Fiction

19. Challengers

18. Kinds of Kindness

17. I Saw The TV Glow

16. Priscilla

15. The Substance

14. Since Yesterday - The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands

13. Small Things Like These

12. Conclave

11. La Chimera

10. The Holdovers

9. Love Lies Bleeding

8. Perfect Days

7. Anora

6. All of Us Strangers

5. The Boy and the Heron

4. The Outrun

3. The Zone of Interest

2. Kneecap

1. Poor Things

AND FINALLY, THE ANSWERS TO MY TEASERS…

• The other two directors – alongside Yorgos Lanthimos – with multiple entries in GFT’s all-time Top 20 are Martin McDonough (with two – The Banshees of Inisherin, Three Billboards…) and Wes Anderson (with four – The French Dispatch, Isle of Dogs, Asteroid City, The Grand Budapest Hotel).

• Goodfellas (January 2023) was the best attended Scorsese of the Month screening – the only title to sell out Cinema 1. This was followed by Taxi Driver (March 2023) and After Hours (March 2024).

• The six sold-out Cinema 1 screenings from the 2022 London Film Festival programme at GFT were The Whale, Triangle of Sadness, The Banshees of Inisherin, Decision to Leave, My Policeman and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. (Wow, what a year!)

• The two best-performing Palme D’Or winners at the GFT box office are I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Parasite (2019, it played at GFT in 2020)

• Pedro Almodovar’s biggest hit ever at GFT is Volver (2006), followed by Pain and Glory (2019) and Parallel Mothers (2022).

David Gattens

Finance/Commercial Director

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