Small European Film Markets: Portraits and Comparisons

Denmark

The Danish film industry is characterized by a strong domestic market (see Admissions & market shares) and a high degree of Public funding which drives an annual production output of 20-25 feature fiction films (100% national & majority co-productions). Danish films have a strong track record at international Festivals in terms of fiction films as well as documentaries and to some extent they travel internationally in theatres and VoD catalogues. Denmark has no tax shelters, production rebates or tax credit schemes. 

  • Increasing pressures on feature production volume puts pressure on the ability to sustain an actual film industry as well as to satisfy diversity aims in terms of genre and budget variation and gender representation. 

  • Concerns about domestic films remaining relevant to young audiences in the current entertainment and media landscape. 

  • Private investment is precarious. Calibrating the mix of public and private investment remains a constant balancing act. 

  • Recent fluctuations regarding commissioning and co-financing activity of nationally, regionally and globally oriented streaming services have shown significant yet unpredictable potential outside the traditional public funding ecosystem.

The contemporary Danish film industry has been shaped by institutional, legislative, political, production-cultural and aesthetic developments in the 1990s. The new Danish Film Law (1997) defined the roles, functions and organization of the new Danish Film Institute (DFI) – a re-organization of hitherto separate institutions.

The Danish Film Law and amendments to it also consolidated the support schemes for filmmaking, distribution and promotion of Danish film and film culture, in particular a commissioner´s scheme (bottom financing), a market scheme (top financing), two minor-co-production schemes and a talent-oriented support scheme (New Danish Screen, in its current form). The funding schemes have been adjusted across the years, but the overall structure is similar in relation to film. Regional film funds (FilmFyn and Den Vestdanske Filmpulje) launched in the early 2000s and have come to play a more important role in recent years. The announcement of an additional regional film fund in the Film Agreement 2024-27 is a testimony to this development. Within the jurisdiction of the Film Law, Film Agreements (usually running four years) issued by the government – and the parties in parliament who back it – set more specific targets. This includes benchmarks for the performance of Danish films, levels of funding, and the film investment obligations of the public service broadcasters. Media Agreements constitute a similar policy instrument regarding television, radio, online and print media.

In the mid-1990s, a new generation of talent in front of and behind the camera embraced internationally popular genres and new realistic impulses (e.g. Dogme 95), which helped achieve both popular and critical success domestically and to some extent internationally. These films often had modest budgets and were often based on working methods established at the National Film School of Denmark. Simultaneously, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) in the mid-1990s strove to establish stronger cross-over between its in-house production crew and the external film production community regarding TV drama production. This paved the way for a significant convergence of the film and TV drama industries that continues to be important to this day.

The number of theatrical releases surged in the later 1990s aided by a boost in public support for film production in the 1999-2002 Film Agreement. Feature fiction output peaked around 2010 but has since decreased to around 20 in the 2017-22-period (100% national and majority co-productions). The decreasing output is a key cultural-political issue highlighted by the DFI in connection with the recently established Film Agreement 2024-27. Increasing funding from broadcasters and VoD providers is to help keep production volume at around 20-26 annual fiction feature films.

The number of registered companies in the film production sector has risen from 249 in 2017 to 356 in 2021, according to a recent report from the Producer’s Union & HBS Economics. A share of these companies is part of larger corporate structures potentially benefiting from vertical integration. The film production sector consists of 1.066 Full-time Equivalents but this number does not include the substantial work done on an invoice-basis (Danske indholdsproducenter 2023).

Public funding of Danish films has been relatively stable for many years but rising production costs and increasing pressures on private funding has made it increasingly difficult to uphold the level of fiction feature output or alternatively underfinancing an equivalent volume of films. The DFI’s total costs in 2022 were €88,685,000, while subsidies in 2022 totalled €71,601,000. This includes subsidy for festival activities, cinemas, regional film funds, and The Public Service Fund (mostly TV drama and documentaries). Development, production and distribution support in 2022 for feature fiction and documentary films as well as shorter film formats totalled €43,164,000. Outside of the DFI and the regional film funds, the pan-Nordic Nordisk Film & TV Fond established in 1990 has long provided top-financing for Danish fiction and documentary films.

Investment obligations put on the two state-owned broadcasters, DR and TV 2, have been an important source of funding for feature fiction films and documentary/short films. Each broadcaster had to invest an annual average of €9 million in Danish films from 2015 to 2018. The 2019-2023 Media Agreement restructured the film investment obligations of broadcasters, only retaining an obligation for broadcasters to invest in a particular number of films on market terms. To make up for this, the general film support was raised by approximately €16 million annually. The Film Agreement 2024-2027 re-instates a minimum threshold of an annual investment averaging approximately €3.4 million (DR) and €2.7 million (TV 2) while retaining a minimum number of productions that the two broadcasters must invest in. 

Investment obligations for VoD providers have been outlined in the last three Media Agreements, yet none have been implemented. The most recent Media Agreement (2023-2026) introduced an investment obligation requiring VoD providers to pay a fixed contribution of 2% of their revenue in Denmark. This is to be allocated to support Danish film and TV production starting in 2025 based on revenue data for 2024. VoD providers that do not invest at least 5% of their revenue in Danish production will be subject to an additional contribution of 3% (Media Agreement 2023-2026). In the framing text to the new legislation, the Ministry of Culture writes that they are expecting approximately €13-14 million annually from this initiative. 

The production community has acquired substantial international funding through international funds, co-funding/co-production arrangements, and investments from the private sector. In recent years, Netflix in particular has invested significantly in Danish drama series and films at different stages of the production lifecycle. However, a host of factors have raised significant concerns about future private investments. The cooling down of commissioning within the SVoD field was exacerbated by a long-running royalty dispute in 2022 that may re-appear once the temporary agreements with the respective SVoDs are to be renegotiated. Due to significant investments from internationally oriented streaming services in Danish-language series, the production of serial fiction is taking the hardest blows but since the two sectors are closely intertwined it also has repercussions for the film industry. 

Denmark has neither tax shelters, nor production rebates, nor tax credit schemes. Different interest groups and politicians from the liberal-conservative parties have argued for the introduction of a production incentive but prominent industry bodies such as the DFI are generally opposed to such initiatives for a variety of reasons (author’s interview with Claus Ladegaard, CEO of the DFI, 21 September 2023).

Scandinavian-oriented distributors have historically held a strong market position in Denmark and vertically integrated Nordisk Film and SF Studios distribute the lion’s share of Danish feature films alongside companies such as Scanbox and Scandinavian Film Distribution. There is also a handful of smaller distributors that focus on documentaries and art cinema.

Danish films have a very high market share (on average 30%) across the 2014-2023 period, and had one of the fastest recovering theatrical sectors in Europe after Covid-19 (Marché du Film: Focus, 2023, p. 19) until facing stagnation in attendances in 2023. The average yearly theatrical admissions per capita is 1.9, which ranks relatively high in Europe (see: Admissions and cinema attendance levels.) There are approximately 168 cinema sites in Denmark. The vast majority of cinemas are organized in one of five sub-unions of Danish Cinemas:

  • The union of first run cinemas in major cities (the main commercial cinema chains, Nordisk and Cinemaxx who run multiplexes in the larger cities).

  • The union for larger provincial cinemas (approximately 24 members who run commercial cinemas in the provinces).

  • The luxury cinema union (approximately 20 members).

  • Small and medium-sized cinemas (approximately 90 members; community-run cinemas).

  • The art cinema union (approximately 12 members; many receive DFI-funding).

Compared to other CresCine markets, there is a high number of cinema sites per capita but also a high number of cinemas with few screens (see: Number of cinemas/screens). Smaller art cinemas are part of the explanation as well as unprofitable provincial cinemas being picked up and run by local communities when competition from home video and broadcasting increased in the 1980s. Consequently, approximately half of the 168 cinema sites in Denmark are now run by local communities. With very few exceptions, they all run like cinemas with many weekly screenings. Statistics suggest that the market share of Danish films in these cinemas as well as in larger commercially driven provincial cinemas is higher than the national average and they thus help drive up the national market share.

The VoD market is becoming increasingly important (see: VoD infrastructure) since approximately two-thirds of Danish households subscribe to an average of 2.5-3 streaming services. The most popular SVoD services are Netflix, TV 2 Play, Viaplay, HBO Max, and Disney+. The first four are estimated to have approximately 1 million subscribers, with Netflix leading the way (EAO Yearbook 2023, Main OTT SVoD Groups in Europe by number of subscribers, December 2022).

YouTube is the most used service overall and DR TV the most used BVoD service (DR Medieforskning 2022). VoD services were launched as early as 2004 (with TV 2 Sputnik) but the game-changer was the launch of Netflix and subsequently HBO Nordic in late 2012.

The impact of streaming services on the feature film ecosystem in Denmark has been much debated. On the one hand, a recent report by Danmarks Statistik, based on film production accounts supplied by the Danish Film Institute for the years 2010-2019, shows a visible decrease in income from DVD across the first half of the decade to the second, thus backing the argument that income from VoD has not made up for the loss of income from the DVD market – an observation voiced as early as 2013 by then-CEO of the Producer’s Union, Klaus Hansen (Nielsen, 2013).

The general problem of income from TVoD and SVoD (licensing) being less significant compared to earlier revenue streams from DVD sales and rentals, and income from theatrical distribution being relatively – and paradoxically – more important, was also identified around 2013-14 in reports commissioned by the Producer’s Union and the DFI (e.g. 2013, p.62). The Danmarks Statistik-report (2023) referenced above shows no signs of this pattern changing and income from theatrical distribution shows no sign of decreasing across the decade. Revisiting this area for the Covid-19 years of 2020-2021 and post-Covid-years might show different results. Only feature fiction films receiving production support from DFI’s commissioner and consultant schemes were included in the 2023 report.

On the other hand, more recently there has been an upsurge in co-financing and commissioning Danish feature films by Netflix in particular such as Kærlighed for voksne (DK 2022), A Beautiful Life (DK 2023) and Ehrengard (DK 2023). Outside of bringing additional investments into Danish films, some of the films have also reached substantial international audiences despite critical headwinds. According to Netflix’s recent Engagement Report for Jan-June 2023, A Beautiful Life generated 45.7 million hours of viewing in only one month (June 2023). Recalculated into “number of full-time viewers” this translates to close to 30 million viewers not including co-viewing. Adjusted for co-viewing, it is likely that more than 40 million viewers watched this Danish language film that neither film critics in Denmark nor abroad seemed to appreciate. The popularity of its star actor, pop musician Christoper, in Asia is likely to have driven many views but additional data from Netflix shows that the film reached the Top 10 for non-English films in more than 70 countries all around the globe in June 2023.

The impact of streaming services on the feature film ecosystem is clearly multi-faceted, paradoxical, and affects the production sector and viewing patterns in very different ways. 

Danish fiction and documentary features have performed well at prestigious international film festivals with regular nominations and winners, for instance at the European Film Awards. Highlights also include Danish feature films winning US Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film in 2020 (Druk), 2011 (Hævnen), 1989 (Pelle Erobreren), and 1988 (Babettes gæstebud). Pelle Erobreren also won the Palme D’or as did Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000).

CPH:DOX is currently the most significant film festival in Denmark, specializing in documentaries.