How many movies are made each year, and how many are never seen? (2026)

1How many movies are made each year around the world?

How many movies are made each year has no single global answer. The nearest anchors are India's 3,455 feature film certifications in 2024-25 and Europe's record 2,522 films produced in 2025.

The closest thing to an answer comes from national bodies, and each measures something different. India's figure is a certification count: films cleared by the CBFC during the financial year in video and digital formats, not cinema releases. Europe and China count films produced, Japan and the United States count films released in cinemas, and Korea's 720 is a rating count that the Korean Film Council itself calls only a proxy for production volume. The same film can therefore appear in one country's total and not another's. No body publishes a global count, and adding these national figures together would produce a number that means nothing.

Europe produced a record 2,522 feature films in 2025, according to the European Audiovisual Observatory: 1,504 fiction features and 1,018 documentaries. Spain led European production with 423 films, followed by Italy, the UK, France and Germany. The Observatory's count is provisional and excludes minority co-productions, so the final figure may shift. China's Film Administration counted 764 films produced in 2025, of which 511 were fiction features, a production count that on its own says nothing about how many reached cinemas. Documentaries are a large part of that European output, and documentary is also part of the work we make at Collective.

The UK shows why first counts deserve caution. The BFI's first estimate recorded 96 domestic features starting production in 2025, a figure it expects to revise upwards because micro-budget films are reported later. The revised 2024 count is 207. A further 58 inward investment features, the category covering productions financed from abroad, started in the UK in 2025. Small, low-budget productions like many of our own film projects are the ones first estimates tend to miss.

2How many films reach cinemas each year?

In 2025, Box Office Mojo counted 670 releases in US and Canadian cinemas, the BFI counted 961 in UK and Irish cinemas, and Japan's Eiren counted 1,305.

The US and Canadian market has not returned to its pre-2020 release volume. Box Office Mojo counts films with reported box office in the year. It counted 910 in 2019, against 677 in 2024 and 670 in 2025, so the current count still sits well below 2019. The UK and Ireland moved the other way, from 764 releases in 2019 to 997 in 2024 and 961 in 2025, on the BFI's Comscore-reported count, which excludes event cinema and Netflix-produced titles. For anyone weighing a theatrical window alongside film and video production services, the two markets have moved in opposite directions.

Japan's release count has climbed from 959 in 2021 to 1,190 in 2024 and 1,305 in 2025, with 694 Japanese films and 611 foreign films in the latest year. The 2023 figure of 1,232 shows the climb was already under way before the most recent rise. Eiren counts releases in Japanese cinemas and splits the total into domestic and foreign films. More releases in the UK and Japan, though, have not meant fewer unseen films. A release count records what distributors put in front of audiences; it says nothing about the finished films that never got a slot.

These three markets count different things, so the numbers describe each territory on its own terms and are not pieces of a world total, however tempting the addition looks. The UK and Ireland figure covers Irish releases too, which is the count that applies to films from Collective, a Dublin production company.

3How many finished films are never really seen?

South Korea is one of the few countries that measures the gap directly. Of the 1,634 films given a cinema release there in 2025, only 583 had what the Korean Film Council calls a substantive release, meaning 40 or more screenings in the year.

A release on paper is not the same as a film people can actually go and see. South Korea counts cinema releases, and it goes further than most countries by separating real ones from token ones: a substantive release means 40 or more screenings in the year. On that stricter measure, only 583 of the 1,634 films released in 2025 cleared the bar. Among Korean films specifically, 262 of the 539 released reached the threshold, and the rest were formal releases, runs too small for most audiences to come across.

The independent sector shows the pattern most clearly. KOFIC recorded 215 Korean independent features produced in 2025 and 130 released, a share of 60.5%. Every film that went unreleased still had a crew and a budget behind it, and the money is real; anyone who has looked at what a shoot day costs in Ireland and the UK knows how quickly a modest independent budget disappears. Years of work sit behind each of those titles.

The UK picture is older and thinner. The most detailed study found is Stephen Follows' analysis of UK Film Council and BFI data, published in 2013. It put 35% of UK films made between 2007 and 2010 in UK cinemas within two years. No newer equivalent study was found, so nobody knows what the figure looks like today. The gap between finishing a film and finding an audience is not unique to South Korea; few countries measure it. Neighbouring forms work the same way: music films and videos usually find their audience online rather than in cinemas.

These figures also understate the problem. KOFIC counts films that reached a cinema, even briefly. Apart from KOFIC's independent count, films finished but never released appear in no official table. The true number of unseen films is larger than the figures show, because no statistical office counts the hard drives.

4What are the odds of getting into a major festival?

Sundance 2026 selected 90 feature films from 4,255 submissions, which works out at a 2.1% selection rate by our calculation. Submissions were made in 2025 for the festival held in January 2026.

A 2.1% rate makes Sundance one of the most selective festivals in independent cinema. Of the 4,255 feature submissions, 2,579 came from outside the United States, so a filmmaker's competition includes finished work from every continent. The programme is open to newcomers too: 36 of the 90 selected feature directors were making their first feature. Across every format, the festival received 16,201 submissions, all chasing a small number of slots.

The short film programme is harder still. Just 54 shorts were selected from 11,480 submissions, so the vast majority of short filmmakers were turned down this cycle. For many directors, shorts are calling cards, a way to show a producer or commissioner what they can do before a longer project gets funded. That is one reason working directors often keep their hand in through adjacent formats, including the TV and broadcast work Collective produces alongside its documentaries and music videos.

The odds also depend on what gets submitted in the first place. A festival can only choose from work that actually exists, and whether a film is ever finished depends heavily on money, which is the subject of our TV commercial cost research. For most of the filmmakers who entered in 2025, rejection left the finished film on a hard drive rather than in front of an audience.

None of this makes festivals pointless. A slot at Sundance is still one of the few things that can move an independent film from a private drive to a public cinema programme, which is why the odds are worth measuring.

5Where does the cinema audience actually go?

Most of a year's cinema money goes to a small group of films. In the UK and Ireland the top 20 releases took £557.5 million in 2025, 55% of all box office, and in Japan 3.8% of releases took 73.7% of the takings.

The British and Irish figures show how narrow the top of the market is. The top 20 releases took £557.5 million in 2025, 55% of all box office in the two countries (BFI Research and Statistics Unit), and everything else on the schedule divided what was left. For the people who made those other films, a cinema release is often a short commercial window rather than the start of a working life. Commissioned brand work is priced and paid for before release, as our corporate video cost research sets out.

Japan shows the same concentration in sharper form. In 2025, 50 films grossed over ¥1 billion, 38 of them Japanese and 12 foreign, and those titles made up just 3.8% of the year's releases. Between them they took 73.7% of a box office worth ¥274,452 million (Eiren data compiled by the Japan Community Cinema Center). Japan counts cinema releases rather than films produced, so the figure is not directly comparable with production counts elsewhere, but the pattern is clear: a small group of films absorbs most of the spending.

China's figures point the same way from a different angle. In 2025, 51 films grossed over 100 million yuan, 33 of them Chinese productions, in a country with 93,187 cinema screens at the end of the year (China Film Administration). A screen count on that scale has not produced a broad base of hits, and audience attention still sits with a narrow group of titles.

Across the three markets the outcome is the same: most of the money and screen time goes to a handful of titles, and the rest of the year's releases compete for what remains. The figures behind this paper, and the questions it leaves open, sit in more Collective research.