French International Box Office on the Rise: $317M Projections for 2025, Driven by Animation and Luc Besson’s ‘Dracula’
The international box office for French productions saw a 6% increase in 2025, generating $371 million (€272 million) in global receipts, according to figures released by France’s film and TV export agency, Unifrance, on Monday.
Unifrance reported that 38.4 million tickets were sold internationally for French majority and minority films by mid-December. The agency estimated a total of 42.5 million admissions by the end of the year, with final figures expected in October 2026.
This marks a rebound from 2024, during which admissions fell 11% year-on-year to 40.1 million. However, this year’s figures still lag behind 2023, which recorded 42.8 million admissions.
Unifrance noted that the upward trend in 2025 aligns with the global box office outlook. Gower Street Analytics estimated a $29.7 billion worldwide box office for the first eleven months of 2025, reflecting a 5% rise from the previous year, though still 4% lower than 2023.
The agency highlighted that the expected milestone of 40 million admissions is promising, but remains approximately 26% below the average for the pre-pandemic period of 2017 to 2019.
This year’s box office was dominated by animated features and coproductions, with Luc Besson’s latest English-language film, Dracula: A Love Tale, reuniting him with Caleb Landry Jones, taking center stage.
Leading the charts was the Latvian-Belgian-French Oscar-winning animation Flow, which garnered 7.8 million admissions in 2025, followed by Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale with 3.7 million. Joint third place went to Walter Salles’ Oscar-winning drama I’m Still Here and the animated film Pets on A Train, both with 2.3 million entries, while Night of the Zoopocalypse rounded out the top five.
In contrast, 2024 saw French-language and majority productions dominate the box office, led by the period action-drama The Count of Monte Cristo and Oscar-winning drama Anatomy of a Fall.
Overall, admissions for majority-French and French-language films dropped to 17.1 million in 2025, down from 25.8 million in 2024. The top-performing live-action film, The Marching Band, sold 1.2 million tickets.
Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale, while securing second place, with 3.7 million tickets sold, falls short of the box office heights achieved by his earlier works such as Lucy and Taken 3.
In regional markets, Unifrance identified Latin America as the second largest market for French cinema after Western Europe. Mexico led with 4.2 million admissions, followed by Italy with four million and Germany and Russia each contributing 3.2 million tickets.
At major film festivals, Unifrance indicated that for the first time since 2020, France was surpassed by the U.S. in terms of programmed films, although it remains a significant presence. Out of 1,167 films and 1,467 selections in 2025, French productions accounted for 233 programmed films and 354 overall selections.
Unifrance also attributed the resurgence of U.S. productions in the past year to the industry’s recovery following the pandemic and the writers’ strike, noting a decline in French films at the Berlinale, where France had traditionally been the most-represented country outside Germany.
