The history of Spanish cinema in the last decade is marked by a dissonance.
It is an inversely proportional variable made up, firstly, of the evident leap in quality in productions that make up the miracle of the seventh. Secondly, there’s been a dramatic drop in box office takings in respect to Spanish spectators.
The crux of the matter, for which we will quote Marisa Paredes in The Flower of My Secret (La flor de mi secreto), is obvious: Is there any possibility, however small, of saving our own?
A batch of new directors such as Paula Ortiz, Estibaliz Urresola or Pilar Palomero, among many others, have intermingled in the last ten years with names and stories already well known to audiences and critics.
That roll call must also include Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s political thrillers, Carla Simón’s self-fictionalised trilogy on mourning and memory, the intra-family violence outlined by Alauda Ruíz de Azúa or the signature works of the Basque production company Moriarti (‘Maspalomas’, ‘Loreak’) made by Aitor Arregi, Jose Mari Goenaga and Jon Garaño.
This is, moreover, a generational relay that not only plays at home or through cinema. Carla Simón was the first Spanish and Catalan to win a Golden Bear at the Berlinale for Alcarràs, and the omnipresent Oliver Laxe (anointed by the internet as the Karla Sofía Gascón of the 2025-26 awards season) won with Sirat, the first Hispanic film to be awarded the Cannes Jury Prize since Víctor Erice’s Dream of Light (El sol del membrillo) in 1992.
Other filmmakers with a claim to fame in genre productions, such as Paco Cabezas or Jaume Collet-Serra, have consolidated their international presence. They’ve followed successfully in the wake of Juan Antonio Bayona’s adventures in Hollywood, while the actresses Laia Costa, Úrsula Corberó and Ana de Armasseem to have emerged unscathed after their leap to Los Angeles.
Cabezas, Ruíz de Azúa and Sorogoyen have also made a strong entrance into television, a genre that is becoming more and more prestigious and financed in Spain. Gone is the elitism with which series were disparagingly relegated to a minor genre and described by some directors as films lasting several hours.
The platforms have enthusiastically embraced this intermediary leap by filmmakers. Those born in Spain (Filmin, Atresplayer, Movistar+) together account for 11% of the share of subscriptions and are holding their own against giants such as Apple TV (10%), according to data from the fourth quarter of 2025 shared by JustWatch, although they are still a long way behind industry leading Netflix (23%).
The creation of the Feroz awards (now widely considered the Hispanic Golden Globes) has also helped to dignify the medium, rewarding prestigious proposals beyond international all-rounders such as Money Heist (La casa de papel) or ‘Élite’ – both series deserve credit for boosting Spanish culture’s burgeoning soft power. The talent of Luis Buñuel’s heirs triumphs abroad in qualitative and quantitative terms, yes, but what happens inside our own house? Let’s return to the cinemas at this point.
How ‘Made in Spain’ compares with France and Italy
Pending what happens during the remaining nine months of 2026, this year could reverse the downward trend, in terms of revenue and viewers, that Spanish cinema has suffered after the best years in its history. That happened in 2014, when it made €123 million and sold 20.8 million tickets, fuelled by blockbusters such as Spanish Affair (Ocho apellidos vascos)or Marshland (La isla mínima). The following two years saw the industry take around €110 million.
Since then, the drop in spectators has been gradual with box office figures falling under six digits in 2019. And then, of course, came the pandemic. The spiral downwards was extremely steep, and although the industry is still recovering, cinemas are yet to reach those heady heights of the past decade.
Pau Brunet, film industry analyst at Box Office Spain and PhD student at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, takes a cold view of the figures. “If we only consider North American cinema, the decline in 2022-2025 is higher than if we consider the rest of the cinematographies and distributors,” he points out, recalling recent hits from the Old Continent such as Emilia Pérez, Sentimental Value or It Was Just An Accident.
“Thanks to European and Spanish cinema, we have recovered more spectators and, very importantly, it has helped our industrial fabric of distributors to improve considerably, with companies such as BTEAM, Elastica Films, Beta, or A contracorriente, among others, achieving very significant market shares,” adds Brunet.
The situation is more glaring in the case of national productions. In 2025, France had some 59 million spectators who went to theatres to see French films: 38% of its total box office. These results are almost five times higher than the Spanish figures (12.3 million spectators, 19% of the total box office). Compared to Italy, at around 33%, its Mediterranean neighbour also loses out.
“France has had very aggressive cultural protectionism, with quotas for French and European films,” says Pau Brunet. “Italy has also had a much greater influx of spectators for a long time, and this is even noticeable in the specialised media, which sell more magazines than in Spain”.
But Brunet, who nevertheless stresses that the situation is better than in markets such as Germany or the prestigious British industry, believes that working on the public conversation about cinema is key to reversing this situation.
“On the one hand, [Spain must] produce less and encourage more press or programmes on television and radio that talk about film, and continuing to push for a presence at festivals is key to the careers of some films,” says Brunet.
A good example of this is the Malaga Festival, now a precursor of the season’s big hits but which in pre-pandemic times was a step below more established events such as San Sebastian’s Zinemaldia.
Spanish polarisation also permeates cinemas
The Juan de Mariana Institute, a conservative think tank, considers in a recent report that there is “a disconnection between the type of cultural offer promoted by the political power and the real demand of the Spanish spectator”, stirring up a hackneyed stereotype about the pre-eminence of the left in Hispanic cinemas and the disdain of right-wing voters for their own audiovisual industry.
“In Spain there is a shadow over Spanish cinema that dates back to the ‘No to war’. That politicised image has always deeply affected Spanish cinema,” adds Brunet.
He’s referring, of course, to the social and cultural mobilisation that was generated in Spain in 2003 after the invasion of Iraq, and that today Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is trying to rescue in order to win the political narrative after his rejection of the US-Israeli bombings in Iran.
This shadow hovered over the speech of María Luisa Gutiérrez, producer of comedy sagas such as Torrente and Father There Is Only One (Padre no hay más que uno), when she picked up her Goya for Best Film 2025 for The Infiltrator (La infiltrada), a thriller about ETA from a police point of view. “Our company”, she claimed to her colleagues, “produces family comedies that bring in a lot of box office and thanks to them we can make riskier films: in a healthy industry, both types of cinema are needed.”
It is because of this heated debate, Brunet believes, that corporations such as Atresmedia have bet on that family comedy defended by Guitérrez, which generated more than 40% of box office revenues between 2019 and 2024. And yet, this seems not to be enough. According to Culture’s Survey of Cultural Habits and Practices 2024-2025, less than half of the population, 48.5%, went to theatres at least once in the last year.
Ernest Urtasun’s Ministry of Culture blames the absence of people going to movie theatres on a “lack of time”, according to the survey, even though it provides another contradictory fact: young people go to cinemas more than older generations (or those over 55).
This is despite the government subsidised ‘Cine Senior’ programme introduced in 2023 to give people aged over 65 cinema entry for just €2, even though that part of the population has the greatest purchasing power in Spain.
Operation 2026: green shoots after a wilted decade
The last two weeks of this month have brought a touch of optimism to this analysis, which was originally based on greyer assumptions. Despite the fact that spring has just begun, 2026 looks like it could be a very good yearfor the Spanish film industry’s revenues.
According to provisional data from Comscore, the Spanish box office for the weekend of 20-22 March stood at around 8.85 million euros. This is the second best figure for a weekend in March since 2019, only surpassed by the weekend immediately before, and the premiere of Torrente for President (Torrente Presidente), the fifth instalment of the saga has so far accumulated more than €16 million with two million entrees.
Figures have also been boosted by Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature film Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad) released on 20 March, or Aida, the Movie (Aída y Vuelta), Paco León’s meta ‘spin-off’ of his historical series, which has earned around €5 million to date.
“This year could be the first year in ten that Spanish cinema exceeds 100 million euros, which would be a total recovery,” Brunet ventures to predict.