Okay, film fans. Don’t freak out. But there seems to be some... good news for once?
I know, I know. Things have felt bleak for a while now. And while I’m under no illusion that the entertainment industry has completely adjusted course, I can’t help but feel a sliver of optimism that’s eluded me for the better part of a decade.
For the record, I struggle with pessimism. More often than not, there’s a nagging demon on my shoulder whispering doom-and-gloom into my ear. Yet somehow, the optimistic angel on the other side has started drowning it out with a growing chant:
“Twenty-twenty-six...twenty-twenty-six...”
I don’t have a crystal ball, and I certainly can’t say with certainty where we’ll be a year from now. But I’ve been around the entertainment industry long enough to spot a trend when I see one.
This summer might one day be remembered as more than the year the box office rebounded. There’s a chance (fingers crossed!) that we might actually say this was a moment where we finally saw real evidence that audiences still deeply value the theatrical experience.
But there’s an important distinction here.
I’m not convinced audiences have necessarily returned to the movies in the way they used to. I think they may be returning to the experience of going to the movies. And those are two very different things.
The question now isn’t simply whether theatrical cinema can survive the era of streaming. It’s whether Hollywood is prepared to build the kind of ecosystem audiences increasingly seem willing to pay for.
Which brings me back to my good news. This summer has given us some pretty compelling evidence to work with.
Let’s start with the facts
The domestic summer box office crossed the $4 billion mark this week, making 2026 only the second post-pandemic summer to reach this milestone. That’s roughly 22% ahead of last year and slightly ahead of Summer 2019. And the full-year domestic box office is sitting at about $6.2 billion, up 15% year over year.
Excitingly, it’s not just one movie pulling the entire industry across the finish line. Spider-Man: Brand New Day has become the year’s biggest film, reaching roughly $1.67 billion worldwide. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has crossed the $1.1 billion mark, becoming IMAX’s highest-grossing global release of all time. And they’re not alone. They join The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Michael, and Toy Story 5 in the billion-dollar club.
Five billion-dollar movies in 2026 is a remarkable number by any recent standard.
We’ve also seen incredibly strong performances from films that don’t fit the traditional blockbuster mold. Hits like Obsession and Backrooms, both made by young filmmakers who built their audiences on YouTube, became genuine phenomena. Backrooms opened to $81 million domestically against a reported $10 million budget, while Obsession grossed more than $250 million domestically against a reported budget of approximately $750,000.
So, yeah. As a guy who loves movies, I’m feeling pretty good.
But then I looked at the attendance numbers.
We’re looking at about 470.9 million tickets sold through the first 30 weeks of 2026 compared to roughly 747.3 million during the same period in 2019. On average, ticket prices continue to rise, particularly for premium formats like IMAX. In other words, the audience is recovering, but it certainly hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic scale.
On paper, the box office is healthy, but has moviegoing made its triumphant return? Could we have entered an era where people attend fewer films, but place far more value on the ones they do attend? If that theory holds, then maybe attendance alone isn’t the best measure of theatrical health. Maybe we need to start thinking about experiential value per visit.
And that changes the conversation.
Premium cinema may be becoming the new normal
According to several reports, much of the industry's 2026 revenue growth is being driven by IMAX, Dolby Cinema, Premium Large Format (PLF) screens, higher ticket prices, and increased concession spending. And while the average ticket price hovers somewhere around $13.50, premium tickets hit closer to $18. It’s worth noting that approximately 24% of Spider-Man: Brand New Day's record-breaking opening weekend came from premium large-format exhibition, despite those auditoriums representing only a fraction of total screens.
There’s an important supply-and-demand story hiding inside those numbers, too. Dolby says demand for its premium screens has outpaced supply. Two-thirds of available Dolby Cinema tickets for Spider-Man: Brand New Day were sold before Thursday previews, and the film generated Dolby Cinema’s highest-grossing domestic weekend ever. That’s a pretty remarkable signal.
If audiences are increasingly selective about what they see theatrically, but when they do go, they want the biggest, loudest, sharpest, and most immersive version possible, the theater of the future may look less like the generic multiplex of the 1990s and more like Broadway, a concert venue, or a sporting event.
And we’ve been here before. Hollywood has a long history of responding to new technology by making theatrical exhibition something that technology can’t replicate at home. Television helped usher in widescreen cinema. Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision, and 65/70mm formats all promised audiences something bigger and more immersive than what they could experience in their living rooms. Maybe we’re watching another version of that cycle play out.
Then again, I’m old enough to have lived through at least three unique “3-D Is the Future!” campaigns. I’m not quite ready to loudly declare that every single theater in the world needs to become a premium experience destination. Not every movie needs to be presented in IMAX. In fact, not every movie should be. More importantly, not every filmgoer is ready to pay $18 or more per ticket.
Still, the trajectory is hard to ignore.
Will Gen Z save us?
I’m not proud to admit that I bought into the hype—that this next generation would have no interest in long-form storytelling because of their TikTok and their microdramas and their Instas and... you know, all of it. Well, consider this elder millennial particularly tickled to be proven wrong.
The youngins are falling in love with the same things I did. The success of The Odyssey has been something to behold. It took me nearly three weeks to book my first screening in its native IMAX 70mm format.
The kids are alright.
Demand for analog screenings has helped revive a specialized exhibition ecosystem that had become increasingly difficult to sustain. The Odyssey is the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, and its release has exposed just how scarce the infrastructure required to show it on film has become. Only a limited number of theaters can present the film in IMAX 70mm, and some have had to bring in specialists from outside their local markets.
There’s something really fascinating happening here. A generation that grew up without film projection is actively seeking it out. Could be digital fatigue or a reaction to social media amplification. Maybe it's the scarcity itself that’s become the most powerful marketing tool. Or perhaps this audience understands something simple that many in our industry have forgotten. The medium itself is part of the experience.
To me, this all feels a bit like the resurgence of vinyl records. When digital streaming became the norm, vinyl didn’t disappear. It surged in popularity as consumers sought out a more authentic, tactile experience. The craze was such that it made vinyl hard to source for a number of years.
Film might be moving in a similar direction. I get it. I miss the grain. I miss the cigarette burns that told projectionists it was time to switch projectors for a reel changeover. And while scarcity might be adding to the value, I have to wonder if this is a generation pendulum swing. We’ve seen similar back-to-basics trends in things like artisan manufacturing, instant cameras, and even mechanical watchmaking.
But that, of course, leads to some natural concerns about resources.
If film is coming back, who knows how to run it?
This is where my newfound optimism is tested most.
The current resurgence of film exhibition isn’t happening against a backdrop of abundant infrastructure. It’s emerging after decades of contraction.
For The Odyssey, IMAX worked with 130 experienced projectionists, putting them through intensive training. Some theaters had to bring projectionists in from other cities, while the pool of people with current 70mm experience remains small enough that specialized companies have had to recruit retired projectionists, trainees, and people who work in entirely different professions.
That’s a significant workforce issue.
Very few projectionists are trained on 35mm or 70mm systems. Replacement parts are hard to find and expertise has become increasingly specialized. Major exhibitors rely on a rapidly shrinking pool of technicians capable of maintaining these analog systems. It’s reasonable to consider that a Hollywood rife with directors, writers, and producers could be hamstrung by a shortage of projectionists, analog technicians, equipment engineers, and maintenance specialists. These jobs are the final link between a filmmaker’s work and the audience.
The entertainment industry spent decades preserving the technology to shoot on film, but now it could be faced with a potential shortfall of the people who know how to exhibit it. So, if there is indeed an appetite for an analog renaissance, we need to consider whether there’s enough equipment to make it happen.
The COVID era, with its uncertainty and cost reductions, put further pressure on theaters already operating with a diminished film-projection infrastructure. And the ones that do maintain their equipment often struggle to find parts, maintenance expertise, and trained operators.
But interestingly enough, this is where my optimism returns in full force.
An opportunity in the making
If film exhibition is genuinely becoming a premium experience, there are a number of potential business opportunities hiding in plain sight.
A growing demand for things like 70mm could lead to more theaters restoring projectors, new investments in manufacturing parts and maintenance, and even new training programs for projectionists and technicians. Perhaps we’d see new partnerships between exhibitors, unions, and film schools. Or even the resurgence of apprenticeship programs.
And if theaters invest in this movement, one could imagine a world where IMAX expands its film capabilities and exhibition map for the next generation.
To me, that looks like a real industry expansion and not just something that runs the risk of feeling like a nostalgia play. There’s already evidence that the infrastructure can respond when demand exists. The Odyssey rollout forced theaters to resurrect dormant equipment and build a temporary network of specialized personnel. The question is whether we treat that as a one-off emergency or the beginning of a sustainable ecosystem.
Because if this really is a renaissance, we shouldn’t be relying on a handful of people who remember how to do it. We should be training the people who will do it for the next 20 years.
Abundance increases the value of scarcity
This may be the bigger story underneath all of this.
We’re living in an era where the pool of content is essentially endless. AI is accelerating that trend, making it possible to create more images, more video and more entertainment at a speed and scale that would have been difficult to imagine even a few years ago. That doesn’t necessarily make theatrical cinema less valuable. In fact, it might make certain kinds of theatrical experiences even more valuable.
When everything becomes abundant, scarcity becomes interesting. When everything can be personalized, communal experiences become interesting. When everything is optimized, imperfections become interesting. When everything can be watched anywhere, the place where you watch something can become part of what you’re buying.
Maybe that’s why people are waiting weeks for a particular format, or how a 20-year-old YouTube filmmaker managed to put enormous audiences in theaters. Theatrical cinema’s future isn’t necessarily about competing with streaming on convenience. It’s about competing with it on meaning.
The Gen Z theatrical pipeline may be bigger than Hollywood
Another thing pulling my lips into a smile is the fact that this intrigue seems to be affecting smaller indie films as well as giant tentpoles. Both Curry Barker’s Obsession (made for under $1M) and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms (made for around $10M) proved that there's a new pathway to theatrical success outside of the traditional system.
Parsons and Barker built audiences online before taking their work into theaters. Parsons was 20 when Backrooms became a theatrical phenomenon. Barker was 26.
These two filmmakers challenged the narrative about what young audiences want. They gave filmgoers something to care about, turned it into an event, and changed their behavior. That’s an interesting proposition for the future of indie filmmaking. Without a huge marketing machine, creators need to focus on “event” thinking. Things like filmmaker Q&As, limited engagements, and community screenings.
Theatrical success might start to depend less on budget and more on whether filmmakers can give audiences a reason to show up.
Summer 2026 was ready for success
As much as I love looking at the numbers, what excites me most about this summer isn't the $4 billion box office. It's what those numbers tell us about audiences.
They still care.
They still want to sit in the dark with other people, watch something unfold on a screen that's bigger than life, feel the bass hit their chest and experience something they can't quite recreate in their living room (and on film, too).
As someone who loves movies, I find that incredibly encouraging. But opportunity only matters if we’re prepared to meet the moment. That means investing in theaters, technology, projection, premium formats and, just as importantly, the people who make all of it possible.
I don’t want to count my chickens, but it truly feels like a cultural shift is occurring in real time. Whether or not 2026 marks the beginning of a true theatrical renaissance, the opportunity is there. For the first time in a long time, I'm excited about the possibility.
Man, I love movies. I love the ridiculous machinery of making them. I love the ritual of going to see them. I love the anticipation when the lights go down, and that first image appears on the screen. And I'd like very much for the next generation to experience all of that.
Maybe they'll experience it differently than I did, in a redefined way I can’t yet fully see. If that happens, the industry’s next challenge is no longer convincing people to go to the movies. It’s about meeting the moment. This year's box office seems to be telling us that the audience is finally knocking on the door again. Let’s make sure we’re ready to open it.
My fingers are crossed.
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