Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar drive revenue surge at Odeon cinemas

Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water were among the box office hits that helped the Odeon cinema group to increase Irish revenues by 78 per cent to €25.9 million last year.

New accounts lodged by United Cinemas International (Ireland) Ltd (UCI) show however that strong performances from individual movies failed to prevent the cinema group recording a pretax loss of €4.8 million. The loss was 8 per cent lower than the deficit recorded in 2021.

UCI operates 11 cinemas containing 78 screens in the State. In notes accompanying the accounts, directors said last year’s aggregate attendance levels were still behind pre-pandemic levels. They said cinema attendances across the Republic last year totalled 10.7 million, which was a 4.9 million increase on the Covid-hit 2021 total of 5.8 million.

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Accurately anticipating the box office success of Barbie and Oppenheimer this summer, the directors said “a more robust slate of major film releases is expected during 2023, which has generated optimism that cinema attendance levels will continue to improve gradually, as we experienced in 2022″.

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The directors said the company’s market share in the Republic decreased 1.55 percentage points on 2021 to 15.93 per cent overall last year.

A breakdown of revenues shows that box office revenues amounted to €14.86 million, while retail revenues came to €9.5 million. Screen advertising revenues totalled €404,000 while other revenues came to €1.12 million.

The company’s loss arose from cost of sales rising from €4.64 million to €8.62 million, while distribution costs and administrative expenses increased from €16.9 million to €22 million.

Numbers employed by the cinema company last year increased from 321 to 363, while staff costs increased from €5.4 million to €5.59 million. UCI received Covid-19 Wage Subsidy Scheme payments of €785,000.

Lease costs last year totalled €5 million.

At the end of December last, the company had a shareholders’ deficit of €24.22 million that included accumulated losses of €32.42 million, offset by a share premium account of €9.49 million.

The firm’s cash funds last year declined from €6.45 million to €3.4 million.