Box office: in the United States, the unclear future of movie theaters

It's a distressing (but collector's) item: a popcorn bucket in the shape of the head of Galactus, the planet-devouring villain from Fantastic Four , the Marvel blockbuster of summer 2025, with his gray skin, purple helmet, and blue eyes, which, beyond arousing unease (who would want to eat popcorn from a skull?), reflects both the soft ingenuity of American movie theaters to bring back the public, and a certain anxiety, not to say panic, about the future. Price of the Galactus bucket : 80 dollars.

Blockbuster season, the American film industry's major meeting with itself, is always a time full of hype, pretense, and overbidding— Fantastic Four grossed $69 million in its first weekend in the United States, Superman $200 million, Jurassic World $650 million worldwide—where it's sometimes difficult to gauge the films' true success, once they're factored into their production and marketing budgets. A bit of a shock: according to a report by forecasting firm PwC , published on July 23, box office receipts aren't expected to return to their pre-Covid levels until 2030. In the best-case scenario.

There's good and bad. The good: The numbers are up, with $33.5 billion in revenue forecast for 2025, up from $29.7 billion the previous year. The bad: The box office is still far from its pre-pandemic level—$39.4 billion in 2019—with the 2023 actors' and writers' strike having dealt a blow to the recovery, even though "the decline was anticipated and was not as steep as feared," the report points out.

There are some constants, too. In the U.S. market, the winners remain "franchise films built on existing intellectual property," and the year's blockbusters—from Superman to Avatar 3 , including Snow White and Mission: Impossible —are expected to deliver a "reasonably robust" 2025 vintage. Conversely, "so-called mid-budget films, including awards-contending dramas," are losing ground at the box office. "These are films that audiences prefer to watch at home," the report says.

Should we read this "reasonably robust" year as a massive return of moviegoers to theaters? Not necessarily. A reminder: box office revenue is a product of the number of tickets sold and their price. The recovery is being driven by rising ticket prices and infrastructure development. And even though "US exhibitors are trumpeting studies suggesting that audiences are re-embracing the theater experience," admissions are unlikely to return to their pre-pandemic levels. Hence the bucket of Galactus popcorn to compensate for the lost profits.

In detail, the studies are contradictory. According to a Deloitte report published in 2025, the threat comes not from platforms, but from social media. More than half of Gen Z respondents responded that TikTok or Instagram content seemed more relevant to them than so-called traditional content, such as movies or TV series. Six months earlier, the Teens and Screens 2024 report from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) offered a bit of nuance: going to the cinema during a film's first weekend would remain the preferred activity for 10-24 year-olds, only once price, transport, and other barriers are taken out of the equation. On this score, social media is indeed unbeatable.

While we wait to see more clearly, the seats are becoming more and more luxurious, the screens are getting bigger and bigger, and Imax is popping up everywhere. "In North America, 950 theaters now have large-format screens, a 37% increase in five years and a clear sign that spectators are looking for a spectacular experience that cannot be replicated at home," points out the PwC report, recalling that cinema is an industry whose death has been regularly predicted since its creation. For the future, the market is turning to its favorite compass: Christopher Nolan. A year before the release of The Odyssey , scheduled for July 17, 2026, the first tickets went on sale. In one night, the Imax in Melbourne reportedly sold 1,800 seats. Sold out within an hour in the United States, where tickets are reportedly reselling for $300, according to The Guardian . The buckets of popcorn promise to be Homeric.