After the most turbulent four-year period ever faced by the movie theater industry, 2025 looks to be the year that exhibitors and studios have long waited for. That’s because they will finally get a sense of what the new box office normal looks like, after COVID-19 shut down theaters for a year and changed moviegoing habits for good.
“Everything we see in the years to come will be compared to 2025, not to 2022 or to 2019,” one studio executive told TheWrap.“This is going to be the new benchmark.”
The struggles of rebuilding after the pandemic, with audiences slowly returning in 2021 and studios navigating production backlogs in 2022, tainted the long-term data about moviegoing habits, even as films like “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” proved that Hollywood could produce a global hit as huge as they did before 2020.