Ronald Chammah, who owns a pair of small cinemas on the Left Bank of Paris, remembers well the grim days in 2022, when he wondered whether the French passion for moviegoing — a pastime that France invented 130 years ago — had been irreparably diminished by pandemic lockdowns.
But that was then. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Chammah was sitting in a packed Parisian cafe happily describing the Sunday in late November when he sold out screenings from a roster of Armenian art-house directors — Inna Mkhitaryan, Artavazd Pelechian, Sergueï Paradjanov — known mostly to hard-core film buffs.
“That day, we broke the record for our theaters,” Mr. Chammah said with a note of astonishment. “It was full, all day long — sold out, sold out, sold out.”
The global movie business had a disappointing 2024, thanks in part to Hollywood strikes. At the Oscars on Sunday, Sean Baker, winner of best director for “Anora,” used his acceptance speech to lament the pandemic-era loss of hundreds of American movie screens. “And we continue to lose them regularly,” Mr. Baker said. “If we don’t reverse this trend, we’ll be losing a vital part of our culture.”
But in France, there has been a more celebratory feeling of late, with fresh statistics suggesting that its audiences are leading the way in returning to what are lovingly known as “les salles obscures” — the “dark rooms” of their movie theaters.
That celebration was infused with a very French idea about citizens’ moral obligation to support the arts and to do so somewhere other than at home. The Institut Lumière, a film society based in Lyon, declared that last year’s French admissions numbers amounted to a triumph over both the pandemic era and the “invasive digital civilization” of scrolling and swiping.
“We know this more than ever: going to the cinema remains unique, singular, precious,” the institute wrote in an email to supporters. “Personal, physical, sentimental. It allows for a re-appropriation of a way of being in the world that nothing can ever prevent.”
According to the data company Comscore, France was one of the few countries that saw an increase in movie theater attendance last year over 2023, with more than 181 million attendees, an uptick of nearly a million. Brazil, Britain and Turkey also saw an increase, said Eric Marti, a general manager of Comscore Movies France. But he said attendance numbers were down in every other European country, as well as in the United States.
At the same time, however, worldwide box office revenues are up, according to a recent report on global media by PricewaterhouseCoopers, and are likely to surpass their prepandemic levels by next year. That is largely because people going to the movies in developed countries are paying more for a premium experience, even if they go less often, said David Hancock, an analyst at the research company Omdia.
But Mr. Hancock said the French public’s relationship to movies and movie theaters was something different altogether. “It’s almost mystical,” he said.
The idea of the French capital as a concentrated locus of obsessive cinephilia is one of those baguette-under-the-arm clichés that also has a basis in fact. Movie theaters have long contributed to the city’s urban landscape, and still do.
The pandemic’s lockdowns shuttered French cinemas for 300 total days in 2020 and 2021. In Paris, the only comparable period may have been in 1940, when the advancing German Army led people to flee the city, prompting widespread temporary movie theater closures.
In today’s Paris, it can feel as if the pandemic never happened. At Le Champo theater, fans turn out for retrospective series on Satyajit Ray and Frank Capra. At the art house theater chain mk2, they attend talks by sociologists, art historians and philosophers. In November, the Jeu de Paume, a museum dedicated to photography and contemporary art, inaugurated a cinema focused on art films and documentaries.
Two months earlier, the movie company Pathé opened its seven-screen Pathé Palace in a Grands Boulevards building steeped in cinema history. The celebrated architect Renzo Piano handled the renovation.
“Many people in the world have buried the movie theater and think that television has definitively eliminated it,” Jérôme Seydoux, the Pathé chairman, said at the time of the renovation. Mr. Seydoux called the project “a reasonable folly, a setting to welcome all the dreamers of this world.”
Some of this sustained passion might be because many Parisian apartments are too small to accommodate large home-theater setups. The French movie industry likes to serve up another explanation, with a spritz of immodesty and a dollop of swagger.
In a statement, the National Center for Film and Moving Images, or CNC, the French government film agency, chalked up the industry’s recovery from the pandemic to “the artistic and industrial excellence of our model of cultural exception,” a reference to national policies meant to promote and protect French culture.
Olivier Henrard, who was until recently the CNC’s interim president, went deeper.
“We haven’t forgotten,” he said in an interview, “that citizenship has been constructed in the theater, from the time of the Greeks.”
Mr. Henrard noted that France’s “cultural exception” model supports the moviegoing habit, with an education curriculum that includes subsidized trips to the movies for millions of schoolchildren.
The government supports tiny movie houses in smaller cities, while some of the most isolated villages regularly receive visits from associations that set up temporary screenings in schools and city halls.
France requires first-run movies to screen exclusively in French theaters for four months before going to video, and the CNC oversees a complex system of taxes on tickets and fees from TV channels and video streaming services that filters back into movie production.
That has created a sense that going to the movies fulfills a cherished sort of social contract.
Mr. Chammah, the cinema owner — who is also a film producer and distributor, and the husband of the French film star Isabelle Huppert — argued that after the pandemic, Paris still offered the most impressive range of choice for cinephiles.
“It is the best, because there is this choice,” he said.
Still, the CNC noted that French cinema attendance was nearly 13 percent below pre-pandemic levels. And in recent years, Paris has seen the closure of a few cherished movie houses.
But Axel Huyghe, an author and expert on French movie houses, sees hope, especially in the numerous restorations of iconic movie venues either recently completed or underway. “The cinema industry is in the process of renewal,” he said.
La Pagode, a faux-Japanese fantasia of enameled stoneware and stained glass in the Seventh Arrondissement, manifests that hope. Once one of the city’s most storied cinemas, it closed in 2015 amid a bitter rent dispute. Now under renovation, it appears, on the narrow Rue de Babylone, like an audacious dream sequence spliced into an otherwise staid reel of buildings.
Across the street, Yohann Lucian, who works in a local bistro, has been watching the renovation’s progress. When the theater finally reopens, Mr. Lucian said, he is certain that the moviegoers will come back.
“For Parisians, it’s a way of life,” he said, with a hint of a shrug. “They like to go to the movies.”
