If anyone still knows how to fill a movie theatre, it’s James Cameron. Having broken the all-time worldwide box office record in 1997 with Titanic and again 12 years later with Avatar, his work is the acme of big-screen spectacle.
His latest offering, Avatar: Fire and Ash, arrives in radically different circumstances. With several years now between us and the pandemic, it is clear that theatrical box office is likely not coming back to what it was: US total box office for 2025 currently stands at $7.6bn (down from $11.3bn in 2019); the worldwide haul is expected to be around $34.1bn, a 13% drop from pre-Covid times. All the more onus on Cameron’s hypertrophic Smurfs to bring in the box office cavalry at year’s end. And hopefully supply some further indications about the magic elixir needed to break the Netflix’n’chill stranglehold and get boots back in cinemas.
Streaming entertainment has the upper hand. With Netflix and co often having a cursory theatrical release, or nixing it entirely, for their flagship films, the traditional studios are under increasing pressure to get their wares on to digital platforms. The pre-pandemic 90-day “theatrical window” during which films were exclusive to cinemas has become 45 days, if they’re lucky. Universal was the first to break with tradition: in 2020, it began putting films that failed to break $50m box office out to premium video on demand (PVOD) after 17 days. A collective Keanu “woah” was the only possible response to Warner Bros scuttling The Matrix Resurrections – beloved big-screen IP, if ever you saw it – by releasing it simultaneously on HBO Max in December 2021.
Facing down this digital firehose of – pardon the Silicon Valleyese – “content”, how does Hollywood now decide what merits a cinema release? What executives are looking for – at least at Sony, according to one of its partner producers I spoke with recently – is “theatricality”. By that term, the company means films with “the urgency to get people to leave the comfort of their homes”, he says. Working out what urgency – or “theatrical intent”, to use the marketing lingo – means is the current Hollywood obsession.
Tom Cruise, for instance, interprets urgency literally – banking on personal peril in the form of old-fashioned, non-CGI stunt work to pack in the punters. It worked for 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, the worldwide No 2 film that year ($1.5bn), but not so much for the two last underperforming instalments of the Mission: Impossible franchise (both took under $600m worldwide). His proselytisation of real thrills in real cinemas is one way of defining theatricality – though the danger is the approach relies only on fading muscle memory of blockbusters past. But neither is Cameron’s technologically led version of cinema a foolproof guarantee – especially for sequels, like Fire and Ash, which generally produce diminishing returns for US audiences.
With their recent successes rooted in long-established pedigree, both men seem like exceptions that prove the new rule of box office volatility. Ironically, it was on-screen exceptionality that was the law of blockbuster-making in their 80s and 90s heyday: exceptional faces (A-list stars) engaged in exceptional exploits (an unmissable story), driving demand through scarcity (an exclusive cinema release).
The hullabaloo over something like the Harrison Ford thriller The Fugitive seems quaint now – but it was the definition of a big-ticket event movie in 1993. Good old Harrison Ford framed as a criminal and subjected to unrelenting high jeopardy, with the short sharp shock of Tommy Lee Jones thrown in, was a must-see pitch. The film retains enough zing to make it a streaming catalogue perennial. But a 21st-century equivalent – something like Rebel Ridge – would be deemed lacking in sufficient theatricality.
The various traditional drivers – IP, superlative VFX, stars, sharp storytelling – can still collectively generate theatricality. But this is becoming more difficult, with many of these pillars looking individually shaky. Much IP has gone through too many repeat washes, though some virgin territory still remains (Warner worked this effectively with the Dune films and this year’s overachiever – $1bn worldwide – A Minecraft Movie). The ubiquity of VFX, and the synthetic look of so much of the work, detracts from the miraculous allure it should ideally serve up. The shock and awe of Jurassic Park’s brachiosaurus reveal feels very distant.
On the star front, the post-90s dilemma persists: there’s no guarantee that new so-called A-listers, like Margot Robbie and Timothée Chalamet, have any consistent box office pull when not playing known entities like Barbie or Harley Quinn, or Paul Atreides or Bob Dylan. At blockbuster level, Hollywood now only trusts the personnel when sheltered by the right IP; a setup that made Spider-Man: No Way Home’s class reunion of all-time webslingers, teaming up Tom Holland with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, one of the biggest pandemic-era theatrical hits (nearly $2bn worldwide).
Precise storytelling, meanwhile, is arguably being sacrificed in favour of the IP packaging in which the film industry prefers to trust to generate heat for theatrical releases. Too many blockbuster plots – sprawling out over interminable sequels or nodding to the wider extended universe – now default to daytime-soap-level convolutions, instead of delivering indelible onscreen events.
The endless double-crossings and alliances of the Fast & Furious “family”, the equally cliquey office intrigue of Ethan Hunt’s Mission: Impossible squad, the mopey group-therapy postmortem in Avengers: Endgame after Thanos’s finger snap – very little of this feels dramatically purposeful and ruthless in the vein of drum-tight blockbusters like Back to the Future or Mad Max: Fury Road. The incentive to bloat the franchise – elongating them with flabby storytelling and unneeded instalments, like The Hobbit, or Mission: Impossible’s two final reckonings – is just too tempting.
As Hollywood struggles to define what constitutes the right stuff for cinema, there’s growing recognition that streaming v theatrical isn’t a zero-sum game. To put it bluntly: “The better it does in theatres, the better it does on streaming,” as Joe Earley, the head of Disney+ and Hulu, told the New York Times recently. This was why, for example, Amazon put its $250m Dwayne Johnson action comedy Red One into 4,000 US cinemas; though it didn’t break even ($185m), the long marketing runup helped drive it to becoming the streamer’s No 1 film debut. Two-thirds of Netflix’s weekly top 10 English-language films since 2022 have had theatrical releases.
All the more reason why the industry needs fresh wellsprings of theatricality. First up is redefining event movies as ones that make an event of the novelty of a cinema trip, a strategy exploited by a number of post-pandemic hits. The choose-your-camp incongruity of Barbie ($1.44bn worldwide) and Oppenheimer ($975m) being released on the same July 2023 weekend – dubbed Barbenheimer – was a win-win situation for both.
Deadpool & Wolverine ($1.3bn) used a different spin on audience participation, with radioactive levels of fanboy in-jokiness beckoning filmgoers into the onscreen party atmosphere. Tapping a live-entertainment participatory vibe is the aim of the ongoing Broadway-adaptation industrial complex, hoping sing-along theatre energy will rub off in the cinema; the two Wicked films have conjured impressive grosses ($759m/$223m and counting) that way.
But these are isolated events. Children’s films released over holidays still thankfully seem untouchable, as reaffirmed by Zootopia 2’s record-breaking haul on Thanksgiving weekend. What else can help secure cinema’s future? Properly serving theatrical audiences means a broader spread of releases – and the likes of Sinners ($90m budget) and Weapons ($38m) reminded us this year that mid-high and medium-budgeted contenders, if sharply conceived, can still carve out awareness as capably as tentpole releases.
There are signs this renewed adventurousness is extending to lower budgets too. Rather than dumping smaller fish on streaming as loss leaders to gain subscriptions, there is a growing willingness to let less expensive punts turn a profit in theatres (though studios only take a 50% cut there, as opposed to 80% of PVOD). Paramount especially has been more forthright than most studios about its commitment to a broader slate of theatrical releases. The 2022 horror Smile, for example, was destined for streaming – but after excelling in test screenings drummed up $217m on a $17m budget in theatres.
A more varied offering is good news, of course – and bolsters the overall appeal of cinemas. But sustainably fostering such a spread means tightly controlling budgets: $42m made The Naked Gun remake viable (and it has turned a profit); One Battle After Another – masterpiece though it is – looks reckless at a reported $130-$175m.
Cinemas were once dream palaces, replete in entrancing drapery and underlighting, with names like the Million Dollar Theater, Le Rialto and Kino Babylon. You went there to walk into the fantasia. Recapturing that glamour seems like a long shot in an age when cinemas are mostly Haribo-encrusted industrial sheds where people second-screen their favourite OnlyFans while Rocket Raccoon bawls for their attention. But community remains their genuine USP, the legacy of the era when the whole of society congregated in them. Whether it’s stars, a party atmosphere, or a pipeline of stories that touch on people’s lives, cinema’s greatest hope now is keeping human beings in sharp focus.
