Like a craps table at three in the morning, where any whiff of hope has been replaced by the stench of secondhand smoke, the mood at last week’s CinemaCon gathering in Las Vegas was grim.
The film industry’s annual dog-and-pony show, during which studio executives, movie stars and theatre owners gather inside the Caesars Palace hotel and casino to convince themselves that they are in a business of creative and financial growth, kicked off just as Hollywood was waking up to the realization that 2025 is not going to be the comeback year that everyone had been banking on.
After suffering through the existential threat of the pandemic and then the largely self-inflicted wounds of the 2023 actors and writers strikes, the industry had been holding onto the mantra of “Survive till ‘25,” at which point a slew of sure-fire hits were going to finally wrest audiences away from their couches and back into the cinemas where they belong. Yet despite an unexpected box-office smash this past weekend with A Minecraft Movie, the past few months have mostly delivered high-profile disappointments (Snow White, Captain America: Brave New World, Mickey 17), with North American box-office receipts 7 per cent off from the same period last year, which itself was significantly down from prepandemic levels.
Robert Pattinson in a scene from Mickey 17.The Associated Press
At the same time, Netflix recently added 19 million members (its largest-ever quarterly gain), theatres have been closing across the United States and Canada (more than 5,000 screens lost since 2019) and audience awareness of new movies is dropping precipitously (with recent data finding a distressing decline of 39 per cent). Oh, and just for fun, you can throw in a global trade war and fears of a recession into the mix – topics that absolutely no one at CinemaCon wanted to touch. (Although, privately, food and drink vendors were already predicting that in-cinema dining would take the biggest hit, especially higher-end fare that requires, say, avocados from Mexico.)
Yet if you could ignore all the whispers of doom and gloom and focus more on the cheers that greeted such stars as Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Scarlett Johansson and even pop star the Weeknd (who surprised attendees with an early-morning set to promote his new thriller Hurry Up Tomorrow), there were stubbornly hopeful signs hiding in plain sight. Here’s how Hollywood can win audiences back, before they’re gone forever.
Big-screen boosterism
(L-R) Glen Powell, Edgar Wright, Colman Domingo and Josh Brolin promote the coming movie The Running Man during a Paramount Pictures presentation at CinemaCon, the official convention of Cinema United, in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., on April 3.Steve Marcus/Reuters
Every edition of CinemaCon relies upon movie stars professing their undying love for the theatrical experience. If you were to play a drinking game that required a shot every time someone talked about “the magic of moviegoing,” you’d be wasted quicker than the bachelor party occupying the Hangover suite a few floors above Caesars’ conference floor. But whereas these declarations can so often ring superficial, this year’s confab was jolted awake by a desperate kind of sincerity. Everywhere you turned, there was a sense that moviegoing is so dangerously close to extinction that everyone, L.A. celebs and middle-America theatre owners alike, needed to be reminded that the communal experience is worth fighting for tooth-and-nail.
The mood in Vegas got a lift early when indie distributor Neon kicked off its mini-presentation with an Oscars-night clip from Anora director Sean Baker: “We are all here tonight because we love movies. And where did we fall in love with movies? At the movie theatre!” The energy rarely dipped as the week went on, including two rousing appearances from Tom Cruise (“Seeing a movie on the big screen can change lives!”), and further stumping from such younger, wannabe Cruises as Glen Powell (“Now, more than ever, we need movies in the movie theatres that bring people from all different backgrounds and ideologies together”).
What in the past felt like obligatory boosterism this time landed on a profound, existential level.
More movies, now more than ever
Co-Chairman, Disney Entertainment Alan Bergman speaks onstage at the The Walt Disney Studios Presentation during CinemaCon.Ethan Miller/Getty Images
For the first time since 20th Century Fox was absorbed into Disney’s corporate kingdom in 2018, this year’s CinemaCon featured seven major studio presentations: stalwarts Sony, Universal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Disney, and Lionsgate, plus ambitious new entrant Amazon MGM.
The latter entity arrived in Vegas promising to theatrically release around 14 big-budget, commercially minded movies a year going forward, including everything from high-concept tent-poles (the Ryan Gosling sci-fi comedy Project Hail Mary) to original adult-skewing dramas (the Julia Roberts/Andrew Garfield thriller After the Hunt) to broad-appeal franchise plays (including new stabs at He-Man, The Thomas Crown Affair and James Bond, the latter of which the studio just paid US$1-billion to gain creative control of).
Amazon’s big bet on theatres largely mystified attendees – no one could quite figure out Jeff Bezos’s endgame here, given his company’s previous emphasis on building up its Prime Video streaming catalogue – but it was still greeted as the second coming by product-starved exhibitors. Since the start of the pandemic, all the other studios have either made fewer movies or sent more of their titles to streamers which they own or to PVOD (Premium Video on Demand) markets in which they don’t have to split revenues with exhibitors.
“We need more movies, more variety,” said Eduardo Acuna, chief executive officer of the U.S. multiplex giant Regal. “The number of movies being released is down 25 per cent, and the box office is down 28 per cent. It’s almost in perfect correlation.”
But what truly perked up spirits in the room was just how long Amazon planned to keep its movies in theatres before making them available on Prime Video: a “theatrical window” of about 45 days.
Crack open that window
Jason Blum, CEO of Blumhouse Productions, speaks during a Universal Pictures/Focus Features presentation at CinemaCon.Steve Marcus/Reuters
Prior to the pandemic, studios had been begging theatres to shorten the “window.” The argument: Most movies earned the bulk of their box office during the first few weeks of release, so why should studios not be able to move the title along to its next downstream market (VOD, streaming, cable), where it can more immediately deliver a fresh source of revenue? More money, after all, means that the studio can make more movies. Exhibitors, though, felt anything less than a 72-day window would cannibalize their business, and essentially threatened to boycott any studio that refused to play by their terms. But then the pandemic came along, theatres were crippled, and studios such as Universal used the crisis as cover to punt movies to digital markets as little as 17 days after they open in cinemas.
But at this year’s CinemaCon, now a few years removed from the worst of the pandemic, exhibitors channelled their inner Howard Beales: They were mad as hell, and not going to take it any more. In his state-of-the-industry speech, chief theatre lobbyist Michael O’Leary all but demanded studios commit to a minimum 45-day window, saying that a “clear, consistent period of exclusivity … is essential for all theatrically released films to be successful. It is the bedrock upon which our collective prosperity is built.”
O’Leary also noted that a longer window is essential to provide clarity for moviegoers themselves, who’ve come to expect new releases to be available at home almost immediately after they hit theatres. Regal chief Acuna even cited polling that showed one-third of consumers considered a movie on Netflix to be essentially “free,” compared with the cost of a night at the cinema: “We’re training our customers to not go to the theatres.”
If that habit can be turned around via clear and consistent windowing, then theatres might witness the same revival that every other out-of-home entertainment sector (sports, live music) has witnessed since the heights of the pandemic. Yet despite the 45-day ultimatum from theatre-owners, only a handful of studio execs even acknowledged the debate. Still, such exhibition leaders as Ellis Jacob, chief executive of Canada’s Cineplex, left Vegas confident: “As some studios start to follow that 45 days, it’s going to be harder for the outliers not to want to come into the program.”
Make moviegoing great, and cheap, again
Gurbani Marwah, Executive Director, Theatrical Releasing & Film Buying, Cineplex speaks onstage during CinemaCon.Jerod Harris/Getty Images
While studios make and market their films, they have little say over the conditions in which their titles are presented. Which is why studio execs this CinemaCon preferred to scold exhibitors about their operations rather than talk about those pesky windows.
Before presenting Paramount’s 2025 slate – which includes a fresh entry in the Naked Gun franchise, with Liam Neeson taking over deadpan duties for Leslie Nielsen, only partly because the two men share similar-sounding names – the studio’s domestic distribution chief Chris Aronson encouraged theatres to give “audiences a premium experience, not just charge them a premium.” Essentially: Freshen up your auditoriums and lobbies, play fewer ads and extend discount pricing beyond Tuesday.
While urging theatres to cut their ticket prices might earn more laughs out of an exhibitor than an episode of Seth Rogen’s new Hollywood satire The Studio – whose final two episodes, which take place during a fictionalized version of CinemaCon, had the room consistently buzzing – exhibitors arrived in Vegas already in the thick of revitalization efforts. This past fall, North America’s top eight cinema chains – including Cineplex – pledged to collectively invest more than US$2.2-billion into their operations over the next three years. This includes everything from projection upgrades to the installation of luxury seating to enhanced food and drink options. “When you look at the percentage that we do in premiums, it’s quite significant compared to other circuits in North America,” said Cineplex’s Jacob.
Still, some upgrades go beyond the mere theatrical experience – the mid-size U.S. chain B&B Theatres, for instance, just added two pickleball courts to its Dallas location, an industry first. Which inspires the question of when, exactly, does a movie theatre stop being a movie theatre?
If all else fails, try Beatlemania
(L-R) Irish actor Paul Mescal, British actor Joseph Quinn, Irish actor Barry Keoghan and British actor Harris Dickinson leave the stage after speaking about the four-film cinematic event The Beatles during CinemaCon.VALERIE MACON/AFP/Getty Images
Forget Tom, Brad or Scarlett: The biggest names around the hallways of Vegas last week were John, Paul, George and Ringo. At the tail end of Sony Pictures’ presentation, studio chief Tom Rothman and director Sam Mendes not only confirmed the official cast for their coming Beatles quadrilogy – Paul Mescal as McCartney, Harris Dickinson as Lennon, Joseph Quinn as Harrison, Barry Keoghan as Starr – but also surprised the crowd with the news that all four films would be released in theatres at once on April 7, 2028, to deliver what Rothman called “the first binge-able theatrical experience.”
The big-swing strategy instantly energized the weary crowd. Even if exhibitors wondered aloud as to how the release might practically work, to say nothing of how much of a Gen-Z draw four separate Beatles biopics might be, at least someone out there was trying something new in these desperate times. Or, to paraphrase the words of the Fab Four themselves: We really, really, really hope you will enjoy the show.