Sangiuliano Franceschini version: the cinema bonus as the “Netflix of culture”

The Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, has promised 10 million euros to “bring Italians back to the cinema“. In practice, “those who book with the Spid will get a discount of 3 or 4 euros for admissions”. Let’s start with the numbers. In 2021, annus horribilis of cinemas, the box offices grossed around 169 million euros, resulting from the sale of just under 25 million tickets. Compared to the average for the 2017-2019 three-year period, this is a drop of over 70 percent. If the comparison is corrected by excluding the compulsory closure periods for Covid, the drop is “only” of 53-55 percent. This may depend both on the restrictions on the number of people in the room, and on the hesitation of people who, for a long time, have avoided crowded places even beyond the prohibitions. However, it would be naive to ignore a deeper and more structural component: today the entire production of films and TV series is available on demand and the performance of televisions is incredibly better than in the past.