The US box office won’t return to its 2019 peak until 2030 a new report suggests, as cinemas slowly recover from five turbulent years.
In 2019, US cinemas brought in around $11.7bn in revenue – a number that more than halved when the pandemic struck the year after. Since then, box office numbers have gradually risen, but cinemas across North America may take until 2030 before they return to the same revenues they were enjoying before Covid.
This is according to an annual report on the sector published by accounting company PwC. Its findings were recently shared by The Hollywood Reporter, which also published some quotes from PwC’s entertainment and media boss, Bart Spiegel. Altogether, the report paints a decidedly mixed future for US cinemas.
First, the obvious news: the rise of streaming and the 2023 Hollywood strikes have all slowed the US box office’s post-Covid recovery. After a fairly flat few years between 2022 and 2024, where revenues hovered around the $8bn mark, numbers are expected to rise this year with $8bn in revenue, before gradually approaching $9.8bn in 2029.
“We project that by the end of 2029, the industry will be on the brink of a full rebound,” Spiegel said. “In other words, 2030 may be the year global box office revenues return to pre-pandemic levels.”
It’s a sign of just how hard the pandemic affected cinemas: according to this forecast, it’ll have taken a decade for profits to fully recover.
The earnings are only part of the story, however. While income is creeping back up, attendances aren’t; the growth in profits is being driven by higher ticket prices, not more people rushing to their local multiplexes. “These ticket price increases are driven by several factors,” Spiegel explains, “including enhanced infrastructure and facilities, technological advancements, and rising content costs.”
The expense of going to the cinema could partly explain the increased dominance of sequels and huge franchises – if movie-going isn’t a cheap, casual experience, but instead a rare treat, then customers will put their money on a safe bet. As a result, such films as Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine and Moana 2 have been the kinds of films that have driven box office growth; by contrast, the PwC report observes, “so-called mid-budget movies, which include award-contending dramas, are struggling at the box office. These are the pictures that spectators seemingly prefer to watch at home.”
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Despite fears that streaming and mind-numbing social media platforms like TikTok are about to render cinemas irrelevant, the PwC noted that more streaming companies, mostly Amazon MGM and Apple, have begun to see the value in putting their films on the big screen first. Releasing a movie in cinemas and on a streaming service on the same day “have now largely been discarded,” according to the report, while more streaming firms are leaving a 45-day gap between a cinema release and a film’s debut on streaming.
Research also suggests that people aged between 10 and 24 still enjoy going to see a movie on its opening weekend. “Market research also suggests that for certain genres – horror and comedy in particular – younger cinema-goers like to watch with their peers and to enjoy the shared experience,” says the report.
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None of these findings are revelatory by themselves, but together, they suggest a direction of travel: cinema isn’t going anywhere just yet, but it is an expensive pastime that generally favours the biggest, most familiar-sounding blockbusters rather smaller, quirkier movies. The PwC report also suggests that Sony’s purchase of the Alamo Drafthouse chain could prompt other studios to make similar acquisitions of other cinema firms – a move that could wind the clock back over 60 years.
In the 1940s, legislation – the Paramount Decrees – was brought in to prevent Hollywood studios from crowding out smaller filmmakers and cinema owners. Studios were therefore forced to divest themselves from the exhibition end of the film business. A by-product of that legislation was the wave of New Hollywood movies that emerged in the late 1960s and 70s.
Still, cinema’s a resilient beast. As the PwC report points out, theatres have survived turbulent periods before, and likely will do so again. “US industry history reveals that the sector has experienced challenges many times before,” it writes, “with everything from the conversion to sound to the anti-trust legislation of the 1940s, the arrival of TV as a mass medium in the 1940s and 1950s, and the VHS revolution of the 1970s. In each case, the sector recovered.”
