Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
The other week, Telefilm Canada released a distressing but, if we’re being completely honest, not altogether surprising report about the state of the domestic box office.
According to the federal funding agency, which used data analysis provided by the Movie Theatre Association of Canada, Canadian films made $13.9-million at the 2025 box office compared with $23.5-million the year before, a decline of nearly 41 per cent.
This means homegrown films accounted for just 1.7 per cent of all the titles consumed by Canadian moviegoers over the past year, making 2025 the third-worst year for Canadian film in a decade, only behind the pandemic-afflicted 2020 and 2022.
The stark drop-off is all the more curious given that the number of Canadian films released in theatres hasn’t changed all that much: 139 feature-length productions opened in 2025 compared with 142 the year before. In other words, the downturn wasn’t because of a lack of product.
But the sheer amount of Canadian movies produced and released each year also underlines the fundamental problem with this country’s perpetually-in-crisis film industry: Can anyone, even the head of Telefilm, name 50 Canadian movies from 2025? How about 25? 10?
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Even if the lives of all three of my precious Atom Egoyan-loving children depended on it, I could maybe get to 45 titles – and it is a not insignificant part of my job to keep track of such things. We do not have a Canadian movie crisis so much as we have a crisis of Canadian movie awareness.
Off the top, I should note that the 2025 box-office decline was largely driven by erosion in the French-language market, where theatrical revenue fell 45.5 per cent from the previous year, compared with a still bad but not totally calamitous 7.9-per-cent drop for English-language cinema.
Quebec moviegoers – historically far more supportive of homegrown productions than audiences in the rest of the country – simply did not visit theatres as much as expected. In 2024, seven Quebec films surpassed the million-dollar threshold at the box office. In 2025, only three such films squeaked past.
In both our French- or English-language markets, though, we can blame larger, global cultural trends for the overall disruption in moviegoing habits, from the domination of streamers to the myriad economic strains compelling households to take a closer look at their entertainment budgets. In the United States this week, the mega-exhibitor AMC Theatres reported a nearly 10-per-cent attendance drop in its latest quarter.
But in Canada, the underlying problem is that audiences have little idea of what a Canadian film even looks like. And if they manage to miraculously find that out, then it is another struggle altogether to discover when those films are being released and where. That’s where marketing comes in.
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Take the recent release of Matt Johnson’s comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which earned a massive (for Canada) $350,000 during its debut weekend, making it the largest opening of a live-action English-language Canadian film since the 2023 comedy BlackBerry (also directed by Johnson). How? To start, the film’s Canadian distributor, Elevation Pictures, pulled out all the promotional stops: advance screenings across the country, a robust social-media campaign, a pop-up merchandise store in downtown Toronto that attracted more than 1,000 people, and on and on.
Of course, it helped immensely that the film’s Canada-wide rollout piggybacked off the promotional efforts of Neon, the movie’s U.S. distributor, which operates a far larger marketing machine. The film also benefited from a built-in fan base, which has been following Johnson’s Nirvanna antics ever since it was a web series in the early aughts.
Still, NTBTSTM is a tricky movie to sell. Canadians knew about the film because Elevation, with significant support from Telefilm’s national marketing program, made sure that they did.
For so many other Canadian releases, though, such a full-force effort remains a fantasy. As it stands, the Canadian film industry – which is largely fuelled by public money from Telefilm – tends to treat the distribution and promotion of a movie as an afterthought. In Telefilm’s 2024-25 fiscal year, the organization spent $106.3-million on production and development programs but just $30.7-million on “promotional support,” which ranges from traditional theatrical marketing to festival screenings, conferences, training programs and awards shows.
For projects submitted by what Telefilm deems an “eligible film distribution company,” meaning an established name brand such as Elevation (of which there are only a handful in Canada), Telefilm can cover up to 75 per cent of the eligible marketing costs through a non-interest-bearing advance. Distributors start repaying that advance from the moment that a film makes its first dollar, rather than after it breaks even (if it ever does). But for projects from non-eligible distributors, Telefilm can cover the lesser of 75 per cent of the eligible marketing costs, up to $75,000 – which won’t go far.
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This is hardly a new problem, with Telefilm’s budget for promotional support remaining more or less static over the past few years. But if Canada is serious about supporting its filmmakers and ensuring that audiences actually get the chance to see their movies, then we need to redefine what success looks like. Does it involve punting a movie out into the world and hoping that it won’t fall into the void? Or would that mean placing substantial promotional bets on movies that have a legitimate chance of attracting eyeballs?
This isn’t to say that Telefilm needs to scale back its production and development funds, necessarily. The marketing deficiencies could be course-corrected if, say, the Liberal government actually kept its 2019 campaign promise and permanently increased Telefilm’s funding by 50 per cent.
But if Telefilm is supporting something like 164 feature-length films and documentaries a year – as it did for 2024-25 – and the visibility of those projects is embarrassingly low, then it is hard to argue that the system isn’t suffering from bloat. Or at the very least, in need of recalibration when it comes to production versus promotion.
Of course, not every Canadian film has to be a blockbuster – or rather a Canadian-sized blockbuster. But not every film has to completely evaporate, either. And it is not only Telefilm that bears the responsibility.
Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Canadian Press
Last week, Ellis Jacob, chief executive of Cineplex, the country’s largest exhibitor, said that the challenge of getting people to watch Canadian films wasn’t just a marketing or awareness problem, but that “it’s also the quality of the content. It’s not bringing droves of people to the theatres.” There is a chicken-and-egg wrinkle to that argument, though.
If a theatre giant such as Cineplex doesn’t devote space in its lobbies to posters for Canadian films or add a handful of Canadian trailers to its already marathon-length preshow, then how are audiences expected to know what is and what isn’t “quality” cinema? Is there not a difference in quality between, say, Canadian Matthew Rankin’s recent crowd-pleasing comedy Universal Language and the latest CG-laden dreck from Marvel Studios?
Cineplex doesn’t need to upend its business model or expect to fill its cavernous AVX auditoriums with the likes of David Cronenberg or Guy Maddin. But there is room to be bold. Canadian theatres exist because of Canadian consumers – some of whom in this elbows-up era might appreciate the option to see what their neighbours are producing for the big screen.
You don’t have to watch 139 or so Canadian films that get released every year. No one but the most hardened of critics should feel compelled to do so. But start with a half-dozen and work your way up. The results may surprise you.