Movies were supposed to have their big box office rebound this summer, but instead the industry slipped to a historic new low. A report from The New York Times reveals that this summer movie season was the worst since 1981, when adjusted for inflation (excluding the COVID lockdown years of 2020 and 2021).
The optimism was not unfounded, with the return of several key franchises that often drive moviegoers to theaters, like Jurassic Park, a new Superman adventure and the long-awaited Marvel Cinematic Universe debut of The Fantastic Four. Individually, those films all did as well or perhaps even better than expected, and there were a few other strong hits as well.
Still, a few bright spots aside, the overall domestic box office was in severe decline. There were just two weeks this summer where theaters collected over $300 million, compared to nine such weeks in the summer of 2019.
That 2019 summer remains the industry’s high watermark, grossing $2.6 billion. Films released in the summer of 2025 grossed $1.6 billion, which falls below the summer of 1981, where films earned $529,762,897 (via The Numbers), or $1.88 billion when adjusted for inflation, and there are more than a few reasons for this downturn.
You Can’t Rely On Franchises Like You Used To
Sure, the big box office drivers are still franchise films such as the new Superman ($353.5 million domestic, $614.4 million worldwide), Jurassic World: Rebirth ($339.1 million domestic, $861.9 million worldwide) and Fantastic Four: First Steps ($270.9 million domestic, $515.6 million worldwide). While those are big numbers, they all represent drops from earlier iterations.
James Gunn’s Superman out-performed Zack Snyder’s 2013 film Man of Steel at the domestic box office ($291 million), but it couldn’t surpass it internationally ($379.1 million to $260.9 million) or worldwide ($670.1 million), and that’s without even adjusting for inflation. With the adjustments, Man of Steel took in $404.7 million domestic and $931.7 million worldwide.
Jurassic World: Rebirth fell shy of all three of its predecessors, even without adjusting for inflation. True, Fantastic Four: First Steps did best 2005’s Fantastic Four domestically when adjusted for inflation ($256.4 million), but the 20-year-old film still beat it globally ($552 million).
Reliance on Traditional TV Marketing When Viewership is Down
Studio marketing departments used to have a fairly reliable playbook that could be applied to any movie. First you drop a trailer roughly six months from release to start the buzz, maybe throw in a few behind-the-scenes videos, then a week or two before release, put everyone on the late-night circuit and ramp up TV spots every day until it’s in theaters. It worked like a charm. Until people stopped watching TV.
Nielsen revealed that nearly 2/3 of people between the ages of 6 and 17 watch streaming ahead of conventional TV.
A Nielsen report in June (via Fortune) revealed that broadcast television represented just 18.5% of all TV viewing, the first time in history it had dropped below 20%. Cable wasn’t too far behind with 23.4% with streaming services dominating with 46%. If movies want to survive, they need to start advertising on streaming.
If studios really wanted to get ahead of the curve, they’d start running more ads on YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok to truly get their finger on the pulse of the youth movement, since they just don’t watch television like previous generations used to.
Anti-Social Youth
Ever since Jaws became the first summer blockbuster in June 1975, studios have been carefully placing its biggest films aimed 13-19 year-old kids in the summer months when they are out of school. Without the structure of school in place, and parents likely at work, kids were allowed to roam free on those sunny summer days, with the air-conditioned theater often a welcome respite from the summer heat.
The days of clusters of kids piling into a movie theater on a hot summer day seem to be coming to an end, or at least the frequency of which they’re doing so. A February 2024 article from The Ringer cited research from sociologist Eric Klinenberg that revealed from 2002 to 2022, teenagers reduced face-to-face socializing by more than 45%.
Another study conducted in the U.K. in 2023 revealed that a whopping 84% of local teachers felt that their students’ attention spans were far less, post-COVID. The tragic decline of kids simply hanging out together, coupled with attention spans that are shorter than ever, has clearly become a harbinger of doom for movie theaters and the industry at large.
Historic Job Losses
When a life-altering event like the loss of a job occurs, often the first thing cut from one’s life is any sort of leisure or recreation activities, like going to movies. A report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics earlier this month painted a rather bleak and tragically historic picture of the American job market.
One of the biggest takeaways from the report was that, for the first time in four years, there was negative job growth, with 13,000 jobs lost in June. While there was a bit of a rebound in August, there were just 22,000 jobs added, a far cry from economists’ projections of 76,500 jobs.
The employment problem spanned far beyond the summer. The report revealed that, between January and July 2025, United States employers laid off a whopping 800,000 workers, a 75% spike since 2024 and the largest figure since 2020, with the unemployment rate at 4.3%, a four-year high. With so many out of work, a trip to the theater has become less and less a priority.
Less Seats = Less Money
Back in July 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported that AMC, America’s largest movie theater chain, was spending a whopping $600 million to add larger reclining seats to their theaters, which has now become industry standard. While the move was thought to add more value to the theater-going experience, it still came at the expense of fewer seats in theaters.
AMC’s 2014 annual report revealed that the conversion to reclining seats led to an 80% increase in attendance in those theaters, despite a reduction in seating capacity by upwards of 66%. However, a report from Benchmark (via Quartz) added that while the first-year growth was often huge for recliner-seat theaters, it was down to single-digit growth by Year 3.
It may be time for exhibitors to admit that, in this case, less (seats) is not actually more (money). Naturally, that would result in more costly renovations to bring back more traditional seating methods, but that may have to happen. While ticket sales naturally went up drastically after the COVID-19 lockdown, they are still nowhere near pre-lockdown numbers, which may lead to a reckoning over the comfy reclining seats.
There Is No COVID Rebound: This Is The New Normal
The glory days of the late 1980s and early 1990s are long gone. There was a stretch between 1986 and 2004 where the movie industry posted growth every year until a 5.6% dip in 2005. While in many years the growth was less than 1%, many years there were double-digit increases, like 1989 (15.3%) and 2002 (15.2).
2002 — the year when Spider-Man showed how big superhero movies could become at the box office — still holds the modern record for admissions, with 1.575 billion. 2003 was the last year admissions crossed 1.5 billion (1.525 billion) with ticket sales fluctuating randomly between 1.2 billion and 1.4 billion throughout the 21st century, until 2020.
The all-time record for admissions goes all the way back to 1946, when a whopping 4.1 billion movie tickets were sold in North American theaters.
Many analysts believed 2025 would be the year to pull the box office out of its COVID rut, but that hasn’t happened. Admissions are currently at 552,317,821 (via The Numbers), which projects the year will end with 781,906,905 tickets sold and a domestic gross of $8.843 billion, both slight upticks from 2024.
While there were upticks in 2022 and 2023, the box office dipped again in 2024, still nowhere near pre-pandemic numbers in both attendance and grosses. It’s possible the lockdown changed viewing habits for good, and there may need to be a serious paradigm shift to bring people back to theaters in a meaningful way.
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
