Nordic B.O. 2024 Drops But Local Fare Save the Game in Three Countries

After the hopeful signs of recovery over the last two years, attendance in all five markets dropped again in 2024, by a small margin of 3% in Denmark to nearly 13% in Norway. Post COVID effects and Hollywood strikes that led to a lack of U.S. tentpoles were blamed for the decline, however mitigated in some territories by the strong performance of domestic fare.

In Finland, local titles secured a record 31.6% market share, with the local epic love story “Stormskerry Maja” leading the charge. In Sweden, the local champion was the heart-warming documentary “The Last Journey” in which the TV personalities Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson (aka Filip & Fredrik) travel to France to rekindle the zest for life of Filip’s aging dad. The Swedish Oscar entry largely contributed to the country’s 22% market-share and biggest ticket sales in seven years.

In Iceland, it was Hollywood-Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur who delivered the country’s biggest hit: “Touch”, another story of love and tender reminiscence of the past, which ended up being short-listed for the Oscars for best international film.

Contrastingly Denmark – usually the strongest performer in the Nordics – lost ground, especially with homegrown titles, partly due to a 10-year low volume of national premieres, while Norway also suffered from a lack of local tentpoles that led to the weakest year since the pandemic.

Besides Finland and Iceland, Disney’s “Inside Out 2” dominated the Nordic charts.

Across the region, audiences chose safe movie bets, either sequels or adaptations of well-known IP or tried universes.

DENMARK

With DKK 964,94 million ($135.5 million) earnings from 9.8 million tickets sold, the nation registered its worse results in 30 years according to preliminary figures from the Danish film distributors’ association FAFID relayed by the Danish Film Institute. The drop was only 3% year on year in admissions, however.

The pandemic, streamer competition and Hollywood strikes were to blame for the weaker cinema figures according to DFI analyst consultant Martin Kofoed Hansen, who underlined the overall drop in first-run offers (down 18 to 209) and in particular the 10 year-low volume of Danish titles with 22 titles, far below the usual 31 annual output.

The 22 new Danish films on release earned DKK 208.4 million ($29.3 million) from 2.3 million ticket sales, down 8% year-on-year admission-wise, and 37% below pre-COVID time averages. The domestic market share (usually one of the highest in Europe, above 28%) had to make do with 23% in 2024, down from 2023’s 25%. However according to the DFI, local fare still achieved far better sales than the overall number of films on offer.

Three Danish titles made it in the Top 10: the romance for mature audiences “When in Rome” starring Rolf Lassgård and Bodil Jørgensen; crime thriller “Boundless,” based on best-selling author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s “Department Q” series and political thriller “Kingmaker,” a sequel to 2004 hit “King’s Game,” based on another popular book crime series from author Niels Krause-Kjær.

With 5.9 million ticket sales, the local market share for U.S. titles dropped from 63% in 2023 to 58%.
Hollywood dominated the top of the chart with four titles in the first spots, including the biggest hit, “Inside Out 2” from Disney.

Only one film in the Top 10 (“When in Rome”) was based on an original story.

Looking at 2025, Hansen was confident that the downturn in attendance would reverse with a plethora of audience-pullers from the U.S. and Denmark, such as the Danish Oscar contender “The Girl with the Needle,” “Checkered Ninja 3” (the third instalment in the hit animation franchise) and Mads Mikkelsen starrer “Back to Reality” from “Riders of Justice” helmer Anders Thomas Jensen. The Zentropa feature is due to open in Denmark this fall.

Top 10 Films in Denmark, 2024

(Ranking based on admissions (title, distributor, admissions, B.O., release date)
Source the Danish Film Institute, FAFID – Gross BO – DKK1 = $0.14 as of Jan. 2025)

FINLAND

Cinemagoing in 2024 was still below pre-COVID levels with 6.7 million admissions worth €89.5 million ($94 million), down 5.5% in ticket sales compared to 2023 and 20.7% under the 2015-19 average, according to estimates from the Finnish Film Foundation. However, “the strong performance of domestic films helped mitigate the decline”, said the Foundation’s head of statistics Petri Peltonen who underlined the exceptional strong performance of local films across the country.

“For the first time in recorded history, every region’s most watched movie was locally-produced,” he noted.

After “Barbie” in 2023 which soared at the Finnish box office and locked the biggest ticket sales since 2014 (7.2 million), in 2024, it was the turn of a Finnish woman – Maja – and her empowering story of resilience in the period movie “Stormskerry Maja” that sailed to the top. With nearly 470,000 tickets, Tiina Lymi’s sweeping epic based on the best-selling novels by Anni Blomqvist, scored a 10-year record high for a local film.

Besides “Stormskerry Maja” which beat Disney’s “Inside Out 2,” four other local films made it in the Top 10: the comedy spin-offs “Luottomies-elokuva: All in” by Kari Ketonen and “Kyllä isä osaa –elokuva” by Panu Raipia; the family movie ”Hayflower, Quiltshoe and the Chicken” by Reetta Aalto, and “Long Good Thursday” by Mika Kaurismäki, the fourth instalment in the hit comedy film series about the “Grumpy” older farmer based on Tuomas Kyrö’s novels.

Released in October, the popular animated movie and worldwide phenomenon “Niko – Beyond the Northern Lights” also passed the 100,000 admissions mark.

With 2.1 million tickets sold from 48 new premieres (including 15 documentaries), Finnish titles scored their biggest result since 2017, up 27.7% from 2023, although still 1.3% down from the 2025-19 average. This gave them a record 31.6% market share, a clear leap from 2023’s 23.4%. Box office revenues also peaked at €27.37 million ($28.7 million) in 2024, up 35.8% from 2023 and 21.1% from the 2015-19 average.

“In 2024, cinemagoers seemed to gravitate increasingly towards familiar local stories and nostalgia. I would not be surprised to see this trend continue in 2025,” said the Finnish Film Foundation’s head of distribution Ilmari Arnkil.

On the U.S. front and an aftermath of the 2023 Hollywood strikes, 79 new premieres accounted for 53.7% market share, a clear drop from 2023’s 66.8%. Besides “Inside Out 2,” the biggest U.S. hits were the franchises “Despicable Me 4,” “Dune: Part 2,” “Deadpool & Wolverine” and romantic drama “It Ends with Us.”

Top 10 Films in Finland, 2024

(Ranking based on admissions (title, distributor, admissions, B.O., release date)
Source the Finnish Film Foundation- Gross BO €1 = $1.05 as of Jan. 2025)

ICELAND

In a market overwhelmingly dominated by U.S. fare (usually above 80%), last year’s dearth of Hollywood titles inevitably hurt the theatrical market of the smallest Nordic nation, which dropped 5.8% in box office to ISK 1.6 billion ($11.4 million), and 9.8% in admissions to 904,809. Pre-pandemic times, overall ticket sales were usually above 1.2 million. “Cinemagoing in Iceland went back to our pandemic days, where a lot of classic films were being shown on the big screen,” said Daníel Traustason from the rights holders’ association FRISK.

A regular champion at the local box office, Baltasar Kormákur’s romance “Touch”, shot between Iceland, London and Hiroshima, was the biggest hit of the year with over ISK 100 million box office ($ 717,388) from 44, 881 ticket sales. The helmer’s earlier pics “The Oath” and “Everest” topped the local charts in 2016 and 2015 respectively.

Another local title entered the charts at number 10: “Odd Fish” by Snævar Sölvi Sölvason, a feel-good movie about two childhood buddies whose friendship is tested when one of them reveals she is a transgender woman. The movie grossed ISK 38.5 million from 17,260 ticket sales.

However, despite an equal volume of new titles on release (8), Icelandic films edged down 30% in admissions to 102,451, year on year, and 24% in gross box office to ISK 217 million. Local films market share stood at 11%, down 2023’s 14%, while U.S. movies kept their 80% market share of the last two previous years.

The three biggest U.S. movies of the year were Walt Disney’s “Deadpool & Wolverine”, “Inside Out 2” and Warner Bros’ “Dune: Part 2”.

As underlined by Traustason, six out of ten best-selling movies were sequels or based on other familiar IP.

Top 10 Films in Iceland, 2024

(Ranking based on box office (title, distributor, B.O, admissions, release date)
Source FRISK – Gross BO ISK1 = $0.01 as of Jan. 2025)

NORWAY

Despite signs of recovery in 2022 and 2023, the market dropped again quite significantly in 2024 to 8.1 million admissions, down 12.8% from 2023 which was already 23% lower than in normal years before the pandemic (2015-19). Meanwhile box office edged down 9.5% to NOK 1.1 billion ($99.1 million).

With tickets sales just above 2 million, and box office revenues at NOK 25 million ($2.2 million), Norwegian films didn’t manage to save the film year.

“It’s been a particularly tough year for Norwegian cinemas, with the lowest cinema attendance since the pandemic,” said Espen Pedersen, head of the cinema association Film & Kino who blamed both the dearth of U.S. tentpoles, the lack of Norwegian audience-pullers the first nine months, until the September release of Erik Poppe’s WW2 drama “Quisling: The Last Days.” “But neither this [film], nor other Norwegian films performed well enough to save the cinema year for Norwegian cinemas, as was the case in 2023,” said the cinema expert.

Only two local titles entered the Top 10, the WWII drama “Number 24” by “The Quake” director John Andreas Andersen, and the Qvisten Animation family film “The Brothers Gruff Go to Splash World,” although the latter premiered in December 2023. “Normally, we would have four or five Norwegian titles in the top list,” Pedersen observed.

Mirroring the new financing and distribution model for Norwegian films, “Number 24,” produced by the commercially-oriented Motion Blur (“The Troll”), was partly financed by SF Studios and Netflix, which means that its theatrical run ended after 60 days although it sold the most tickets for a Norwegian film in 2024. Released on New Year’s Day on Netflix, the film became the most-watched non-English language film on the platform globally in its debut week, with 8.8 million views.

In cinemas, the last two months of 2024 were crucial in boosting general attendance as they accounted for 25% of all 2024 tickets sales, according to Pedersen who believes the cinema upswing will be sustained all through 2025.

Norwegian titles ended up with 24.81% of all ticket sales, versus 67% for U.S. fare, that delivered eight out of 10 biggest hits of 2024, including “Inside Out 2”, “Despicable Me,” “Deadpool & Wolverine,” “Dune: Part 2,” and “Moana 2.”

Only two titles in the Top 10 featured original stories: Justin Baldoni’s “It Ends with Us,” and “Number 24.”

Top 10 Films in Norway, 2024

(Ranking based on admissions (title, distributor, admissions, B.O., release date)
Source Film & Kino – Gross BO NOK1= $0.09 as of Jan. 2025)

SWEDEN

(No box office figures were made available by the Swedish Distributors’ Association)
Amid challenges shared with its neighbouring Nordic countries-and the rest of Europe – post COVID effects, inflation, Hollywood strikes in 2023 – Sweden had one success story that proved that a single movie can have a miracle effect. The documentary “The Last Journey” (“Den sista resan”),” selected by Sweden as its Oscar candidate, emerged as the standout story of the year.

Co-directed by popular local comedy heroes Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson who delivered 2018’s third biggest Swedish hit: “The Cake General” starring Mikael Persbrandt, “The Last Journey” has taken the Swedish nation by storm in 2024, selling 412,425 tickets to make history as Sweden’s highest grossing documentary ever. The film, produced by the gifted comedy duo’s outfit Nexiko (credited for the Netflix hit series “Young Royals,”) won best documentary and the audience award at Sweden’s national Guldbagge awards and is being repped globally by Universal Pictures Content Group.

The film’s success comes from its heart-warming and tender portrait of a son – Filip Hammar – as he tries to reconnect with his ageing father on a hopeful and uplifting road trip to France.

Thanks to its phenomenal success at home, the film also contributed to 20% of all Swedish film sales in 2024, according to the Swedish Film Institute’s statistics consultant Torkel Stål.

In a vintage year for local documentaries, the film “It Could Have Been Us” (“Det kunde varit vi”) which turns on a dark chapter in Swedish history – the experiences of people with disabilities who were confined to institutions in the 20th century – also turned into a success story, selling 135,521 tickets. All in all, Swedish documentaries clocked in close to 700,000 admissions, an absolute record according to Stål.

Thanks to another popular homegrown feature – the family film “Håkan Bråkan 2”– Swedish films ended up with approximately 2.3 million admissions, the highest figure since 2018, up 21% from 2023, resulting in a market share of 22% (17% in 2023). “The 2024 results show that the audience for Swedish films at the cinema can be as big as before the pandemic,” said the SFI data specialist.

Total admissions at about 10.4 million according to estimates, still remaining way below pre-COVID by around 35% and around 7.8% versus 2023.

As always, U.S. fare took the largest slice of the market – above 70%, delivering eight out of ten biggest grossers of the year, led by “Inside Out 2”, “Despicable Me 4”, “Dune Part 2” and “Deadpool & Wolverine.”

Looking ahead, Stål said ticket sales in 2025 should climb to 11 million or more. “Even though the Swedish audience has changed since pre-pandemic times in both attitudes and habits, there is still a broad interest in the theatrical experience. And the slate of American film releases coming up looks much stronger than in 2024.”

He added: “The situation for local films in 2025 looks a bit uncertain though, as the number of upcoming fiction releases is lower than normal. But hopefully the positive trend for Swedish documentaries will continue. And there might still be additions to the release calendar of local fiction films, especially regarding the fall. “

Top 10 Films in Sweden, 2024

(Source Swedish Film Institute, Filmägarnaskontrollbyrå, admission figures)