Cinemas And Their Audience : Germany

In 1995, attendance at Germany’s approximately 3,500 cinemas topped 125 million. The number of cinema-goers is continuing to grow, due in no small part to the current German film boom. Numerous film festivals have played a key role in establishing the reputation of the German cinema abroad: In addition to the “Berlinale” (founded in 1951), which is the most important German forum for international encounters between members of the film industry, there are international days of short films in Mannheim, Oberhausen and Leipzig as well as film festivals with a specific orientation in Hof, Lubeck and Munich.

Notwithstanding the success of German film productions, elaborate Hollywood films continue to dominate the programs of the country’s cinemas. The German cinema must also fight ever stiffer competition from television and other media, especially from the continuously growing variety of entertainment provided by private television broadcasters, cable and satellite transmission, pay TV and video.

For this reason more resources are being invested in German cinema today than ever before - both in movie theaters and in feature film production. Since the early 1990s media corporations and international cinema groups have been investing more heavily in German cinema. Multiplex cinemas with as many as 18 screens and more than 5,000 seats have already opened in many major cities, and others are under construction or planned. By the year 2000, German cinema operators intend to invest about DM 1.2 billion in such huge cinemas. Today cinema films are often produced in cooperation with television networks. A general agreement between the film industry and the television corporations obligates the latter to provide funds for coproductions with film producers and to refrain from broadcasting such jointly produced films on television until at least two years after they have been released.