The Olympic rings on display outside Paris City Hall . The Summer Olympics will take place from 26 July to 11 August 2024, mostly in the French capital. (Photo: Andrea Mantovani/Bloomberg via Getty Images) 
Cities and other organising bodies will each be given a number of invites to distribute. Guests will have to go through a security screening process supervised by intelligence services before they can attend the event from the upper quays of the river Seine.
These 222,000 spots are in addition to the 104,000 paying spectators who will watch the ceremony from the lower quays. The revised total of 326,000 spectators is almost half of the 600,000 that had been estimated to attend in the original plan.
The minister said he reserved the right, if necessary, to revise that number down again.
(Reporting by Juliette Jabkhiro, editing by Pritha Sarkar)