The way people go to the movies has been changing but don’t be fooled into thinking the future is bleak for movie theaters. In fact, when you crunch the box office numbers they reveal some optimistic trends.
Some analysts panicked when James Camerons’ latest “Avatar” chapter debuted $20 million under box office projections on its opening weekend back in December 2022. But in due course, the film made five times that number in box office, and there is no reason to fret this summer’s box office, either, because numbers seem to be showing us that people tend to go out less for opening weekends of major movies than they used to. Instead, the secret to success for modern movies seems to lie in their long “legs.”
“Superman”, “Weapons,” and “F1: The Movie” each had solid opening weekends, but their real success was in their long legs. Not Aunt Gladys’ stellar gams, but the films’ weekend-to-weekend holds, with each making about three and a half times the amount of their debut weekend over the course of their theater runs. It means people actually liked these movies, told their friends and families to go, or returned themselves.
There have been a few other surprising trends in recent box office numbers. First up, reboots originally bound for streaming have outperformed. Both “Freakier Friday” and the summer’s biggest winner “Lilo & Stitch (2025)” were originally bound for streaming, so Disney would’ve been thrilled if they brought in any money at all, and they did in fact bring in a lot. The Lindsay Lohan reboot bought in almost $150 million and the Lilo and Stitch remake made $423 million domestically.
Different kinds of movies were making a splash in a way they haven’t in a while, with two R-rated horror films, “Weapons” and “Final Destination: Bloodlines” cracking the top 10 domestic summer box office and A24’s romantic dramedy ”Materialists” making over $100 million globally.
There were some surprising losses with films like Pixar’s “Elio” and “Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning”, which made $600 million globally but needed to make around $800 million to justify its $400 million production budget. But those aren’t the main story. Film going culture is rebuilding itself, and the future looks bright with great holds, studios making their streaming content profitable, and variety returning to the big screen.
