James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water led the 2022 chart with an estimated $54 million grossed from 7.8 million admissions since its Dec. 14 release, followed by “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Minions: the Rise of Gru,” “Jurassic World Dominion,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” “The Batman,” “Thor: Love and Thunder,” “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.”

But even these blockbusters failed to lift the French box office back to its pre-pandemic levels. It was down 28% on 2019.

French box office was impacted by several factors, including the threat of COVID variants, the rescheduling of several anticipated releases during the first months of 2022 and a smaller number of U.S. movies being released in the summer.

The highest-grossing French film, Serial (Bad) Weddings 3, came in 12th among the year’s releases with 2.4 million tickets told. The third installment of a UGC-produced comedy franchise, “Serial (Bad) Weddings 3,” underperformed compared with the previous two entries.

The initial movie, released in 2014, sold over 12.4 million admissions and the second garnered 7 million tickets. The franchise revolves around the Verneuil family, upper-class and xenophobic French Catholic couple (Christian Clavier, Chantal Lauby) whose daughters married men of different faiths and ethnic origins.

The big comedies that were expected to be last year’s highest-grossing locals titles, such as “Serial (Bad) Weddings,” “Super-hero malgré lui,” and “Ducobu President!” did not fare as well as expected.

Cedric Jimenez’s November, a counter-terrorism thriller set in the aftermath of the Paris attacks in 2015 with Jean Dujardin. The Studiocanal movie ranked as the second-highest grossing local film with $2.3 million sold.

The third biggest local language hit was Simone: A Woman of The Century, a biopic of Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor who became health minister of France and championed the 1975 law that legalized abortion in France.

While there were few French box office hits in 2022, several sleeper successes punctuated the year, including arthouse movies such as Louis Garrel’s romantic crime comedy “The Innocent,” Dominik Moll’s thought-provoking thriller “La Nuit du 12” and Cedric Klapisch’s “En Corps.”

Some foreign titles also proved successful, notably Tarik Saleh’s “Cairo Conspiracy,” which represents Sweden in the Oscar race and is France’s biggest (non-English) foreign-language hit since Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite.

while U.S. movies dominated the French box office last year, their market share was slightly down due to the fact that there were less American movies released. The average box office per U.S. release was up last year.

The opposite was true for French movies, whose market share was on par with 2021 despite a higher number of local releases.

In contrast, U.S. studios opted for more contained release plans. “Smile,” released on 250 screens by Paramount, packed cinemas and sold over 1.2 million tickets.