3.6 million people watched the Goya gala. Only a small part went to see the nominated films

The gala of the Goya 2026 has scored a 26% screen share, its best figure since 2020 and the second highest since 2010, in a context of television consumption down. Paradoxically, this massive attention contrasts with a box office that remains stagnant and with an audience that prefers to see Spanish cinema on television platforms and events rather than in theaters. Technology and new consumer habits explain this gap.

The figures. The broadcast of the gala on RTVE’s La 1 brought together an average of 2,396,000 viewers and reached a 26% share. In his analysisVertele emphasizes that linear television consumption has been significantly reduced in the last decade, with fewer people watching DTT at the same time than in 2010. That the gala reaches percentages comparable to fifteen years ago in an ecosystem fragmented by streaming and delayed viewing platforms suggests that the Goya remains an event capable of bringing together a mass audience in real time, in the style of a sporting event.

These good figures are part of five consecutive years of growth for the gala in audiences, with an increase of 1.6 share points and 56,000 viewers compared to the 2025 edition. However, the majority of the films that competed for the award that night had not managed to recover their investment in theaters.

Less box office. According to the official data published by the ICAASpanish theaters closed 2024 with 72.9 million spectators and a collection of 484.6 million euros, figures that represent a 5% decline in attendance compared to the previous year. The share of national cinema within this shrinking market was around 18.65%. But that percentage is not sustained by the auteur films that dominate the Goya nominations, but rather the exact opposite: family comedies and commercial thrillers.

This can be applied to the big winners of this editionwhich we summarize in this table. All of them enjoyed subsidies between one million (except Sorda, with 800,000 euros) and 1,200,000. That is to say, they are films highly valued on the awards circuit, rather than by the general public. In this way, the market bifurcates, and the cinema that really fills theaters, such as the family comedies by Santiago Seguraare left out of the Goya.

lto Spanish exception. It is not something that happens in all countries: in France, the eternal model in which we want to see ourselves, French films raised 44% of the year’s box office. But at the same time, the three most watched French titles of the year (a comedy with disabled actors, an epic adaptation of Alexandre Dumas and a romantic drama) are films that also aspire to the Césars, their equivalent to our Goyas. Subsidies are also comparable in quantitybut here the number of releases has skyrocketed (168 in 2016, 364 in 2025), while the collection has decreased (from 111.5 to 85.6 million in the same period).

And yet… the Goya audience demonstrates every year that there is interest in the industry. There is a potential audience that debates whether ‘Sirat’ deserved to win more awards than ‘Los Domingos’, but they did not go to the cinema for the premiere of ‘Sirat’.

The hinge of the platforms. Three weeks after its very limited theatrical release, ‘The Snow Society’ landed on Netflix: in its first eleven days accumulated 51 million views and closed the first half of the year with 103 million views, becoming Netflix’s third most viewed film globally. The fact that he had that success right after leaving the theater sums up the problem. In October 2025 Netflix advertisement that they would spend one billion euros on Spanish production between that year and 2028. All this in Tres CantosNetflix’s largest production space in the entire European Union.

Since its arrival in Spain, Netflix has produced more than a thousand titles with Spanish teams, generating 20,000 jobs in the sector. Amazon Prime Video follows a similar logic, although with less weight in its own original production. The money from the platforms has allowed Spanish cinema to produce on a scale outside the traditional financing system (subsidies, investment from traditional chains). For this reason, and in the face of competition from platforms, which produce and release almost immediately in their space, in 2022 the Spanish exhibitors They formally requested a minimum window of one hundred days between the theatrical release and the arrival on platforms, shorter than the windows in France (15 months) and Italy (3 months). At the moment, there is no regulation and each window is negotiated separately.

The power of the Goya. However, there is a Goya Effect at the box office. Last year, when ‘El 47’ and ‘La infiltrada’ won the award for Best Filmthe two tapes their box office skyrocketed by more than 70%. It is something that carries lifetime happening with the Oscars, but here we do not have the muscle of international Hollywood distribution. In Spain, ‘Los Domingos’ continues in 50 cinemas and ‘Sirat’ in 35 throughout Spain. It is insufficient for them to experience notable growth. But these are the highest grossing ones: the Goya, their audience proves it, they generate real interest, but the majority of the winning films, such as ‘Sorda’ or ‘Maspalomas’, are already streaming. The impact of the awards does not benefit the box office because there are no open avenues to do so.

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