Phil Clapp Archives - Celluloid Junkie

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UNIC 2026 Annual Report

UNIC Reports European Box Office Held Near €6.9 Billion in 2025, But Admissions Tell a More Complicated Story

European cinemas spent much of 2025 proving a point that has become familiar in the post-pandemic theatrical business: audiences show up when the films are there. The harder question, and the one the International Union of Cinemas’s (UNIC) 2026 Annual Report keeps circling back to, is whether…

Guests arrive at the UK Cinema Association's 2026 Conference (Photo: Julie Edwards Visuals)

UKCA 2026 Conference: Box Office Optimism, Engaging Gen Z, and Leveraging the Power of Community

At the UK Cinema Association’s annual conference – which took place in May 2026 at the Vue London Westfield, Shepherd’s Bush – the mood was cautiously optimistic over the two days of talks, perhaps boosted by the buoyant reaction out of CinemaCon in Las Vegas a month earlier. The current box office…

Executive Roundtable panel at the 2024 UK Cinema Association Annual conference

Industry Execs Express Cautious Optimism for 2024 at UKCA Conference

One of the more informative sessions at the UK Cinema Association’s annual conference held in London at the BFI Southbank, March 5-6th, was an executive roundtable moderated by Sharon Reid of Cinema First, an industry body that promotes cinema going in the United Kingdom. It left everyone pres…

Phil Clapp, President, Laura Houlgatte, CEO, International Union Of Cinemas Keynote Address – CineEurope 2023

This is the keynote speech delivered by Phil Clapp, President, and Laura Houlgatte, CEO, International Union of Cinemas (UNIC) at CineEurope 2023 in Barcelona on 19 June 2023 Good afternoon everyone – on behalf of UNIC, the International Union of Cinemas, we are delighted to welcome you to Cin…

Planeta Kino Tempts Hollywood Back to Ukraine With Dinner and a Movie

Celluloid Junkie visited Kyiv’s Blockbuster Mall for a tour of Planeta Kino and a chat with CEO Natalia Baydan and found that the future of Ukrainian cinema might already be here. The Blockbuster Mall is possibly the shiniest building in Kyiv. A gleaming lump of burnished aluminium and crystalline g…

Oleg Berezin

Russian Cinema Association Chair Resigns Over Ukraine War

The Chairman of the Russian Federation’s Association of Cinema Owners has resigned over his opposition to the war in Ukraine. Oleg Berezin announced his decision in a lengthy Facebook post on Sunday. He is one of several prominent figures in Russia’s world of arts and culture who have vo…

Phil Clapp at CineEurope 2021

UNIC Opens CineEurope 2021 With Optimistic Keynote

The first in-person CineEurope since June of 2019 opened in Barcelona, Spain on Monday, 4 October with Phil Clapp, the President of the International Union of Cinemas (UNIC), and Laura Houlgatte, the organization’s CEO, personally welcoming attendees in keynote address that recounted the toll…

Cinema Reopenings in Italy Point the Way for the Rest of Europe

On 26th April 2021, Italian director Nanni Moretti had a special date: open the doors of his own cinema in Rome, the Nuovo Sacher, and greet the audience coming in after six months of darkness. Miles away through the north of the peninsula, in Milan, another cinema was the very first to reopen in It…

CJ Opinion: Vaccination ‘Passports’ and Cinemas – An Unnecessary and Unwelcome Imposition On Our Industry

The last few weeks and months have seen increasing interest on the part of the United Kingdom government around the use of vaccination certificates or ‘passports’ and so-called ‘rapid testing’ as a way of hastening the return not just of international travel but also a number of other parts of the e…

iPic Auditorium

CJ Opinion: How Cinema Operators and Landlords Must Work Together to Bounce Back (Communication, Cooperation, Consensus)

An increasingly challenging relationship has developed over the last few years between commercial landlords and retail & leisure tenants, due to CVAs (Company Voluntary Arrangements), rental and service charge terms; business rates and ever-growing competition, mainly in the form of online shopp…