Italy 2025 Box Office Holds Firm as Local Movies Rise, Led by Checco Zalone Hit ‘Buen Camino’

Italy’s box office remained basically stable in 2025, totaling roughly €496 million ($578 million) in grosses and 68 million admissions — which is slightly above the country’s 2024 intake of €494 million ($576 million). 

But the year marked a major shift, with Italians flocking to see more homegrown movies, starting with local box office sensation Checco Zalone’s new smash hit “Buen Camino.” The film easily conquered the 2025 top spot, scoring more than €36 million ($42 million) in just one week following its Dec. 25 release, according to figures from national box office compiler Cinetel.

The latest comedy by Zalone — in which he plays a rich and debauched 50-something father who zips around in a red Ferrari searching for his runaway teenage daughter along the path of Spain’s world famous Camino de Santiago spiritual pilgrimage — has now pulled more than €53 million ($61 million) via Italy’s Medusa, and counting.

But unlike other years in which a single Zalone hit accounted for most of the domestic slice of Italy’s box office pie, the year 2025 saw three Italian titles ensconced among the country’s top 10. Besides “Buen Camino,” the other two movies are concept comedy “Madly” by director Paolo Genovese (“Perfect Strangers”), which pulled $21 million via 01 Distribution — landing at No. 3 on the 2025 chart — and Ferzan Ozpetek’s female-centric ensemble drama “Diamonds,” which weighed in at No. 8 with a $19 million take via Vision Distribution.

During 2025, homegrown titles in Italy enjoyed the best box office level of the past decade, Cinetel underlined in a statement. Italian movies, including co-productions, generated more than €160 million ($187 million) in grosses last year, scoring more than 22.5 million admissions and a roughly 33% admissions share, up from 25.7% in 2024.

Meanwhile, Hollywood still accounted for more than 50% of the Italian market share, with Disney continuing to be the country’s dominant distributor thanks mainly to animated titles “Lilo & Stitch” and “Zootopia 2” as well as James Cameron’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”

Cinetel, in its preliminary 2025 analysis, noted that the country saw relatively robust moviegoing figures in the summer — which is historically a sore spot as millions of Italians hit the beach — and that moviegoing gained plenty of momentum toward the end of the year. December 2025, which saw the releases of both “Avatar: Fire and Ash” and Zalone’s “Buen Camino,” marked Italy’s strongest box office month since 1995, which is the year that Cinetel began collecting data, “confirming the central role that holidays play in supporting overall results,” the statement said.

Though Italian moviegoing remains well below pre-pandemic levels — when admissions hovered around 100 million — the country’s current box office stability is encouraging compared to the moviegoing crisis looming in some other European countries, especially Spain, which in 2025 saw an 8% decline to 65 million admissions. January Italian releases expected to keep the momentum going include Paolo Sorrentino’s Venice 2025 opener “La Grazia” and Josh Safdie’s Timothée Chalamet-starrer “Marty Supreme.”

Source: Cinetel, BoxOffice Mojo