As CinemaCon Fires Up, Here Are The Biggest Mistakes Studios & Exhibitors Are Making Right Now

Every major motion picture studio, including streamer and theatrical embracer Amazon MGM Studios, will be accounted for at this week’s CinemaCon in Las Vegas, with all making onstage presentations inside the Colosseum at Caesars Palace.

However, it comes at a time when the domestic box office really stinks — and that’s an understatement.

At a current year-to-date gross of $1.44 billion stateside per Comscore, we’re 11% behind last year for the period of January 1-March 31. We’re also roughly $1.4 billion behind the same point in Q1 2018, which had cleared $2.8 billion by now.

The box office will not hit $10 billion this year, a significant disappointment after last year’s industry mantra “Survive till ’25.”

Despite boom times last year with movies like Deadpool & Wolverine, Moana 2 and Wicked, and movies like Barbie in 2023, it’s clear that the pre-pandemic audience hasn’t returned. The question is, will they ever? In a 2024 NRG industry study, moviegoers are going less often: 25% attend the cinema at least every other month, compared with 40% pre-pandemic.

Motion picture studio executives — and the exhibition industry — are stuck in some seriously antiquated ways. A revolution, a detox, a rewiring is in order if the business is going to change the minds of stubborn quadrants who find that the best experience for a movie is to watch it at home.

So, let’s begin CinemaCon 2025 with some ice-cold water in the face. Here are some cardinal sins the studios are exhibitors are committing right now:

You’ve Gotten Clueless When It Comes To Release Dates

How do we go from a holiday heyday of Wicked, Moana 2, Mufasa: The Lion King and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 into an absolute dead zone in 2025? A consistent supply of want-to-see tentpoles is the answer, not a consistent supply of rando titles like Love Hurts, Novocaine, Death of a Unicorn, etc. Why would you fail to program a branded title during the prime time of spring break? Why isn’t Ballerina going in the spring instead of getting potentially slaughtered in the summer? Why would you put two live-action takes of feature toons — Lilo & Stich and How to Train Your Dragon — within three weeks of each other? Why does Jack Quaid, an untested star at the box office, have two movies in Companion and Novocaine opening in Q1? Why did two female-skewing horror films in Death of a Unicorn and Woman in the Yard open this weekend against each other?

As Cher said to Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck when she smacked him in the face — twice: “Snap out of it!”

At the same time, many say that come Memorial Day, the box office will back in shape when Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stich and Paramount’s Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning hit screens. But then there’s too many tentpoles, and a bloodbath for Imax and PLF screens. In a four-week stretch, Mission, Lilo, Karate Kid, Ballerina and Dragon are opening. Forget about getting back to pre-pandemic levels, distribution suits, and focus on getting moviegoing back to a 52-week-a-year schedule.

You’re Killing The Movie Business By Telling People to Stay At Home

It’s feast or famine at the box office: When it’s big, it’s Deadpool & Wolverine ($211.4M domestic opening) and Barbie ($162M). But when it’s not, it’s the marketplace we’re weathering now with single-digit starts. Studio execs shouldn’t peg the current box office recession to merely an off period, or being “out of season.” It’s spring break for cryin’ out loud, with a third of K-12 schools off across a rolling March-to-April frame. While the impact of a movie’s debut on Premium VOD isn’t immediately seen in a title’s weekend box office (Universal has demonstrated this), it’s clear from these openings that a substantial portion of people post-Covid are conditioned to stay at home and wait for a movie. Go back to the NRG stat atop the story: Windows that are 17 days or 30 days aren’t going to cut it if we want to see a bounceback at the B.O. Separately, an internal AMC Theatres study found that 72% of consumers are trained to stay at home if they know a movie is coming out on PVOD soon, versus 28% who’ll come see it in a theater. Cinema United (formerly NATO) boss Michael O’Leary tells Deadline’s Jill Goldsmith this morning that 45 days should be the minimum theatrical window. Couple this misstep by studios with them promoting the presale order of their movies in the home when the pic hits theaters.

You’re Not About Originality, And If You Are … You’re Messing It Up

Yes, auteurs sell movies, i.e., Christopher Nolan with Oppenheimer and Robert Eggers with Nosferatu, and they’ll be the backbone for originality’s survival at the box office. However, Film Business 101 dictates that if you’re making a non-IP original movie, make it cheap. The $100M-plus production cost auteur streak of Warner Bros with Bong Joon Ho bomb Mickey 17 ($43.5M domestic to date), Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (September 26), Ryan Coogler’s period genre movie Sinners (April 18) and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride (March 6, 2026) is concerning. All are worthy on paper and prime for the screen. However, financially, as non-branded IP, their budgets put them in a position of potential dire straits. That’s not good for the fate of originality.

Another problem with studios nowadays: They slash marketing budgets to get to profit, or to get to the next home window. Sometimes the move is based on middling pre-tracking data, but sometimes it is not. An example: Warner Bros, despite the great exits on the Zach Cregger-produced Companion (B+ CinemaScore and a massive 61% definite recommend on PostTrack), didn’t want to commit to a lofty P&A spend (more than $29M global) because it was a thrifty-priced film at $10M. The business notion was to never spend more P&A on a low-budget film. How then to blossom a potential blockbuster? Rival studio executives would kill for those exit scores. Why not invest in a picture that could be a Get Out? Companion was a missed opportunity for a hit-starved studio, finaling at $20.8M stateside and $36.7M global — even if it made a profit.

Another factor with originals: Do the studios even know how to break through and market one? Sure, it’s easy to drop a trailer for a Marvel movie and make a big splash in the ocean with a boulder, but how are indie distributors like Neon with Longlegs ($22.4M opening) and Cineverse with Terrifier 3 ($18.9M) dynamiting their core audiences in ways the majors aren’t? A better grappling and stunting of a fractured linear audience is required.

In the NRG study last year, 68% of those polled agreed with the statement “I want more original movies.” However, audiences haven’t gone to see them. Why? They need assurance that originals are going to be worth their time and money. Franchises and brands promise value and de-risk the theatrical experience. If we don’t have brands in the title, where else can we get brands? Via stars and filmmakers (we’re looking at you, A24, with your Jenna Ortega misfire Death of a Unicorn, which opened to $5.8M this past weekend, a low for an actress who has propelled audiences to Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice and the last two Scream movies). A24 has a wonderful reputation for dividing audiences (Death of a Unicorn received a B-) with edgy fare and propelling it to a great box office multiple. How was this hysterical horror movie starring an ‘It’ girl with 39 million social media followers bested by an old-dude action movie in Jason Statham’s A Working Man ($15.4M) and a Blumhouse horror movie sans stars with simply a black-clad mourning woman in a yard as the main selling point ($9.4M) — there’s a teachable lesson here for all suits in regards to what moviegoers do and don’t want to see right now.

“With all the data that’s out there, they should be making more hits than duds,” says Delaware-Kentucky exhibitor Rick Roman. “You don’t have to spend a lot to have a hit. You just need a story that people want to get lost in.”

Adds a major studio marketing exec: “Do baby boomer motion picture production executives really know what the 18-34 crowd really wants to see? Do they watch TikTok? Do they even visit cinemas on a weekend basis to connect with the audience? That seems to be the biggest disconnect in the business right now.”

One example to that point: 31% of NRG respondents say they prefer horror movies in theaters to comedies at 28%. Yet horror movies dramatically outnumber comedies, particularly this year. In the 13-weekend Q1, there already have been six wide horror entries. Clearly some studio executives aren’t being like Al Capone during Prohibition and responding to the will of the people. One of the biggest sleepers year-to-date is the SZA-Keke Palmer comedy One of Them Days, which opened to $11.8M and did a 4x multiple to $50M at the domestic box office. Another movie hoping to steal comedy away from streaming, which has owned it in the post-Hangover era, is Paramount’s Naked Gun revival from Akiva Schaffer, with Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson starring. It hits theaters August 1.

The Theatrical Experience Isn’t More Stunning Than In-Home

If there’s a will to survive, theatrical moviegoing must evolve, sources tell us. Whether that’s via more ScreenX, more motion seats or 3D sans glasses. Cinema United says there’s been a 37% increase in large-format theaters over the past five years to 950 auditoriums. But we clearly need more. Per a December Cinema United/NATO report, exhibition is expected to see an infusion of $2.2 billion in upgrades. AMC has seen a spike in business in those theaters that have upgraded their seating to plush chairs. In addition, the No. 1 circuit in the world is upping its 450 PLF screen count to around 700 in the near future as James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash is primed to set the business ablaze December 19.

Movie Ticket Prices Are Too Expensive & Not Worth Their Value

In the days of the Jack Valenti-run Motion Picture Association, the slogan always was that movie tickets were the cheapest form of entertainment for a family of four when compared to a baseball game, a concert, etc. But what does it say when people have zero problems shelling out $800-$1,000 for a Lady Gaga concert ticket, and filling an arena? This all goes back to value. People don’t mind paying for a sporting or concert event. Why do they mind spending for a movie? Part of this has to do with the fact that current movie ticket prices — at $16.86 for an average premium-screen seat and $11.98 for standard, according to analytics firm EntTelligence — are around the same price for a monthly streaming service that provides consumers with a plethora of movies to choose from in a posh sound-system big-screen living-room environment. Between 2021-2024, the cost of the average movie ticket grew 9%, while the cost of movie tickets on an annual basis is outpacing that of the rate of inflation (+4% year-to-year vs +2.8% in core CPI).

“Also, have you been to a movie theater lately?” another studio insider sniped. “They’re gross!”

The ticket-price situation is indeed a tightrope for theater owners. If movie theaters are going to propel themselves into a future of more motion seating, ScreenX surround and seat upgrades, all of that comes at a cost that’s passed on to the consumer. The major studios assisted exhibition financially during the big 3D-screen overhaul of the early millennium. Can they possibly toss exhibitors a safety ring in the next evolution of theatrical? Some studios champion dynamic pricing, in which tentpoles cost more ticket-wise than lower-budget movies. However, that’s a hard pill for a filmmaker to swallow and also a ding to the studio in its financial modeling of a motion picture.

What’s the solution? Says AMC boss Adam Aron, “Raise ticket prices during boom times, lower prices during low-traffic times.”