Driven by Kneecap’s movie and Paul Mescal’s Gladiator II, the Irish company behind Odeon cinemas saw turnover grow marginally to €30 million in 2024, as pretax losses widened.
UCI Cinemas, which operates under the Odeon brand in the Republic, is one of the largest cinema operators in the State, with 77 screens across 11 venues. The wider Odeon group operates in 10 European countries.
It recorded a pretax loss of €8.06 million in 2024, up significantly from €4.75 million in 2023 according to accounts filed with the Companies Registration Office (CRO).
The accounts show that its gross profits grew on the back of a small increase in revenue, up to €30 million from €29.66 million the previous year. The majority of its revenue is generated from ticket sales, just more than 54 per cent.
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The bulk of its remaining incomes is from retail revenue, such as food and drink sales, an additional 38 per cent. Pre-film advertising and other revenue streams accounted for the remainder.
The group’s growing revenue was far outweighed, however, by a €2.7 million increase to its distribution costs from €23.14 million to €25.84 million. It closed the year with an operating loss of €4.8 million, up from €2.8 million a year earlier.
These losses were exacerbated by interest payments rising by €900,000 to just more than €2.5 million as foreign exchange losses doubled to €722,000.
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The company now owes more than €28.5 million to a number of parent companies.
The average ticket price fell slightly from €8.90 in 2023 to €8.24 in its most recent financial year. The average spend on food and beverages also dropped slightly, down 13 cent per customer to €5.77.
Cinema audiences in Ireland, UCI said, grew from 10.7 million in 2022 to 11.5 million in 2023, up 800,000. Last year, that slowed to a growth of 300,000 to reach 11.8 million people.
“At the beginning of 2024, the industry was impacted by the Writers Guild Strikes, leading to delays in several big film releases,” the company said in its accounts, pointing to figures showing that recent rebounding growth in the overall market attendance for the cinema industry had slowed.
This remains significantly below pre-Covid levels, when more than 15 million people visited annually in the 2010s, according to data from Screen Ireland.
The company notes in its accounts that the biggest risk facing the group is declining cinema attendance levels and says it is mitigating this by creating “inspiring entertainment experiences for every guest” in an effort to drive attendance and create customer loyalty in addition to managing its costs.
Against this backdrop, the group’s staff headcount remained largely static, falling by two to 321 in 2024 as wages increased slightly.
AMC acquired the Odeon and UCI brands from private equity firm Terra Firma in a $1.2 billion (€1.05 billion) deal in late November 2016, in a move that created the largest cinema group in the world.
