Laura Carollo
Research expert covering cinema and film
Film industry in the Netherlands - statistics & facts
The cinema market in some robust European economies struggled to at least start to recover from the pandemic in 2021. That group includes, for instance, Turkey, Italy, and the Netherlands. The latter saw its annual box office gross decrease by over six percent that year. When compared to 2019, there was a decline of almost 60 percent. The drop followed a downturn in moviegoing. The Netherlands had the ninth highest cinema attendance in Europe in 2022 at little less than 25 million. However, that figure was still way under the 38 million tickets sold across the country in 2019, before the coronavirus outbreak. Still, Dutch filmmaking resisted bravely. The Netherlands was among the only seven European markets where the domestic films' share in ticket sales increased between 2020 and 2021. Nearly 22 percent of its cinema attendance came from Dutch movies, up from less than 11 percent two years before.
Dutch moviemaking
The production value of domestic movies in the Netherlands approached 220 million euros in 2022. Feature films (excluding documentaries) accounted for most of that total. After reaching, in 2020, the lowest value since 2013, the sum of the budgets of movies produced or co-produced by Dutch studios grew in 2022 to around 129 million euros. That amount was topped only in 2019 when it surpassed 140 million euros. And an eventual payoff would come from global audiences due to the relatively small Dutch market. The two highest-grossing Dutch-language films in the Netherlands in 2022 were the comedies "Soof 3" and "Bon Bini Holland 3." They respectively amassed 4.97 million and 4.47 million euros at the domestic box office.Dutch moviegoing
After enjoying supremacy in the movie industry's revenue in the Netherlands from 2012 to 2017, the cinema sector watched video-on-demand (VOD) take the lead and skyrocket, especially after COVID-19. In 2022, VOD's revenue in the Dutch market was about four times higher than movie theaters'. Meanwhile, the cinema segment tried to catch up by raising entrance fees. The average price of a movie ticket in the Netherlands reached a record-high 10.32 euros in 2022 – an increase compared to 2019. The rise was an attempt to compensate for the persistent decline in cinema attendance since the pandemic began.
