February 20, 2017

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport reports that figures released by the British Film Institute show that spend on UK film and TV production in the UK soared in 2016, reaching £1.6 billion, a 13% increase on 2015. Of that, £1.35 billion was invested by 48 major inward investment films basing themselves in the UK.

Further, 2016’s top three grossing films at the UK box office were all made on British soil: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Bridget Jones’s Baby. Overall there was a good turnout at the UK box office too, with cinema ticket sales at a second time high, raking in £1.227 billion.

TV also thrived in 2016, with overseas companies “flocking” to the UK to spend £478 million on making high-end TV shows such as The Crown and Game of Thrones.

The DCMS also says that figures from PACT’s UK Television Exports Report show that UK’s sales of television exports to international markets rose by 10%, from £1.2 billion in 2014/15 to £1.3 billion in 2015/16. There has also been a large increase in sales in the Chinese market, which is up 40% on 2014/15, with the UK and China TV co-production treaty signed at the end of last year set to further boost those numbers.

Proving that music is the UK’s forte, figures released by UK record labels’ association the BPI, showed that the continuing surge in audio streaming and accelerating demand for vinyl LPs helped achieve another successful year for British music in 2016. We were listening to even more music last year thanks to an explosive rise in audio streaming, which has increased 500% since 2013.

According to the British Film Commission, there are a whole host of UK-made films set to wow us this year as they hit the big screen including Warner Bros’s Ready Player One, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Twentieth Century Fox’s Murder on the Orient Express.

Further, Mary Poppins Returns and detectives Holmes and Watson are to be filmed in the UK this year.

As for TV produced in the UK, we can expect to see more of HBO’s Game of Thrones on our sets, along with Netflix/Left Bank’s The Crown, Starz’/Company Pictures The White Princess, Crackle’s Snatch, TNT’s Will and Sony’s Outlander. To read the DCMS press release in full, click here.