Here are the Ministry of Culture's official statistics on the Spanish movie market for 2005.

76 million people saw American movies. Box-office take was €378 million. That's about 60% of the market. 602 American movies were shown in Spain in 2005, 35% of the total.

21 million people saw Spanish movies. Box-office take was €105 million. 343 Spanish movies were shown. However, of the top twenty-five movies last year, only three were Spanish. The first was Torrente III, the second-most-seen movie of the year in Spain with 3.5 million spectators. Torrente is an atrociously unfunny series of movies about a revolting character played by an unattractive actor which for some reason is incredibly popular. It makes Wayne's World look intellectual. It's about on the same level as Jackass or The Dukes of Hazzard. Maybe Cheech and Chong, except Cheech and Chong were more sophisticated, had better taste, and had higher budgets for their movies. Also, they were occasionally funny if you'd been smoking a lot of weed. The problem is they've already made three Torrente movies. There will be no Wayne's World III. There will be a Torrente IV, and V, and VI...

The other two were Kingdom of Heaven, a Hollywood flick, ranked 11th, seen by about 2.3 million people, and Princesses, ranked 25th, with 1.1 million spectators. 438,000 people saw Obaba, the unsuccessful Spanish nominee for best foreign film at the Oscars. The stats show that there are about a million people or so, out of Spain's 42 million, out there willing to pay to see a Spanish movie, because I will bet that the spectators of Princesses, Obaba, The Secret Life of Plants, and so on, are all the same people. They hang around the Verdi movie theater up here in Gracia, smoke black tobacco, have goatees, and wear scarves. And they wonder why people aren't tuning in to the Goya Awards on TV.

Third place was for British movies, with 19 million spectators and a box-office take of €94 million. Looks like the British film industry is pretty healthy, right? Well, the only four "British" movies on the list of top twenty-five in Spain were Harry Potter, Alexander the Great, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Batman Begins, which everybody but the Spanish Ministry of Culture considers to be standard Hollywood flicks. What really happened was that 1 million people saw British movies and 18 million should be added onto the American figure.

A total of 46 million people saw European Union-produced movies, including Spanish and "British" flicks for a take of €233 million, but what this really means, again, is that 25 million people saw Torrente III and big-budget Hollywood movies with some British or European connection, no matter how tenuous, 15 million saw non-Torrente Spanish movies, and 6 million people saw sensitive black-and-white artworks from, like, Sweden.

That means that 96 million people saw Hollywood movies in Spain last year for a take of about €470 million. This does not include, of course, DVD and video sales and rentals, or cable or pay-per-view TV.

In 2004, the Spanish movie industry received €32 million in subsidies, one-third of the total box-office take.