The 2021/22 school holidays proved that big just got bigger with Cinema admissions exploding to 1.6 million. Driven by a strong slate of highly anticipated big-name films such as Spiderman: No Way Home, Sing 2, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, House of Gucci, and The Matrix Resurrections all releasing across 16 December 2021 – 30 January 2022, cinema audiences eclipsed the comparable 2020/21 school holiday period by 60 percent.
Spiderman: No Way Home took out the top result of the summer and 2021 with a total of 667,000 admissions across the entire school holiday period. Family favourite Sing 2 became the second-biggest film of the summer school holidays pulling in 203,000 Kiwis to the big screen, while The Matrix: Resurrections captured 80,000 admissions.
Summer audiences skewed towards young, affluent 18–39-year-olds, eager to immerse themselves in entertaining and exciting experiences. A total of 49 percent of admits over the holidays came from this hard-to-reach segment, with 18-39 attendances doubling year on year. Alongside these audiences were other high value categories such as families and Socio 1&2 which presented an incredibly valuable opportunity to advertisers at such a crucial time of the year.
Matt Tremain, Sales Director of Val Morgan Group New Zealand says: “Cinema across the summer school holiday period has performed impressively well, driven by the iconic Spiderman: No Way Home. With these incredible figures we can see that consumer confidence in the cinema environment is exceptionally strong, which presents an exciting opportunity for brands to get on board and explore cinema advertising this year – especially with the incredible slate of content rolling out over the coming months.”
The stellar start to the 2022 blockbuster slate is set to continue in the coming weeks and beyond, with a diverse range of films on the horizon with the likes of action-packed adventure film, Uncharted, starring Tom Holland releasing on February 17, and one of this years most anticipated films, The Batman, starring an all-new Batman, Robert Pattinson, releasing on March 3.
