The box office results of many European countries in 2024 have been released. Except for France, the situation in most other countries is not optimistic. The number of moviegoers in Spain has declined by 5%, and the three-year box office recovery from 2021 to 2023 has come to an abrupt end.

Specifically, in 2024, a total of 71 million movie tickets were sold in Spain, with a total box office of 477 million euros, a 2% decrease from 2023 and 29% lower than the average box office from 2017 to 2019 before the pandemic. In particular, in the first half of 2024, the total number of admissions dropped by 13% compared to the same period in 2023. Fortunately, several popular movies were released in the second half of the year, which somewhat recovered the gap. As for the reason, it is probably due to the shortage of new films caused by the Hollywood strike.

Looking at the whole year, the Hollywood animated blockbuster "Inside Out 2" topped the list with 45.5 million euros at the box office. Looking at the ten years from 2014 to 2024, this result is the third best result after "Spanish Love" with 56 million euros in 2014 and "Avatar: The Way of Water" with 51 million euros in 2020. In general, animated films occupy five of the top ten films in the Spanish box office in 2024, indicating that watching movies with families has become the biggest reason for Spaniards to go to the cinema in the past year.

Inside Out 2 poster

Among Spanish domestic films, "Padre no hay más que uno 4" directed, written and starred by Santiago Segura achieved 13.4 million euros at the box office, ranking first. This film is the fourth in the "Padre no hay más que uno 4" series. The previous three films were also written, directed and starred by Segura himself, and were very popular with local audiences. However, they have little influence overseas and are quite unfamiliar to Chinese audiences.

Poster of "There's Only One Father 4"

Santiago Segura, 59, started out as an actor. At the age of 30, he won the Goya Award for Best New Actor for his role in The Day of the Beast. Three years later, he became a director and won the Goya Award for Best New Director for his comedy film Torrondi. In the years that followed, Torrondi had four sequels, all of which were box office hits, making it the Spanish domestic film series with the highest cumulative box office.

In 2019, Segura remade the Argentine comedy "I Can't Hold My Father" into "I Have Only One Father", successfully creating a new film series. In the film, he played the role of a helpless father who was forced to take care of his five children because his wife temporarily left, and became a well-known pop culture symbol in Spain. From 2019 to 2024, the films directed by Santiago Segura became the highest-grossing domestic films in Spain five times. Such an impressive achievement is probably rare in the global film industry.

However, among the top ten movies in Spain's box office, except for "Only One Father 4", the other nine are Hollywood movies, including "Deadpool & Wolverine", "Despicable Me 4", "Gladiator 2", "Moana 2", "Dune 2", "Wild Robots", "Kung Fu Panda 4" and "Love, So Far". Compared with neighboring France, Spain's own film industry strength still seems somewhat vulnerable to the impact of Hollywood blockbusters.