Are movies so back?

Picture this: It’s December 2019. Little Women has just come out, and Timothée Chalamet is still an artsy, French-leaning, burgeoning movie star. The domestic box office is shaping up to reach nearly $11.4 billion. Cinephiles everywhere let out a satisfied sigh.

It was a pretty good time to be in the movie business—and now, five years later, the movie industry is still trying to get back to those good old days.

After the pandemic brought record low attendance, Hollywood has had a difficult time convincing patrons to go to the movies the way they did just a few years ago. With waning interest in franchises that were once a sure bet, slowdowns in content due to the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023, and more movies available to stream at home sooner, it’s been something of an uphill battle. But with 2025’s history-making Memorial Day weekend box office, which brought in an estimated haul of $325 million, it seems the movie industry could finally be on the rebound for real this time—though the price may have been trading in artsy Timothée for pro sports fan Timmy.

With more summer movies on the way, the multiplex seems poised to regain its dazzle through the summer, and Manu Singh, chief data and innovation officer at National CineMedia (NCM), believes marketers should be priming to take advantage, especially as the cinema could prove a cultural focal point amid an otherwise fractured entertainment landscape.

“Moviegoing is the No. 1 shared activity experience out there,” Singh told us. “This is now the new watercooler, because there is no other watercooler that exists.”

Big money

After the success of Memorial Day’s seasonal kickoff, analysts everywhere are citing one number that seems to be the industry’s ultimate finish line: This could be a $4 billion box office summer.

But why is $4 billion the number to strive for? It’s considered to be something of a bellwether for a healthy box-office year, as it is roughly the amount earned each summer during the movie boom of the 2010s, and about what 2018’s summer box office pulled in, a year widely regarded as one of the best box-office seasons ever. That year, audiences gathered in droves for titles like Avengers: Infinity War, a climactic Marvel story at the apex of the franchise’s power, and Incredibles 2, a family-friendly sequel to a beloved Pixar movie.

2019’s summer season also achieved this $4 billion marker, buoyed by Avengers: Endgame, a film designed to conclude multiple storylines in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and several other Disney and Pixar releases, too, although both the summer and year-end box-office totals were down slightly from the year prior.

Since the pandemic, there have been valiant efforts to get back to that high point, and 2023’s Barbenheimer double feature also helped power about a $4 billion summer finish. But that summer wasn’t typical, either: Barbie and Oppenheimer vastly overperformed other releases, making up more than half of the summer box-office total and creating something of an outlier, Vulture recently noted.

Without the same kind of Marvel enthusiasm or a compelling pink-versus-black aesthetic narrative, this summer’s movie slate doesn’t have a recent formula to follow. Kevin Near, equity research senior associate analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, told us in an email that in the age of streaming, audiences are most motivated to go to the theater for a movie event, which can mean a film’s opening weekend box office is more important than ever.

“If a film doesn’t have a big opening weekend, it’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy where people don’t see other people talking about it online or with their friends, and they say to themselves, ‘Well, it must be just OK. I can wait to watch it at home in a few weeks,’” he said.

For this summer to reach the $4-billion mark, Near said breakout hits are paramount, but there are releases on the slate that could carry the needed cache, like Superman, Jurassic World Rebirth, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and the recently released How to Train Your Dragon, and F1. And though this summer might not have a Barbenheimer moment, these films still have a well-trod path to follow.

“The recipe for success is still quality and marketing,” Near said.

If the summer season measures up, confidence in the entertainment industry will justifiably increase. According to Near, Bloomberg Intelligence projects that the 2025 box office total will land in the $9.2 billion–$9.4 billion range, which would be a slight improvement over last year's $8.57 billion total and the "best result since the pandemic," he said.

However, overall box-office growth could also be a result of increased ticket prices, and if the year ends closer to the midpoint of the projection, it could suggest that attendance is still down in comparison to pre-pandemic levels—a metric that he said is what Hollywood and theater owners really care about.

Movie magic = marketing gold?

It’s not just studios and distributors that reap the benefits of a cinema surge. Related industries, like concessions, advertising, and retail merchandise, could see a boost, too, according to Singh.

“There’s a lot of tchotchkes that are coming out that are tied to movies,” Singh said. “I haven’t been able to get my hands on anything because they sell out so fast.”

This Memorial Day weekend also presented opportunities for plenty of brand partnerships. Advertisers like Oura partnered with Mission” Impossible — The Final Reckoning, and Spam whipped something up with Lilo & Stitch; during opening weekends, the films brought in $79 million and $183 million, respectively.

Those millions of dollars in ticket sales are increasingly coming from a younger and more diverse audience, according to Singh. For marketers trying to reach the consumers of tomorrow, the cinema could hold considerable weight, especially when compared to streaming.

“The median age of broadcast television is 60+. Cable is within the same range,” Singh said. “As more and more audiences have started cutting their cord and moving to streaming, streaming has started aging.” The median age of the moviegoing audience, meanwhile, is much younger—one study from Fandango found that around 4 in 10 moviegoers are millennials, while about 80% are between the ages of 18 and 54—and its younger makeup allows for a naturally more diverse reach, Singh said.

Because theater audiences are also naturally a captive audience, some theater chains are running even more ads before feature films begin. AMC recently reached an agreement with NCM to increase ads and feature a “platinum spot,” an ad that runs right before a movie starts rather than before trailers, per Bloomberg.

And hey—for the people who just want to sit in a cool, dark room and watch a movie? Well, this means they’ll have a bit more time to browse the concessions and merch offerings.