The international box office for French productions rose 6% in 2025 generating $317 million (€272 million) in box office receipts worldwide, according to figures released by France’s film and TV export agency Unifrance on Monday.
The body said it recorded 38.4 million tickets sold internationally for French majority and minority productions until mid-December, on the back of which it had projected an estimated 42.5 million admissions for the entire year, with final data due out in October 2026.
This represents a rebound on 2024, when entries fell 11% year-on-year to 40.1 million but is still slightly lower than 2023 when there were 42.8 million admissions.
Unifrance suggested that the 2025 trajectory was in line with the global box office, pointing to Gower Street Analytics’ estimates of a $29.7 billion world box office for the first eleven months of 2025, which represents a 5% rise on 2024 but is 4% lower than 2023.
The body welcomed the fact that the “symbolic” benchmark of 40 million admissions was expected to be breached but noted that entries remained some 26% lower than the mean of the pre-pandemic period of 2017 to 2019.
This year’s top ten was dominated by animated features, coproductions and Luc Besson’s latest English-language feature Dracula: A Love Tale, reuniting the director with Caleb Landry Jones for a second time after their first collaboration on Dogman.
Latvian-Belgian-French Oscar-winning animated coproduction Flow topped the chart with 7.8 million entries in 2025; followed by Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale with 3.7m. Brazilian director Walter Salles’ Oscar-winning drama I’m Still Here and animated feature Pets on A Train came in joint third with 2.3m entries each, followed by Night of the Zoopocalypse.
This was a very different picture from 2024 when French-language and majority productions came out on top, with period action-drama The Count of Monte Cristo leading the charge followed by Oscar-winning drama Anatomy of a Fall, Autumn and the Black Jaguar, The Taste Of Things and The Jungle Bunch 2: World Tour.
Overall, admissions for majority-French and French language films dropped to 17.1 million in 2025, against 25.8m in 2024. The top performing French-language, live action production was The Marching Band, which sold 1.2 million tickets.
While Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale came in second with 3.7 million tickets sold, its box office performance is a far cry from the days of his blockbusters such as Lucy, which grossed $463.4 million on a budget of $40 million, or Taken 3, which he wrote and produced, which achieved a global box office of $326 million.
In other data, Unifrance noted that Latin America had become French cinema’s second biggest regional market after Western Europe. Mexico topped the territory chart, delivering 4.2 million admissions, followed by Italy, with four millions entries, and then Germany and Russia, with 3.2 million tickets sold each.
North American came in sixth with some 2.2 million admissions accounting for a 5.6% share.
Looking at the presence of French productions at ten top film festivals, Unifrance noted that France had been superseded by the U.S. for the first time since 2020 in terms of its share of programmed films, but still remained a major force on the circuit.
Out of 1,167 films and 1,467 selections in 2025, French productions accounted for 233 programmed films, and 354 selections overall.
Unifrance pointed to a strong comeback for U.S. productions last year, as the industry revived in the wake of the pandemic and the writers’ strike, while there was a dip in French films selected by the Berlinale, where France has traditionally been the most-represented international territory outside of Germany.