Cinema 2025

It is often said that comedies no longer draw crowds as they once did. The 2025 figures say otherwise. Checco Zalone is a case apart. He will never be invited to compete at Venice with one of his films, yet he is the one who saved the sector.

Buen Camino is not his finest work, but it is the film that brought the most cinemagoers of all to theatres last year: 4,631,697. And that was in a single week, having been released on 25 December 2025. In second place came Lilo & Stitch, with 3,258,257 admissions. At the box office Zalone reached 76 million euros in total, the highest gross ever in the country. After one week he had taken almost 31 million. The point is this: had he not been there, the disruptive comedian who rescued the Italian cinema system, the picture of 2025 would have been entirely different.

The encouraging fact is that the top ten includes as many as four Italian titles. Besides Zalone, there are Follemente by Paolo Genovese (2,546,138 admissions), Diamanti by Ferzan Ozpetek (1,470,095) and Io sono la fine del mondo by Gennaro Nunziante, Zalone's own director, (1,275,720), placing third, seventh and tenth respectively.

Which region goes to the cinema the most? Lombardy, in the lead as always, had 14,009,771 cinemagoers; Lazio 9,406,871. If we then look at the average number of viewers per screen, far down in tenth place we find the region that hosts the most important festival in the world after Cannes, Veneto, with 25,192. And yet it ranks third, after Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, among the regions with the most screens, with 233 active venues.

Overall, the figures for the two years under review are practically the same, with a slight drop in attendance. In 2025 there were 71,750,837; in 2024 there were 73,476,500. The number of screens: 4,729 in 2025, 4,729 in 2024.

There is a slight increase in box-office takings: 539,864,502 in 2025, 539,541,033 in 2024. Takings generated +0.5%; attendance -2%.

A final observation on Avatar by James Cameron: industry insiders judged the third chapter the most beautiful and moving, and yet it drew only 1,897,988 viewers, ranking fifth.

Alberto Barbera, in 2024, at the press conference of the Venice Film Festival, took everyone by surprise when he said that "there is an Italian overproduction, where quality is not always equal to the numbers". Yet, of 21 titles in competition, five were by Italian directors: Gianni Amelio, Giulia Louise Steugerwalt, Luca Guadagnino, Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, and Maura Delpero, whose Vermiglio, the only truly fine film of the five, won the Silver Lion. In 2025 the Lido's artistic director was even more pointed: "The platforms are not able to absorb all the titles, some are small and have little capacity to intrigue audiences, and significant debut works are lacking".

Then there is the tax credit with its scandals, which conjured up improvised producers out of nothing. The fashionable inner circle of Italian cinema, the one that goes to festivals and wins at the David di Donatello awards, represents only a part of the sector. Italian cinema has respected auteurs but struggles to renew itself, as was seen at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where there were films from Nepal and Nigeria, Cyprus and Somalia, but not a single Italian film in any of the sections. It is also true that for the French selectors only a few Italian names exist, always the same ones. But that is another story.