16
votes
2025 moviegoer attendance hits 780M, -5% from ’24; majority went to cinemas during pics’ first thirty days of release
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Anthony D'Alessandro
- Published
- Jan 2 2026
- Word count
- 530 words
Some interesting parts:
It was recently announced that Netflix plans on giving WarnerBros films 17 days in theaters, which will absolutely shrink theatrical audiences even more since a majority of the films audience is viewed outside of that window. It's also gonna suck cause usually when a studio says "theatrical window" they mean the time before it's on PVOD, but this probably means before it gets put on Netflix.
The average movie going habit of Americans was four times a year pre-pandemic, and now that number's been cut in half. So I assume that number will go down and eventually be like .5.
I mean, that '30 days' thing is nothing new. That's why when studios started demanding ever larger cuts of the first three weeks of a movie's showing they crippled theaters.
Remember when movie theaters used to have $1 matinees? And the movies were only 2-3 months old? That was in 1994. That would be less than $3 today. It was possible because the first few months of a showing kept the lights on for longer and it let them capture the long tail of owning the movie from poorer people who couldn't afford the $6 ticket.
Not sure if I'm misinterpreting you about the majority being outside that window, but it seems like 17 days will still capture almost all of the current audience? Looking at those numbers, I'd guess Netflix are aiming for WB releases to get 80-85% of the cinema viewing that we're seeing now.
It's still a drop, and I do think you're right that cinema viewing is likely to keep declining - I'd guess you know more than I do on the subject anyway! - but the percentages they give suggest that it's skewed heavily enough towards the release week that shorter timelines won't have a massive impact on that.
I miss the old days where theaters could just buy the copy of the movie and they would get to decide how long to air each film.
There's an amazing independent cinema in the middle of London that somehow still manages to do that - I have no idea how they haven't been squeezed out, they're down an alleyway in one of the blandest, most over-touristed, hypercommercialised parts of the whole city, but somehow they're holding on and it's excellent!
I agree. One of the things that disappoints me is that I will sometimes hear of a movie that is "out now" but literally all of the theaters have already taken them down. And then they aren't anywhere for a while and I just simply forget they exist and never see them.