Movies | Data

Is Cinema Actually Dying?

There’s a problem with the industry, but probably not the one we are talking about

funeral rites

It’s been almost six whole years since the COVID pandemic, and the discussion around cinemas and the film-viewing experience of today’s audience keeps reiterating in one way or another. There was of course some kind of talk before the pandemic around the subject, but 2020 onwards is when the topic became central in media.

Why are we so interested in whether cinema is dead or is dying or is having a death rattle or whatever?

The whole idea of discussing the death of an entire artistic medium seems almost silly, when you take a breather and think about it. To be more precise, the discussion is not about the medium of film itself, but about the whole cinema-going experience to watch a movie with a live audience.

And it is equally silly.

The year before the pandemic saw the release of a movie that is considered for many the last great blockbuster that brought EVERYONE to the cinemas. I’m talking of course about *Avengers: Endgame (2019)*. It raked in a whopping **$2,799,439,100 **in global box office revenue and accounted for 8% of the U.S. domestic box office. The numbers are dizzying.

But then COVID hit like a freight train and since then we have been talking ad nauseam about how cinemas have been affected. Put on top of all that the rising popularity of streaming platforms, and the obituaries were practically writing themselves.

Everyone seemed to panic. Rash decisions were made. Movies were released simultaneously in cinemas and on streaming platforms. Entire movie releases were postponed or cancelled completely.

When the dust settled a bit, the big talk started.

At first, the online discussion took a more optimistic (and/or desperate) turn, and people were constantly looking for the “savior” of the cinema-going experience. We were looking for the next big movie that would bring people back to the theater. Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020) seemed to be the first candidate. Then Bad Boys For Life (2020) and Dune (2021) and No Time To Die (2021) and then, finally, Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), which actually brought people to the cinema in a big way.

But soon after, we started talking in earnest about how cinemas were closing down, how it was annoying to go to the cinema, how expensive it was, and how all this spelled their definitive death.

So after setting the stage, let’s take a look at whether cinemas are actually dead/dying/decomposing or I don’t know what else.

cold, hard data

In order to examine the situation, we have to take a look at what the data have to say about this first.

I have taken the public data from Box Office Mojo regarding the U.S. domestic box office on an annual basis. In the figure below you can see the evolution of the domestic box office from 1990 onwards.

Evolution of the U.S. domestic box office ($), [1990–2026]. Source: Box Office Mojo.

the glorious 90s

First of all, let’s zoom in on the 1990s. The average growth of the box office in this decade was around 6%, which cemented a stable upward trend over the whole decade. After all, this was the last decade before the onslaught of internet, and then the streaming platforms.

A more interesting metric is the theatrical release window of a movie. This is the time the movie is allowed to spend in cinemas, before it’s distributed through other secondary services.

So in the era of the 90s, where the one other method of distribution after the cinema was through VHS tapes and then DVDs, the release window tended to be around 5–6 months. Compare to today’s 30–45 days window and the difference is staggering.

the new millennium

From 2000 and on, there is still an upwards trend of around 2% annual growth in the box office. For two whole decades, there seemed to be a steady but modest increase that kept the balance (an uneasy one as it proved) between the different players in the movie industry: the studios, the creatives and the cinemas. Movies were released in cinemas for around 3 months before migrating to streaming platforms and rental stores (remember those?).

the critical hit

But then COVID hit in 2020 and everything was thrown out the window. In a single year the box office was wiped out almost entirely, seeing a drop of 81%.

Studios saw their revenues dropping to zero, and this is where the streaming platforms entered the chat in CAPSLOCK. The streamers were building a loyal audience over the previous decade with their primary offer of convenience. “You can watch anything with just a click from the comfort of your home”, they said. “Isn’t it amazing?”, I hear you say.

The behemoths in the likes of Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max came in to save the day for the studios. And so then, they had leverage over the industry to impose their rules on how the whole show should work. The biggest change was the release window, as already mentioned by yours truly.

Imagine that. A movie came out in the cinemas and if you loved it so much you wanted to watch it again and again till you learned all the lines from it, you had to wait half a year before you could rent it and watch it at home.

Nowadays, a movie is released and before the internet has made up its mind about it and any controversy surrounding it has died down, it is already hosted on some platform so you can passively view it in the comfort of your home while you doomscroll into eternity.

But let’s pivot back to the figure. Did the cinemas actually die? Apparently not. As we can all see, the box office numbers have bounced back significantly in the course of just 3 years.

To be honest, the box office has not fully recovered to the levels of 2015–2019, which averaged $11.4B annually. There are still $2.7B missing, and frankly I don’t think that we will see it return, at least not any time soon.

For the past three years the average annual box office sits comfortably at $8.7B. Not too shabby. There seems to be a new kind of balance, where the cinemas are still reeling from what hit them in 2020, and the streamers have occupied a large enough sit at the table so as to have a say as to how the game is played from now on.

So why are we still talking about the death of cinema?

we have a supply problem at hand

To be clear, I think that the movie industry has undergone significant shake-ups in a matter of years and there is some kind of structural problem.

I don’t think that it is a matter of people not wanting to go to the cinema, but a matter of unsustainable overproduction of movies. In other words it is a problem of supply and not demand.

But I guess it is easier to frame it as such, since now the proverbial blame can be put on the audience and not the strategic decisions the execs are making.

But again let’s look at what the data tells us. In the figure below, we can see how many movies were released each year from 1990 up to today and how much money each movie brought in on average.

Number of movies releases per year and average gross per movie ($/release), [1990–2026]. Source: Box Office Mojo.

During the ‘90s we saw the release of about 295 movies each year and each one brought in around $18M. From the new millennium onwards, the number of annual releases more than doubled, reaching 734 movies on average but now they only brought in $14M.

Funnily enough, the two points in time since 2000 when we can see a significant uptick in the average per-movie gross, are both in times of crises. Notice the increases in the years 2009–2010 right after the financial crisis and the years 2022–2023 after the pandemic.

A similar pattern (although less pronounced) can be seen in the number of tickets sold below.

Number of cinema tickets sold, [1990–2025]. Source: The Numbers

Someone could say that the arts are oftentimes a luxury, but the people yearn for a good time when hard times hit.

From the figure of ticket sales, we can also see the effect the onslaught of internet and specifically the streaming platforms had on the cinemas. Up until the early 2000s the ticket sales continue to rise. Going to the cinema was a big pastime for all people.

But as we move on into the new millennium we can clearly see a stagnation in annual ticket sales, if not a slight decline. This was the uneasy balance we talked about before. A tug of war was held for over a decade until the final push in 2020 gave rise to a new status quo.

Let’s move on now to one last critical bit of data about the movie industry.

When one looks at the supply side of the movie industry, what is more concerning is not only the sheer number of movies being released, but also the super-ballooned budgets that the majority of major releases get, that they subsequently have to somehow recuperate AND turn a profit.

The figure below shows the clear shift in movie budgets that occurred over the last 20 years.

Share of total films released by budget category. Source: Wikimedia.

In the 90s and early 2000s, there seemed to be a modest approach towards budgeting a film. Most films got a mid-budget of 50–100 million dollars. Then some big/huge mega blockbusters got something around 200 mil dollars. And that was it.

To put this into perspective, the Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) was the single most expensive film ever made and held on to that record for a good amount of years. And all that with a budget of $300M.

You know what spot this film holds today in the list of most expensive films?

The grand number of 19. Since 2007 that record has been broken 18 more times. That means that each year since, there was a film that was more expensive than the record holder.

Over the past 20 years or so, it has become standard practice for films to regularly have budgets over 100 and 200 million dollars. Those two budget categories account for over 70% of movies being produced in the last couple of years.

let’s wrap it up

So, what was the point of this whole rant and data-dump? My main point is that no, cinema is not dead or dying. But I guess we all kinda knew that already. No?

The way I see it is that the industry is operating in a truly unsustainable way, financially at the very least. There are more movies being produced and released than we have time to watch. These movies have monstrous budgets that cannot be recuperated and they are obliged to rake in something like a billion dollars at the box office in order to consider them successful.

This all leads to the discussions online about the death of cinema. The same industry is using its own target audience as a scapegoat, in order to not deal with the problem the industry itself has created.

But the audience isn’t stupid. And when it needs to showcase its power, it actually does. That’s how you get those seemingly “random” box office hits like Obsession (2026) and Backrooms (2026). Both films had low to ultra-low budgets (Obsession had a budget of only 750k dollars) and have managed to bring in the cash big time, with both of them earning over $200M.

Now that’s impressive!

Stills from the films Obsession (2026) and Backrooms (2026). Source: A24, Focus Features, Universal Pictures