A. Guttmann
Research Lead covering media
Cinema in Brazil - statistics & facts
Brazil is the largest country in Latin America, but its box office revenue is not quite there yet. In 2021, it amounted to about 176 million U.S. dollars, less than half of the result recorded in Mexico that same year. The Portuguese-speaking country holds the silver medal in the region's film industry by many measures, but it also has the potential to thrive in that field. In 2021, the average cinema ticket price in Brazil was just slightly higher than in Mexico. Pricing, however, is always a double-edged sword that may also cut off the part of the audience that lives on a budget. The average cost for a single movie ticket added up to a little less than half of the monthly price of a Netflix basic plan in Brazil as of mid-2023.
Sponsors behind the big screen
Around 20 percent of Brazilian consumers went to the movies throughout 2021. After hitting fairly low results during the coronavirus pandemic, the audiences started showing signs of returning to the theaters. And so, cinema advertising spending also saw a hike in 2021, surpassing 2.5 billion Brazilian reals that year. Even in 2020 – when the coronavirus outbreak brought the segment to its knees – cinema ad spending in Brazil amounted to nearly 1.6 billion reals. This is more than the expenditures in 2016 and 2017 combined. Out of the 2021 figure, almost 10 percent came from the top cinema advertiser in Brazil, Prevent Sênior, a private health care provider focused on the elderly.The struggle of domestic productions
In May 2021, actor and screenwriter Paulo Gustavo – one of the most bankable Brazilian movie stars of all time – fell victim to COVID-19 at the age of 42. His legacy included the drag trilogy "My Mom Is a Character", whose second installment is among the most viewed films in Brazil's history. The precocious death took place while moviemaking became harder, as tax incentive policies for film funding are increasingly scarce. Even a year later, in 2022, domestic movies accounted for less than four percent of the box office revenue in Brazil, the second lowest share in at least 15 years. Viewers have turned to foreign titles since the coronavirus restriction measures were eased, and the international release schedule resumed. As a result, in 2022 none of the top 10 most-watched films at movie theaters in Brazil were Brazilian. This suggests that the quest to expand the overall cinema audience is also a quest to release more appealing pictures made in Brazil.
