Throughout 2024, movie theaters in the United States and Canada managed to sell around 760.5 million tickets, which is less than the 2023 figure of about 940 million tickets. Furthermore, the 2024 figure falls short of the nearly 1.23 billion movie tickets sold in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. Cinema's slow recovery after the coronavirus The pandemic also impacted cinemas' finances. The revenue at the so-called North American box office – consisting of Canada and the U.S. – stood just below 8.6 billion dollars in 2024. That value remained well under the figure recorded in 2019. The box office revenue in Canada alone struggled even more, adding up to 600 million Canadian dollars in 2023, barely more than half the value reported four years earlier. Newer audiences and how to attract them The coronavirus outbreak has not changed the fact that teenagers watched the highest number of movies per year in the U.S. The 12-17 age group watched, on average, 2.5 feature films at a movie theater in 2021, or five times more than moviegoers aged 60 and above. According to a 2022 survey, the availability of films is what most motivated Gen Zers to attend movie theaters.

In 2020, there were ***** cinema sites in the United States, a similar amount to the ***** recorded a decade earlier. However, a look at the figures during the mid to late 1990s shows that there has been a significant decrease in the number of cinema sites in the U.S., dropping from ***** in 1995 to just over ***** in 2005. With the increasing take-up of streaming services, leaked movie files available online and rising movie theater ticket prices, the gradually decreasing amount of cinema sites in the U.S. is just one way in which the film industry and the act of going to the movies have changed. How cinema has changed The practice of projecting movies onto a screen via 35mm film reels is no longer the norm, as digital methods prove simpler and more versatile. As a result, the number of analog movie screens in the U.S. has dwindled whilst digital screens (including 3D) take over the market. In fact, the number of 3D films released in North America has increased fivefold in 10 years. Further, whilst between 2006 and 2008 there were no movies shot in digital only format in the U.S. with a budget of over *** million U.S. dollars, between 2015 and 2017 more than ** percent of digital only movies had a budget larger than that figure. Old-school methods – 35mm filmThe method of shooting movies on 35mm was invented by Thomas Edison in the early 20th century, and many age-old classics filmed using this method have made their way into academia around the world. Notable movies shot on 35mm film include ‘The Great Train Robbery’ directed by Edwin S. Porter in 1903, ‘Battleship Potemkin’ by Sergei Eisenstein and 1915 epic ‘The Birth of a Nation’, as well as the surrealist feature ‘Un Chien Andalou’ by Luis Bunuel and artist Salvador Dali.

Number of Businesses statistics on the Movie Theaters industry in the US

In 2024, a total of 569 movies were released in the United States and Canada, up from 506 in the previous year. Still, these figures are under the 792 titles released in 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak. Will moviegoers return? The box office revenue in the U.S. and Canada more than tripled between 2020 and 2022, when it reached almost 7.4 billion U.S. dollars. The 2022 result still fell way behind the 11.3-billion-dollar annual revenue recorded just before the pandemic. But there are ways to attract newcomers to the moviegoing experience. During a mid-2022 survey conducted among members of the Generation Z – aged between 13 and 24 years – more than half of respondents mentioned movie offering as a leading motivation to go to the movies. About 40 percent of interviewees included the quality of the service and the physical comfort of the seats at the movie theater among their main incentives. Cinema circuits As the industry tries to reinvent itself for a post-pandemic scenario, the top movie theater chains in North America slowly bounce back. Their financial results improved since the coronavirus outbreak, but when or if they will see figures similar to those recorded before 2020 remains an open question. The leading circuit, AMC Theatres, reported a revenue of more than 2.5 billion dollars in 2021, over twice as much as in the previous year.

In 2024, total earnings at the box office across the United States and Canada amounted to around 8.56 billion U.S. dollars, down from 8.91 billion dollars in the previous year. Still, the 2024 figure was still under the revenue recorded in 2019. Light, camera, action – literally The initial recovery in the box office was followed by a return in market concentration. As of February 2023, the "Big Five" major film studios – Disney, Paramount, Sony/Columbia, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. – collectively held a market share of over 80 percent in the U.S. and Canada. Meanwhile, the action genre remained the most popular movie genre of the year. Diversity attracts moviegoers Over 60 percent of Gen Zers surveyed in the U.S. in May 2022 mentioned the movie offerings as the main reason to watch motion pictures in theaters. This suggests that new generations of moviegoers may be losing interest in some of the themes abundant in Hollywood productions. Between April 2018 and November 2021, the share of internet users in the U.S. who said they enjoyed superhero movies but were getting tired of so many of them went from 17 percent to 23 percent.

As of March 2023, AMC Theatres was the leading cinema circuit in the United States and Canada, with 7.71 thousand screens spread across both countries. Regal and Cinemark followed with around 6.47 thousand and 4.39 thousand movie theater screens, respectively.

AMC versus COVID-19 The pandemic's impact on the North American cinema industry continued up until 2022. That year, attendance at AMC's movie theaters added up to more than 200 million, up from 75 million in 2020. But the 2022 figure amounted to little more than half of the 356-million attendance the company reported in 2019, before the coronavirus outbreak. Similarly, AMC Theatres' revenue amounted to 4.03 billion U.S. dollars in 2022 – less than the result reported two years earlier.

Cinemark tries to recover The Texas-based cinema chain faced a comparable struggle. Attendance at Cinemark's movie theaters stood at 73 million in 2021, more than doubling its 2020 figure but still amounting to less than half of the 176-million attendance recorded in 2019. Meanwhile, the revenue of Cinemark Holdings, Inc. added up to 2.45 billion dollars in 2022, down from the 3.28 billion dollars reported three years before.

As of May 2022, around ** percent of Hispanic internet users surveyed in the United States said they went to the movies sometimes. Approximately ** percent of Black, non-Hispanic respondents stated that they often went to see a film in theaters.

Author: Víctor Yeste. Universitat Politècnica de Valencia.This work is an exploratory, quantitative, and not experimental study with an inductive inference type and a longitudinal follow-up. It analyzes movie data and tweets published by users using the official Twitter hashtags of movie premieres the week before, the same week, and the week after each release date.The scope of the study is the collection of movies released in February 2022 in the USA, and the object of the study includes them and the tweets that refer to the film in the 3 closest weeks to their premiere dates. The tweets recollected were classified by the week they were published, so they are classified by a time dimension called timepoint. The week before the release date has been designated as timepoint 1, the week of the release date is timepoint 2, and the week immediately afterward is timepoint 3. Another dimension that has been considered is if the movie has domestic production or not, which means that if one of the countries of origin is the United States, the movie is designated as domestic.The chosen variables are organized in two data tables, one for the movies and one for the collected tweets.Variables related to the movies:id: Internal id of the moviename: Title of the moviehashtag: Official hashtag of the moviecountries: List of countries of the movie, separated by a semicolonmpaa: Film ratings system by the Motion Picture Association of America. It is a completely voluntary rating system and ratings have no legal standing. The currently rating systems include G (general audiences), PG (parental guidance suggested), PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned), R (restricted, under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) and NC-17 (no one 17 and under admitted)(Film Ratings - Motion Picture Association, n.d.)genres: List of genres of the movie, e.g., Action or Thriller, separated by a semicolonrelease_date: Release date of the movie in a format YYYY-MM-DDopening_grosses: Amount of USA dollars that the movie obtained on the opening date (the first week after the release date)opening_theaters: Amount of USA theaters that released the movie on the opening date (the first week after the release date)rating_avg: Average rating of the movieVariables related to the tweets:id: Internal id of the tweetstatus_id: Twitter id of the tweetmovie_id: Internal id of the movietimepoint: Week number related to the movie premiere that the tweet was published on. “1” is the week before the movie release, “2” is the week after the movie release” and “3” is the second week after the movie release.author_id: Twitter id of the author of the tweetcreated_at: Date and time of the tweet, with format “YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS”quote_count: Number of the tweet’s quotesreply_count: Number of the tweet’s repliesretweet_count: Number of the tweet’s retweetslike_count: Number of the tweet’s likessentiment: Sentiment analysis of the tweet’s content with a range from -1 (negative) to 1 (positive)This dataset has contributed to the elaboration of the book chapters:Yeste, Víctor; Calduch-Losa, Ángeles (2022). Genre classification of movie releases in the USA: Exploring data with Twitter hashtags. In Narrativas emergentes para la comunicación digital (pp. 1012-1044). Dykinson, S. L.Yeste, Víctor; Calduch-Losa, Ángeles (2022). Exploratory Twitter hashtag analysis of movie premieres in the USA. In Desafíos audiovisuales de la tecnología y los contenidos en la cultura digital (pp. 169-187). McGraw-Hill Interamericana de España S.L.Yeste, Víctor; Calduch-Losa, Ángeles (2022). ANOVA to study movie premieres in the USA and online conversation on Twitter. The case of rating average using data from official Twitter hashtags. In El mapa y la brújula. Navegando por las metodologías de investigación en comunicación (pp. 151-168). Editorial Fragua.

In 2021, there were about ***** thousand cinema screens in the United States and Canada, down from ***** thousand a year earlier – an annual decrease of one percent. Digital 3D movie screens added up to almost ***** thousand in 2021, accounting for little more than one-third of the total number of cinema screens in the so-called North American movie market.

What is digital cinema? Digital cinema describes the use of digital technology to produce and project movies onto a screen, as opposed to the traditional analog technique of using 35mm film. Within the segment, 3D films are a recurring feature to attract more viewers. After peaking at ** in 2016, the number of 3D movies released in the U.S. and Canada decreased year by year. Despite a *** increase between 2020 and 2021, the **** 3D titles released in the latter year amounted to less than one third of the figure recorded in 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Distribution of digital cinema screens worldwide The global number of digital cinema screens has been growing steadily since the late 2000s, amounting to over *** thousand in 2020. When it comes to digital 3D movie screens, however, the Asia Pacific has been the only region to report annual growth lately – even before the pandemic. That part of the world accounted for roughly two-thirds of all digital 3D cinema screens on the planet in 2021.

In 2024, "Deadpool & Wolverine" was the movie with the highest- grossing weekend in the United States, recording a total revenue of almost 212 million dollars on its opening weekend. It was followed closely at 154.2 million dollars by “Inside Out 2” first weekend. Franchises reign supreme All the highest-grossing movie openings belong to movie franchises or were part of a bigger cinematic universe. “Avatar: The Way of Water”, the sequel of the highest-grossing movie ever released, grossed over 134 million dollars in its first weekend and made a splash in China, the first international market. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU, is the highest-grossing movie franchise worldwide, before Star Wars and Harry Potter. Superhero fatigue? The pandemic and the rise of video-on-demand have strongly impacted movie attendance. Movie theater chains are heavily relying on blockbusters to attract viewers, who would rather enjoy big productions on a wider screen. Still, a lot of moviegoers are more interested in watching movies at home and consider seeing movies in theaters to be too expensive. Even Marvel is not immune to this phenomenon, as several of its most recent productions have recorded a week-to-week box-office drop between 60 and 70 percent. Released in February 2023, the latest installment of the Ant-Man franchise plunged 69 percent the weekend following its release, the biggest yet in the MCU’s history.

A survey held in the United States reported that ** percent of consumers said if high touch areas such as concession stands were sanitized in between movies, they would be much more likely to visit a movie theater within a month of their state passing benchmarks for re-opening the economy, during the coronavirus outbreak. Sanitization of the space was the most popular precaution among consumers, whereas measures such as compulsory face mask wearing and offering fewer movie screenings than normal were less likely to encourage consumers to visit cinemas.

During the weekend ending on June 15, 2025, the live action remake "How to Train Your Dragon " was the highest-grossing film in the United States and Canada, collectively known as the North American movie market. Its box office revenue amounted to **** million U.S. dollars. The North American box office after the pandemic The impact of the COVID-19 outbreak persists in the arguably most influential market worldwide. Box office revenue in the U.S. and Canada stood slightly below nine billion dollars in 2024 – more than three billion less than the value recorded in 2019. Perhaps unsurprisingly, cinema attendance experienced a very similar trajectory. The number of movie tickets sold in Canada and the U.S. amounted to little more than 762 million in 2024. Between 1980 and 2019, it had always surpassed a billion. The struggle of Canada's cinema When looking only at the northernmost country part of the North American movie market, the post-pandemic recovery was even slower. Box office gross in Canada amounted to around 600 million Canadian dollars in 2023, roughly only two thirds of the result seen in 2019. It is possible that the audience remained cautious after the coronavirus outbreak. As of mid-2021, nearly 70 percent of people aged 14 and above said in a survey that they did not go to a movie theater in Canada throughout the past 12 months.

In 2021, the global box office revenue amounted to approximately **** billion U.S. dollars, out of which more than half – **** billion dollars – came from the Asia Pacific region. In Europe, the Middle East, and Africa – collectively known as EMEA – the box office revenue added up to **** billion dollars or almost one-fourth of the total. Despite the increase when compared to 2020, the 2021 figures remained distant from the ****-billion-dollar global revenue recorded in 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak. What is box office data used for? The term box office revenue refers to the total revenue generated through movie ticket sales. It is primarily used to measure and compare the commercial success of a film. Ticket sales may account for a large portion of the film industry’s total revenue – especially before the pandemic. They are also the main source of income for movie theaters. Leading box office markets The United States and Canada – known as the North American movie market – were the leading box office market worldwide for several decades. But China, alongside other Asian markets, has also begun to make its mark on the global movie industry in recent years. Bollywood movies, in particular, are gaining popularity outside of India. While the Indian film industry released far more movies than China and the U.S. until the coronavirus outbreak, its box office revenues remained comparatively small.

In 2021, China reported the highest box office revenue worldwide, at approximately *** billion U.S. dollars. This is more than the revenues of the United States, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom combined. France ranked fourth alongside the UK, each grossing around *** million dollars at the box offices. China: the top film market The Chinese movie industry flourished throughout the past decades, reflecting the country's overall economic expansion. This skyrocketing market is also translating into higher demand for cinemas. After a decline in 2020, amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, the number of new movie theaters built in China went up once again in 2021. That year alone, the Asian giant erected almost ***** new cinemas. Is the North American movie market in decline? To say that Hollywood days are counted would be an overstatement. The box office revenue in the U.S. and Canada – altogether known as the North American film market – grew by *** percent between 2020 and 2021. However, the latter result amounted to less than 40 percent of the 11.3-billion-dollar revenue recorded in 2019, before the pandemic. Despite the slow recovery, younger American moviegoers have been catching up. Teenagers experienced the highest increase in films seen per capita at a movie theater in the U.S. in 2021.

Released in March 2023, the latest instalment of the John Wick franchise grossed a total opening weekend box office revenue of 73.53 million U.S. dollars, making it the most successful to date. By comparison, the first movie recorded a box office revenue of 14.42 million U.S. dollars during its first weekend in movie theaters, almost a decade earlier.

Results from a survey released in 2020 found that nearly half of U.S. consumers would wait to watch content on home entertainment (HE), if that content had not been available on Premium Video-on-Demand (PVoD). A further ** percent would have seen the movie in theaters, provided they were open.

As of September 2019, the movie within the franchise 'The Fast and the Furious' with the highest grossing opening weekend in domestic movie theaters was 'Furious 7', which generated 147.19 million U.S. dollars on the first weekend of its release. Second and third were 'The Fate of the Furious' and 'Fast & Furious 6', which grossed 98.79 and 97.38 million U.S. dollars respectively.

After its initial release on Netflix, animated sensation "KPop Demon Hunters" topped the domestic box office, grossing a total of 18 million U.S. dollars over its exclusive weekend event. The sing-along version of the movie hit theaters two months after its original release on Netflix. As of now, the movie is the most-watched movie on the streaming platform.

The movie theater audience of summer blockbuster "Barbie" was mostly female, with a share of **** percent of moviegoers, while more than ** percent of "Oppenheimer" audience was male. The dual release of "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" on July 21, 2023, also called "Barbenheimer", garnered a total of *** million U.S. dollars at the box office during its opening weekend.

In 2023, Mexico recorded the highest box office revenue in Latin America, with over *** million U.S. dollars. That was more than the second (Brazil) and third (Argentina) markets combined. The most-viewed domestic movie in Mexico's theaters in 2023 was "Radical" which sold about *** million tickets in that North American country.