Cinemas Cash In as Europe's Brutal Heatwave Sends Families Running for the Air Conditioning
Schools across the U.K. shut their doors early last week as temperatures touched 100 degrees Fahrenheit, capping off the hottest June on record. For most of the country, it was a miserable stretch to get through.
Theaters up and down the country started reporting something unusual for a Tuesday afternoon: packed houses. Parents who suddenly found themselves with kids at home and nowhere cool to put them were spotted making a beeline from the school gates straight to the nearest air-conditioned lobby, buying tickets to anything that would let their children burn off energy somewhere that wasn't their own sweltering living room.
It's worth saying upfront that nobody's treating this as good news. The heatwave that swept across Europe last week is now being described as the most severe and widespread the continent has ever recorded, and the risks that come with that kind of heat are serious enough that few people in the industry want to sound like they're celebrating a side effect of it.
Still, the numbers don't lie, and they point to a real bump in ticket sales. "Toy Story 5" had already posted the biggest U.K. opening of the year the weekend before, pulling in $20.2 million and claiming 72% of all ticket sales over its first three days. That opening weekend alone made it the biggest launch any Toy Story film has ever had in the U.K. and Ireland, beating out Toy Story 4's debut back in 2019. By June 29, the film's cumulative U.K. total had climbed to $38.6 million, and notably, most of that extra money came in during the middle of the week, since temperatures had already started cooling off again by the time the weekend rolled around.
Phil Clapp, who heads up the U.K. Cinema Association, told Variety that heatwaves are something of a double-edged sword for his industry. There's always a risk, he said, that extreme heat keeps people locked indoors at home rather than sending them out anywhere at all, cinemas included.
Two of the biggest chains in the country, Odeon and Picturehouse, wouldn't share specific figures when asked, but both leaned into the same basic message: going to the cinema doesn't really care what the weather's doing outside. Odeon's spokesperson described a trip to the cinema as a good day out no matter the conditions, while Picturehouse pointed to its £3 children's ticket as part of what's been bringing families through the door, calling cinema-going an activity built for any weather, heatwave included.
Here's the irony, though: for a lot of families, the cinema was one of the only reliably air-conditioned spaces they had access to in a country that, generally speaking, isn't built for this kind of heat. However, multiple chains quietly dealt with air conditioning units breaking down under the strain, leaving some audiences barely any cooler inside the theater than they'd have been outside, which may be part of why exhibitors have been a little cagey about putting hard numbers on the heatwave bump in the first place.
It wasn't just a U.K. problem, either. France saw even higher temperatures, including the hottest day in the country's recorded history, and despite that (or maybe because of it), Marc-Olivier Sebbag of the National Federation of French Cinemas told Le Monde that French theaters pulled in 50% more admissions in the week of June 17 to 23 than they had during the same week the previous year, and 36% more than the equivalent week before the pandemic, based on the 2017-2019 average.
