The UK Cinema Association has warmly welcomed key changes announced today by BAFTA to their 2025 Film Awards, but encouraged the organisation to go even further in ensuring audiences get a chance to see nominated films on the big screen.
The changes, announced today in the Press Release here, cover a range of areas, including categories, voting rules and eligibility.
On the former, the major change is the introduction of a new Children’s and Family Film awards category, recognising the increasing importance of this audience.
in addition, BAFTA have confirmed moves significantly to increase the minimum number of theatrical screenings for Best Film contenders such that films must be theatrically exhibited publicly for the first time on at least 50 commercial screens in the UK for at least seven days – the equivalent of at least 350 screenings. Previously, BAFTA mandated ten screenings per day for seven days to be eligible.
Welcoming today’s announcement, UK Cinema Association Phil Clapp said:
‘The introduction of a Children’s and Family Film Award category is a welcome recognition of the increasing importance of this audience, and something on which we offer BAFTA our full support. Equally, we are very pleased to see some strengthening of the eligibility criteria around the Best Film, seeing the increased requirements as an important step in efforts to ensure cinema audiences get a chance to see nominated films on the big screen.
That said, it will be no surprise that we would have liked BAFTA to go further, both in increasing the requirement and in extending it to all relevant film categories, where as it stands certain distributors are still able to ‘game’ the current criteria to become eligible without any meaningful theatrical release.’