Specter dominates 2015 Netherlands box office; Star Wars catching up

With more than 2 million tickets sold, the new James Bond film Spectre was the most watched film in the Netherlands last year, the Dutch Film Distributors' Association announced on Tuesday. Star Wars: The Force Awakens was also a crowd pleaser, drawing nearly a million viewers last year, despite only being released on December 16th. After only three weeks on the Netherlands screens Star Wars earned 10,343,628 euros in the box office, more than half of what Spectre earned in the 10 weeks it's been on the screens. Though ticket sales tend to taper off after the first few weeks of a film showing. In week three Spectre earned 10,943,676 euros. The second most popular movie in the Netherlands last year was Minions with 1.6 million tickets sold. Jurassic World came in 3rd place with more than a million viewers. Fast & Furious 7 drew nearly a million viewers. 2015 was a good year for Dutch films too, though the market share based on number of tickets sold did drop from 20.84 percent in 2014 to 18.7 percent last year. The top three Dutch movies were Gooische vrouwen 2 with 818,113 tickets sold, Michiel de Ruyter with 693,202 and Ja, ik wil! with 368,096. The total turnover from ticket sales in 2015 amounted to 275,659,614 euros, an increase of 10.3 percent compared to 2014. The number of cinema visitors increased with 7 percent to 32.9 million people, the highest number since 1967.