More people are buying cinema tickets this year, but less money is going into making new films. The UK shows the gap most clearly, because both numbers come from the same official source: cinema admissions rose 15% to 107.7 million in January–September 2026, while UK film production spend fell 37% to £1.28bn ($1.70bn), according to statistics the BFI published on 10 November.
Britain is not alone. Global box office reached $29.7bn in the first ten months of the year, the best January–October total of the decade, according to Gower Street Analytics. Yet within four days this week, ITV cut its programme budget, France’s public auditor proposed capping the taxes that pay for French film support, and Spain’s film institute turned away 358 short-film projects that had cleared its quality bar, because the money ran out.
Key facts
- UK cinemas, January–September 2026: 107.7 million admissions, up 15%, and £897.3m ($1.19bn) at the box office, up 20% and the highest for the period in seven years (BFI)
- UK film production, January–September 2026: £1.28bn of UK spend by films that started shooting, down 37%; films financed and controlled from abroad spent £1.11bn, down 40% (BFI)
- Worldwide, January–October 2026: $29.7bn at the box office, up 8% on 2025 (Gower Street Analytics)
- ITV: £25m ($33m) taken out of fourth-quarter programme spending after advertising fell 8% in the third quarter
- France: the Cour des comptes proposes capping the CNC’s earmarked taxes at €690m ($772m), €157m below the 2026 forecast of €847m
UK and France, figures published 9–11 November 2026 Cinema ticket sales are up; production budgets are down or facing cuts Different measures and markets, shown side by side, not added together. The CNC cap is a proposal, not law. Sources: BFI; ITV plc; Cour des comptes. Full data and method below.
The gap matters most to producers, financiers and sales agents. Box office is what audiences spend now, largely on films financed and shot years ago. Production spend, broadcaster budgets and public funds decide what reaches cinemas next, and it is that second set of numbers that weakened this week.
In the UK, cinemas are up and shoots are down
The two BFI releases of 10 November cover the same nine months. The box-office release puts UK takings at £897.3m, up from £750.8m, with admissions above 100 million for the period for the first time since 2019. Add Ireland and run the count to 5 November, and Rentrak figures published by Screen put the year at £1.07bn, already more than any full year since the pandemic.
The production release runs the other way. The 123 films that started principal photography between January and September spent £1,278m in the UK, against £2,029m first reported for the same months of 2025. The number of films barely moved, from 120 to 123. The money fell by more than a third.
Most of the fall sits in what the BFI calls inward investment: films financed and controlled from outside the UK, including the large US studio productions that fill the country’s biggest stages. Thirty-six of them started shooting, against 41 a year earlier, and their UK spend fell 40% to £1,107m. They still account for 87% of all UK film spend. Domestic UK features spent £103m, down 17%. Co-productions were the only group to grow, up 31% to £68m.
The fall sharpened over the summer. Subtracting the BFI’s first-half figures from its nine-month totals, as we reported on 11 November, leaves about £251m of film spend from shoots that started in July, August and September, against about £932m a year earlier. The BFI does not publish quarterly figures, and its totals usually rise as late returns come in. A year ago it put film spend for the 12 months to September 2025 at £2.34bn; that figure now stands at £2.77bn. A revision of that size would narrow this year’s gap. It would not close it.
UK, January–September, £m UK cinema takings went up and UK film production spend went down Same nine months in both years. Box office is money taken at UK cinemas. Production spend is UK spend by films that started shooting in the period, with 2025 as first reported. Jan–Sep 2025Jan–Sep 2026 UK box office+20% UK film production spend, all films−37% of which inward investment films−40% of which domestic UK features−17% Box office and production spend measure different things: money collected this year, and money committed to films that will be released later. 2025 production figures are as first reported, the BFI’s like-for-like basis; later revisions usually raise them. Source: BFI Research and Statistics Unit, official statistics, 10 November 2026.See the data
Measure Jan–Sep 2025 Jan–Sep 2026 UK box office (+20%) £750.8m £897.3m UK film production spend, all films (−37%) £2,029m £1,278m of which inward investment films (−40%) £1,853m £1,107m of which domestic UK features (−17%) £124m £103m
Our reading: the two lines measure money at different points in a film’s life, and a third BFI release the same day shows the delay. The 735 films that received final certification as British in the year to September recorded a record £2.9bn of UK spend, but the BFI notes that most of the spend by films and high-end TV certified in that year came from productions that began between 2022 and 2024. UK cinemas are selling more tickets to films shot two or three years ago, while less is being committed to the films that will follow them.
ITV cuts programme spending within a quarter
Studio money is not the only production money under pressure. ITV said on 11 November that it would take £25m of what it calls temporary content savings in the last three months of the year, after its advertising revenue fell 8% in the third quarter. In July it had expected a fall of about 5%. Its content budget for 2026 is now about £1.2bn ($1.6bn), and its trading update forecasts fourth-quarter advertising 5–10% below last year’s.
ITV gave three reasons for the weaker demand: economic uncertainty, more advertising money moving to global streaming platforms, and the UK’s restrictions on advertising less healthy food. The sum is small against a £1.2bn budget. What matters to independent producers is the speed: when advertising weakened, ITV cut programme spend within a single quarter.
France may stop its film fund growing with ticket sales
In France, much of the public money for new films is raised from the businesses that sell films to audiences. The CNC, the national film and moving-image body, is funded by taxes on cinema tickets, on broadcasters and on video and on-demand services, including the subscription streamers. Those taxes are not capped, so when ticket sales or subscriptions rise, the money available for production and distribution support rises with them.
On 9 November the Cour des comptes, France’s public auditor, proposed ending that link. Its report on the public finances recommends capping the CNC’s earmarked taxes at €690m a year, against €847m forecast for 2026: €157m ($176m), or about 19%, less. The auditor calls the missing cap “an anomaly” and notes that the taxes rose by €154m, or 21%, between 2022 and 2025. The state had already taken €500m from the CNC’s reserves in 2025. The CNC’s answer, given by its legal and financial director, Alexis Goin, and reported by Boxoffice Pro, is that its receipts were flat for more than a decade before the recent rise and grew at half the rate of inflation. We reported the proposal in full this week.
A cap would bite hardest in a good year, and France is having one. Cinemas sold 151.8 million tickets in the first ten months, 24.8% more than in 2025, according to CNC estimates. Under a cap, receipts above €690m would go to the state instead of back into French production.
Spain shows the same squeeze on a smaller scale. The ICAA, Spain’s film institute, split €2.2m ($2.45m) between 39 short films on 11 November, the same budget as in 2024 and 2025. Another 358 projects scored above its 60-point threshold and received nothing, according to the final resolution. Fewer than one in ten projects that qualified were funded.
The case against
The strongest objection is that the UK fall reflects decisions taken by a handful of companies rather than a lasting trend. Inward investment is 87% of UK film spend, and a few studio slates can move it by hundreds of millions of pounds. Paramount completed its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery on 6 October, and Skydance has said it is applying “the playbook we ran at Paramount” to Warner Bros., including tighter control of what it greenlights. The same shareholder letter warned that weak Warner Bros. releases would cut fourth-quarter studio profit by up to $200m, yet said the company was on track for more than 30 theatrical films in 2027. A pause during a merger is not a permanent cut.
France’s cap is a proposal, not law, and would need a provision in a finance law to take effect. The auditor’s case also cuts the other way. Reviewing the CNC’s policies from 2011 to 2022, it found that a growing number of support schemes had raised the number of films produced while weakening their chances of success. On that reading, France has too many films for its money rather than too little money for its films.
European documentary figures fit that view. The European Audiovisual Observatory’s first study of the form, published on 12 November, counts about 1,341 documentaries produced a year in 2022–2025, up 9% on 2016–2019, of which fewer than half reach a commercial release. In parts of the market, output is growing faster than the audience.
Our reading
Our finding: the evidence supports a narrower claim than a funding crisis. In the UK, where the figures are clearest, audiences have returned while production money has fallen. Elsewhere, the money most exposed is the money tied to the market: broadcaster budgets that follow advertising, and French public funds that follow ticket sales and subscriptions. If the UK fall is a pause caused by studio mergers, new shoots will pick up in 2027. If it is not, cinemas that are full this year will have fewer UK-made films to show in 2028 and after.
Next milestone: the BFI’s full-year production figures, due on 9 February 2027, will show whether shoots returned to UK stages in the final quarter. In France, the test is whether a cap appears as an amendment to the 2027 finance bill, now before parliament, and at what level. ITV reports its full-year results on 4 March 2027. Our earlier analysis of local hits and franchise floors looked at the demand side of the same year.
How the figures were calculated
Both charts set figures side by side; none are added together. The UK comparisons use the same nine months, source and currency, with 2025 production spend as first reported, the BFI’s own like-for-like basis. The third-quarter estimate (about £251m against about £932m) is FilmBunch’s subtraction of the BFI’s January–June release of 11 August from its January–September release. Dollar figures use European Central Bank reference rates: 30 September 2026 for the UK figures and ITV ($1.3286 to the pound), 9 November 2026, the report’s publication date, for the Cour des comptes ($1.1193 to the euro), and 11 November 2026 for the ICAA ($1.1127 to the euro).
Sources
- BFI Research and Statistics Unit, Film and high-end television programme production in the UK, January to September 2026 (official statistics, 10 November 2026)
- BFI Research and Statistics Unit, The UK box office, January to September 2026 (official statistics, 10 November 2026)
- BFI Research and Statistics Unit, British film, HETV, animation, children’s TV and video games certification, October 2025 to September 2026 (10 November 2026)
- Screen International, UK-Ireland box office for 2026 passes totals of every post-pandemic year (11 November 2026; Rentrak figures to 5 November)
- Gower Street Analytics, October Verities: global box office remains top of decade; China still in slump (11 November 2026)
- ITV plc, Q3 Trading Update for the nine months to 30 September 2026 (RNS, 11 November 2026)
- Cour des comptes, Contribution au rétablissement des finances publiques (report, 9 November 2026; measure 5, pp. 23 and 90–91)
- Boxoffice Pro (France), La Cour des comptes veut plafonner les recettes du CNC (12 November 2026)
- CNC, La fréquentation au mois d’octobre 2026 dépasse les 14 millions d’entrées (3 November 2026)
- ICAA, Resolución por la que se conceden las ayudas a la producción de cortometrajes sobre proyecto correspondientes al año 2026 (11 November 2026)
- Skydance Corporation, third-quarter 2026 shareholder letter (SEC filing, exhibit 99, 9 November 2026)
- European Audiovisual Observatory, Documentaries in cinema and on VOD: insights into production and distribution trends 2016–2025 (November 2026)
- European Central Bank, euro foreign exchange reference rates (30 September 2026: USD 1.1355, GBP 0.85463; 9 November 2026: USD 1.1193; 11 November 2026: USD 1.1127)