Yesterday (Sunday) I was supposed to fly from Stockholm to Haugesund, where this morning I gave a talk about young people and cinema at the kinoseminar at Den Norske Filmfestivalen, at the kind invitation of Espen L. Pedersen and Film & Kino.

Then Norway’s air traffic controllers went on strike, Oslo, Gardermoen began shutting itself down for hours at a time, and my flight quietly ceased to exist other than a “we apologize” SMS from SAS.

The only alternative was six hours by train from Stockholm to Oslo, starting 07:33am, followed by eight hours on the Haukeliekspressen coach from Oslo to Haugesund. I finally got there after 10am (22:15). It is the longest East-West journey possible on the Scandinavian mainland. So fifteen hours all in, for a trip that SAS normally manages in rather less than two. (Coach operator NOR-WAY, to their credit, put on extra departures precisely because of the strike, which is more than the strike’s originators did.) I could have flown to Singapore, changing planes in Dubai, in the same amount of time. (Just saying.)

If this were a LinkedIn article, we would now arrive at the lessons.

I would tell you about the value of slowing down, and how the best strategic thinking happens when you are forced away from your desk. I would reflect, gravely, on the carbon footprint of all this flying back and forth, and wonder whether the strike had in fact been a gift. I would describe the young person I met on the train who told me something unexpectedly moving about why she still goes to the cinema, and I would extract from that a Broader Truth About Our Industry. (Insert another inspiring train/coach-originating anecdote here. Go on, I’ll wait, I had time. Lots of it.)

None of that happened.

What happened is that I had a cinnamon bun and a latte. I stared out of the window. I stretched my legs out in a comfortable seat when other passengers got off. The wi-fi was good enough to do email, so I did email. Somewhere around Telemark I did think about my Stockholm meeting with Rickard, my business partner at Cultpix and Klubb Super 8, and noted (with some satisfaction) that we have not only kept a global cult film streaming service running for five years but for the last year have been putting out an average of two Blu-rays a month, a number we will probably double next year. That is not an insight. That is arithmetic, and pleasant arithmetic at that.

I tried to read a book. The scenery through Telemark was too spectacular for reading, which is the closest this journey came to a moral.

I did listen to an interview with Martin Bech Holte, whose bestseller Landet som ble for rikt (The Country That Got Too Rich) argues that Norway has grown comfortable, complacent and rather too pleased with itself on the proceeds of the oil fund. Sitting on a coach across the Haukeli mountains because twelve air traffic controllers had downed tools to get longer coffee breaks, I found I could not possibly comment.

I arrived in Haugesund too late to have a formal meeting with anyone or do any of the socialising that is, let us be honest, at least half the point of a festival, other than to pop briefly into Il Forno where the opening party was winding down. But I got to the hotel and I slept OK. And it beat the alternative, which was getting up for a 06:30 departure from Stockholm, Arlanda that, thanks to the strike, would still have deposited me in Haugesund well after the 09:00 start of the seminar at which I was speaking.

So the conclusion, such as it is, is not mine. It belongs to somebody more intelligent than me, who once said that everything in life is either a good experience or a good story.

This one, I hope, is both.

Patrick von Sychowski was speaking at the kinoseminar at Den Norske Filmfestivalen in Haugesund on Monday 24 August, on how to get young people into cinemas. He got there.

Sony Picture/Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened to $360 million in the United States and Canada, the largest Domestic (i.e. US and Canada) opening weekend ever recorded, from 4,487 sites. It did so without a single IMAX screen in North America, because Universal had bought a three-week exclusive for The Odyssey covering the entire domestic network.

That was Monday’s story, and so far, so extensively already reported.

Here is the number that didn’t make the headlines: premium large format (PLF) screens took 24% of the weekend, with 3D taking 17% in total.

Six weeks earlier, at CineEurope in Barcelona, Disney was making the case for its new Infinity Vision certification/branding with the industry’s working assumption attached: PLFs can account for some 40% of a tentpole film’s opening weekend in North America, the reference point being Toy Story 5, which took close to $64 million of its $159.6 million opening on premium screens.

So the biggest opening in the history of the business ran a premium mix roughly sixteen points below the norm. The IMAX-shaped hole was not filled by the other formats, but instead drained downwards, into 3D and into standard auditoriums.

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Every premium format set a record, yet premium share still fell

This is the part that looks contradictory until you count the auditoriums.

Dolby Cinema had its biggest domestic weekend ever at $11 million-plus, with a record per-screen average of $63,000, and something more telling than either: nearly two-thirds of all tickets across its 177 domestic auditoriums were sold before Thursday previews began. ScreenX, which Spider-Man: Brand New Day was “shot for”, took a Domestic record $7 million, more than double the $2.7 million set by The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. 4DX meanwhile took $5.2 million. Worldwide, CJ 4DPLEX’s two formats combined for a record $31 million from 1,111 screens, and Dolby, 4DX, ScreenX and D-BOX all set all-time global marks, which would seem to be cause for celebration.

Add the three branded domestic figures together and you get roughly $23 million, which is 6.4% of the weekend. Everything else inside that 24% came from the own-brand chain-operated formats: XD, RPX, Prime, iSense and the rest of the alphabet.

A format that sells out cannot grow, at least not instantly. Dolby’s 177 auditoriums were substantially gone before the film opened, so the record it set was not a share gain, it was its admissions ceiling made visible. The own-brand chain PLFs have far more auditoriums but neither the per-seat premium nor the pull that makes a customer drive past a nearer cinema, let alone get on a flight, to see a ancient Greek poem’s celluloid adaptation in a specific format.

It is worth adding that Spider-Man was not being squeezed for the non-IMAX screens. The Odyssey ceded the own-branded PLFs when it kept the IMAX network, and by midweek Brand New Day held nearly half of all weekend showtimes in the United States. It had the estate, but it still couldn’t get past 24%.

The money did not vanish. Sixteen points of a $360 million weekend is around $58 million of gross that arrived anyway, at a lower yield per admission. Nobody lost a ticket sale. What was lost was the upcharge on several million of them, which is the whole economic argument for premium capacity in the first place. Remember, North America is still only about 80% of the pre-pandemic three-year average when it comes to box office, but lower than that on admissions. Upcharges is what bridges that gap.

The 3D figure deserves its own paragraph, and I will come back to it in a later piece. Seventeen per cent on a 2026 tentpole is not a rounding error and not what anyone was forecasting three years ago, when 3D for cinema was routinely written off as dead when there wasn’t a film set on Pandora.

What saying no cost IMAX, and what it did not

IMAX held the line for Nolan and it was not an act of charity. The Odyssey took $22.1 million on IMAX screens in its third weekend, 43% of that film’s $51 million, for a domestic IMAX cume of $121 million and third place on the format’s all-time domestic list. Meanwhile, in the three Asian markets where The Odyssey had not yet opened, Brand New Day took $23 million on IMAX screens, $19 million of it in China alone.

Then, on 6 August, Brand New Day begins sharing the digital network in North America while The Odyssey retains all 41 of the 70mm film locations.

Three weeks became three weekends. Which is not a humiliation, but rather a commercial adjustment, and IMAX made it from a position of some strength. However, it does establish something useful for every exhibitor and distributor watching the December fixture: the IMAX exclusive is a contract, not a fortress, and its edges move when the number on the other side gets large enough.

Doomsday will be a harder test than this one, not an easier one

The comforting read-across from this weekend is that Avengers: Doomsday will be fine without IMAX, because Spider-Man was, and because Barbie was before that. Neither precedent survives contact with the December 2026 calendar.

Take Barbenheimer first, since it is the one often being invoked. In July 2023 Nolan’s Oppenheimer held IMAX on a three-week exclusive and, per Deadline’s reporting at the time, showtimes on more than 80% of all PLFs; IMAX and premium formats together drove 47% of its opening gross, IMAX alone 26%, at a $70,000 per-screen average. Barbie was left with standard screens and opened to $162 million on its way to $1.4 billion. Everyone remembers that as proof that a tentpole does not need premium screens. What it actually proved is narrower: a comedy with a four-quadrant audience that was never likely to pay the upcharge does not need premium screens. The film that year which did get hurt was Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, which had taken 42% of its own opening on PLF and IMAX, lost those screens to Nolan in week two, and fell 54% and then 64%. Tom Cruise is even alleged to have called CEO of big cinema chain to request to keep the big screens, but to no avail. Nolan previaled.

There was a second lesson, and the trade press drew it correctly at the time before the industry filed it away: the demand for PLF and IMAX was outweighing the supply. That was August 2023. Three years on, the diagnosis has not changed and the number of premium auditoriums has not moved anything like enough to answer it.

Now to this coming December. Brand New Day was locked out by a holdover. The Odyssey was in its third frame, had already ceded the non-IMAX premium screens, and left the entire rest of the estate to Sony. Doomsday opens on 18 December against Dune: Part Three, which has roughly 400 North American IMAX screens on a three-week exclusive, day-and-date. That means Villeneuve’s film will not only hold the IMAX network. It will also be competing for the Dolby auditoriums, the XDs and the RPXs that Brand New Day had to itself. The substitution capacity that proved insufficient in August gets divided up in December.

There is an audience point too. Spider-man: Brand New Day was as four-quadrant as the business gets (everybody loves Spidey), with a large family component that does not seek out premium presentation and does not pay for it. Doomsday’s core is precisely the demographic that buys the upcharge. The film that most needs premium capacity is the one scheduled into the weekend where there is least of it.

Everyone is asking whether Infinity Vision still matters. That is the wrong question.

The question doing the rounds since Monday is whether Disney’s new certification has been made redundant by a film that broke the record without any premium branding help at all. The Spider-Man weekend answers a different and more awkward question. It shows that when premium capacity is withdrawn, it is not replaced. The constraint is not consumer confusion about which badge means what and whether they will be well served by a THX 2.0. The constraint is the number of qualifying auditoriums, and it binds hard.

Which makes Infinity Vision more necessary than its critics allow and less capable than its supporters hope, for the same reason.

It is a certification. It certifies auditoriums that already exist. At launch in April, Disney counted 75 domestic and 300 global exhibitor PLFs; by CineEurope it had more than 7,500 applications from screens seeking approval. Applications are not the same as capacity. Certifying a Cinemark XD does not add a single seat to it, does not raise its lumens by one foot-lambert and does not shorten the queue on 18 December. What it does is put a Disney-approved sticker on an auditorium that was already going to sell out.

And there is a structural asymmetry that the enthusiasm at CineEurope effectively skated past. What makes IMAX worth a fight is that IMAX can say ‘no’. Scarcity is the product; in the case of The Odyssey even more so with those 41 global IMAX 70mm screens. Infinity Vision is designed to be granted to everyone who qualifies (based on my understanding), which means it can never be withheld from anyone, which means there is nothing to negotiate over and no premium to defend. A badge available to up to 7,500 screens is a marketing convenience; it is not leverage, and it’s definitely not a moat.

Then there is the part that troubles me most, and I say this wearing the EDCF Vice-President hat rather than the Substack columnist’s.

At CinemaCon in April the pitch was consumer clarity, which is a real problem and one this industry has failed to solve for fifteen years. By CineEurope in June the pitch was momentum, expressed as an application count. What has not appeared in either room is a published specification. We are told the requirements involve large screens, laser projection and premium immersive audio. But those are adjectives, rather than thresholds. No foot-lamberts, no minimum screen dimension relative to throw, no audio channel count, no measurement method, no named test facility, no appeals process.

Compare the obvious precedent. DCI was Hollywood studio-led too, and exhibition accepted it, but DCI was seven studios acting jointly, it published a specification any manufacturer or operator could read, design and invest against, and compliance testing sat with independent laboratories rather than with the studios themselves. Infinity Vision is one studio, certifying its customers’ auditoriums, against criteria it has not published, in a programme whose first two titles are Avengers: Endgame Encore on 25 September and Doomsday in December.

That is not a standard, or even a specification, as much as it’s procurement with a shiny logo on it.

Who this actually lands on

Dolby. Its position is now proven and its constraint is now public. A $63,000 per-screen average across 177 auditoriums is a company being told, in numbers, to build more.

CJ 4DPLEX. Shooting for the format (as Sony did with Spider-man) rather than certifying for it was the smartest premium move of the summer (OK, second smartest, after the IMAX 70mm marketing carpetbombing), and the $7 million domestic ScreenX record is the receipt.

The chains with their own PLF brands. Cinemark, Regal Cineworld, Vue, Cinépolis and TOHO have all publicly welcomed the Infinity Vision programme. The trade is worth pricing: you get Disney’s marketing weight attached to your auditorium, and in exchange the brand equity you have spent a decade and considerable capex building becomes a sub-line under someone else’s badge. If a second studio launches a rival certification, an operator carrying three of them on one screen effectively carries none. (ParaMax, anyone? Warner Vision takers?)

Whoever pays for compliance. Nobody has said. Certification against unpublished requirements is an open-ended capex request, and it is landing on operators in a year when the money is also meant to be going into seats, service and software (AI), which fall outside presentation specs.

IMAX. Doing just fine, on this evidence. It gave up a record opening weekend, took $22.1 million on a third frame anyway, and still holds the only premium asset in the business that a studio will restructure a release around.

A non-Domestic postscript

Vue and Cinépolis have backed the programme publicly, as has TOHO in Japan, which tells you the certification’s reach was never meant to stop at the American estate. In these parts of the world, a technical certification affecting thousands of auditoriums would normally pass through a trade body (CST in France, for example) or a technical forum before it passed through a studio’s marketing department. This one has gone the other way round, and nobody in Barcelona seemed inclined to say so, at least not out loud.

So the questions worth putting to Disney’s theatrical team between now and 25 September are dull and practical. Who measures the screen in Lyon or Leeds, and to what published threshold? What is the remedy if an operator fails? Who bears the cost of re-testing? And what happens to a certified auditorium if the programme is quietly retired in 2029, once whatever December problem it was invented to solve has passed?

The badge on the door will carry the studio’s name. The lease will still be yours.

Saint-Paul-de-Vence has a population of 3,203. On Monday 7 September it will host the President of the French Republic, the President of the Republic of Korea, and 150 people who between them decide a great deal about what the world watches.

The venue is the Fondation Maeght, a private modern art foundation with a Giacometti courtyard, which is a considerable distance in every sense from the Palais des Festivals in Cannes forty minutes down the coast. There is no red carpet. There is no market. There is no trade floor. There is no delegate body or film jury. There is just one day to tackle big issues.

The Élysée communiqué, published on 22 July and so far unremarked in the English-language trade press, calls the Lumière Summit the first international summit devoted to the future of cinema and the moving image. It expects guests from more than thirty countries across five continents, drawn from film, audiovisual and video games, alongside political figures and talent. They will, it says, commit to concrete actions.

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The last time anyone convened the world’s film industry on French soil with that ambition was the autumn of 1926, i.e. exactly a century earlier in a neat coincidence.

What is actually on the record

I should first declare a proximity. On 17 May I moderated a roundtable on the CNC’s beach at Cannes, following the presentation of Les salles de cinéma : quelles tendances à l’international ?, the detailed and terrific study on global cinema trends that the CNC commissioned from Cine Group, Hexacom and Omdia across fourteen markets. It was a wide-ranging and vigorous discussion with a broad panel of industry executives. CNC’s head Gaëtan Bruel (pictured above) took the podium immediately afterwards to present the Lumière Summit. I have spoken to enough people at the CNC since to be confident that the ambition here is not decorative, and correspondingly I am limited in what I can usefully add to the public record. Everything below is thus drawn from what has already been published about the event.

Which turns out to be a fair amount. To recap, Gaëtan Bruel unveiled the Summit at Cannes on 17 May, to be co-chaired by President Emmanuel Macron and Korean President Lee Jae-myung, in partnership with the Korean Film Council. Last Thursday the Élysée and the CNC filled in the details of the event at a Paris press briefing, as reported by Boxoffice Pro: one day, four working axes, covering creation under technological disruption, financing and the sharing of value, audiences and distribution, and building the industry of the future. Around fifteen culture ministers set to attend. Studio heads (Hollywood and others), streaming platform heads, festival directors, and the wider cultural and creative industries. CNC secretary general Vincent Florant put it in the terms that matter, describing the leaders of a set of countries representing 80% of the global box office. Let that sink in.

Everyone reaching for Davos has the right instinct and the wrong institution. Davos (the World Economic Forum, to give it its proper name) is a membership organisation with a paying delegate body and a week’s worth of event programming. The Munich Security Conference is structurally closer, being a short event of closed rooms and a text. But the real lineage is more historic than either, and considerably more instructive. Let’s go down a history rabbit hole.

What happened the last time

From 27 September to 3 October 1926, the Congrès international du cinématographe met in Paris, in the salons of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, a body of the League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations). Governments sent delegations. So did producers, distributors, critics, teachers and authors. The British contingent included the vice-president of the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association (today’s UK Cinema Association).

Note what was being convened. In 1926, cinema was not one screen medium among several. It was the whole of audiovisual culture. Radio was in its infancy, television was a laboratory curiosity, and the medium beaming (streaming?) from the projection booth was the only one there was. Cinema was 30 years old. It was the ‘Roaring 20s’, and Clara Bow is the original “It Girl” and cultural influencer. Whoever set the rules of film back then was setting the rules for moving images, full stop.

The congress duly resolved to establish a provisional international commission, charged with building an “international organisation of cinema”. France assumed it would house the thing. So did Germany. So did Switzerland.

It went to Rome. Italy took the proposal to the League Assembly in September 1927, and Mussolini, who had Istituto Luce and an appetite for exactly this sort of prestige, saw the double advantage: visible commitment to the internationalist project, and Italian primacy in educational cinema. The International Educational Cinematographic Institute opened in Rome and did not last long. The cinema League went the way of the League of Nations.

Two things are worth carrying forward. The first is that the object of the exercise was never the meeting. It was the institution the meeting created, and that went to whichever government wanted it most and had a use for it. The second is that a century later, the agenda has grown from one medium to four, and cinema is now the smallest of them in terms of revenue, though not in the attention and ability to capture the minds of both the public and politicians.

The format has a scoreboard

The useful precedent, though, is not a hundred years old. It is eighteen months.

In November 2023 the United Kingdom convened the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park and produced a declaration with 29 signatories. Korea hosted the second in Seoul in May 2024, which managed 11. France took the third in February 2025, co-chaired with India, renamed it the AI Action Summit, shifted the frame from safety to adoption, and secured 61 countries and regional blocs. India hosted the fourth in New Delhi in February 2026, renamed it again as the AI Impact Summit, and closed with 88 signatories, then 89.

Three things fall out of that sequence, and all three bear on September.

The first is that neither host is improvising. Korea has run one of these. France has run one of these, with a non-Western co-chair, which is precisely the architecture of the Lumière Summit. This is a format both governments have already operated, so this is not an experiment.

The second is that the framing determines the arithmetic. Paris in 2025 led AI discussions on governance and lost Washington and London: the United States and the United Kingdom both declined to sign, with JD Vance telling the room that over-regulation could kill a transformative industry as it was taking off. Delhi in 2026 moved the frame from harm to benefit and brought the United States and China into the same document. Same format, twelve months apart, twenty-seven more signatures, entirely on the strength of what the text was about. Words matter.

The third is the one to hold on to. The most consequential product of the Bletchley AI meeting was Seoul. The most consequential product of Seoul was Paris. Summits of this kind are not events. They are the first meeting of a series, and they are to some degree measured by whether a second one happens.

The Élysée communiqué on Lumière is written in the Delhi register rather than the Paris one. Alliances, opportunities, attractiveness, concrete commitments, with the sharper regulatory language conspicuously absent. Somebody has taken notes on what the AI summits achieved and how it was done. (NB: This is my interpretation, not something that the CNC has ever said to me.)

The guest list is the least interesting thing here - for now

The names have not been published. When they are, the trades and even mainstream media will run the guest list, and the guest list will be the story for several days. Who is on it? Who is not? Was someone ‘snubbed’ or maybe they declined?

That is the wrong thing to watch, and not because the names are dull. Quite the opposite. It is the wrong thing to watch because the scale is already legible without the actual names, and the scale is the whole point.

Consider what is being attempted. A state is convening an industry. Not a trade association convening its members, not a festival convening its market, not a studio convening its partners, but two governments summoning the people who run global film, television, animation and games into a single room for a day, at head-of-state level, with a text at the end of it. This business has never had that. It has had Cannes, Berlin and the AFM, which are markets. It has had CinemaCon and CineEurope, which are conventions. It has had UNESCO's 2005 Convention on cultural diversity, which is a treaty about culture in general and which almost nobody in this industry could quote a line of. (Go on, I’m waiting.) It has never had a summit in the diplomatic sense, where two presidencies spend their own political capital on a moving-image declaration and concrete action.

The type of guest is the validation, and that much is public: culture ministers, the heads of American majors, the principal platforms, the major festivals, plus games and immersive. You do not need the names to read the calibre. An invitation of that shape is either accepted at that level or the entire thing degrades into a photo opportunity, and the fact that it has been scheduled, co-chaired and communiquéd by two presidencies tells you which way the invitation acceptances have gone. Hint!

Korea is the other half of that reading, and it is a design decision rather than a courtesy. A France-only summit on the future of the moving image invites the obvious and lazy characterisation. A France-and-Korea summit does not, because Korea is the standing proof that global soft power in this medium is no longer a two-horse race, and because KOFIC is an instrument rather than a gesture. The 140th anniversary of Franco-Korean relations supplies the diplomatic hook. The market data supplies the rest.

Which leaves one genuinely open question, and I am not going to pretend to know the answer to it. Bruel’s diagnosis includes what he describes as a crisis of American leadership in the sector, arising less from politics than from Hollywood’s structural difficulties. That is a defensible reading of the evidence. It is also, heard from an American chair, capable of sounding like something else, particularly with a proposed 100% tariff on films produced outside the United States still floating about and Bruel on the record observing that European cinema accounts for 1% of admissions in the United States while American cinema accounts for 60% of admissions in Europe. Whether the American majors and the American administration put their names to whatever is drafted at Saint-Paul-de-Vence is the most consequential unknown of the day. Paris 2025 suggests one answer. Delhi 2026 suggests the opposite. I know which way I think (hope!) it goes, but there are no certainties until 7 September, which makes it all the more important to pay attention to the Summit.

Who this lands on

The MPA and the Hollywood majors, who have never before had to respond to a multilateral text about their own business, and who will have to decide between signing, abstaining and staying away, in public, at presidential level.

The streamers, invited as principals rather than as disruptors or part of the problem, which is a change of status worth noticing.

National film bodies outside the room. Eighty per cent of the world box office is a great deal of box office. It is also not all of it, and the other twenty per cent will hopefully not read the declaration as a document written about them rather than with them.

UNESCO, which has held the multilateral cultural-diversity file since 2005 and now finds a faster, smaller and considerably better-connected vehicle operating in its lane.

And whoever ends up holding the secretariat, if one is created, or the next summit location, if another is held. Which brings us back to where this began.

Coda

The 1926 congress produced a resolution, a provisional commission and an institution. France convened it. Rome got it, because Italy wanted it more and had somewhere to put it. France has twice before convened the moving image industry (before 1926 there was also 1909, but that’s too much history for a supposedly forward-looking article), and twice the decision that mattered was taken somewhere other than the hall where those meetings took place.

I do not think that is the risk this time, and the co-chairing arrangement with Seoul looks deliberately built to distribute the ownership rather than concentrate it. But the underlying rule has not moved in a hundred years. The day is not the prize, though it will be a major achievement. The prize is whatever the day leaves behind, and who volunteers to look after it, to follow it and to take it further.

Anticipate the guest list. Watch for the declaration. Count the signatures. Then wait and see who offers to host the second one. All eyes on Saint-Paul-de-Vence in September. Call it ‘the Davos of the moving image’ if it gets the point across about the significance of the Lumière Summit.

There are exactly two things in the United States that Congress has struck from the legal definition of a ‘commodity’.

The first is onions. In 1955 two traders, Vincent Kosuga and Sam Siegel, cornered roughly 98% of the onions in Chicago, squeezed the growers, then flooded the market and bankrupted a good number of them. Not very nice. Congress responded with the Onion Futures Act, sponsored by a young Michigan congressman named Gerald Ford and signed by Eisenhower in 1958. The president of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, watching a fifth of his trading volume disappear, described it as burning the barn down to catch a rat. The ban still stands - cry if you will as you chop them.

The second thing is the money your local cinema takes on a Friday night.

Both prohibitions live in the same short piece of statute, 7 U.S.C. § 13-1, because in 2010 Hollywood asked to be added to the onion law. That is not a metaphor. Motion picture box office receipts were written into the Onion Futures Act as an amendment, at the industry’s own request, and they have sat there ever since alongside the root vegetable.

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I have been writing about this business for over twenty-five years and even I had forgotten it - until I started researching this piece. Which is awkward, because as of this summer the BO markets are back, they are trading in dollars, and nobody in exhibition seems to have noticed.

The market that lasted two days

The idea was never that exotic. The Hollywood Stock Exchange had been running since 1996 as a play-money game in which users traded “MovieStocks” priced against a film’s first four weeks of wide release. Cantor Fitzgerald bought it in 2001, correctly identifying that a crowd of obsessives generating free forecasting data might be worth something to the people who make the films.

By the late 2000s, with independent financing evaporating in the credit crisis, Cantor and a rival called the Trend Exchange proposed the logical next step: real-money contracts on domestic box office receipts, so that a distributor could hedge a slate, the same way an airline hedges fuel. The CFTC approved both, finding by a three-to-two vote that box office receipts met the statutory definition of a commodity, that the contracts were not readily susceptible to manipulation, and that they offered a genuine means of managing risk.

The industry’s response was immediate and, in lobbying terms, magnificent. The MPAA, the major studios and (importantly for readers of this Substack) the National Association of Theatre Owners (now Cinemas United) all opposed it, arguing the contracts were open to insider trading and that a rival studio could quietly short your film. Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas inserted a provision into Dodd-Frank excluding from the definition of a commodity “motion picture box office receipts, or any index, measure, value or data related to such receipts.”

The House passed it two days after Cantor’s approval came through. The amendment was made retroactive by thirty days, voiding the approvals. Years of work and millions of dollars produced a market with a lifespan of forty-eight hours. Barney Frank, one half of the act’s name, later admitted he had forgotten the provision was in there at all.

Two details are worth holding on to. The first is that Congress did not ban prediction markets, or event contracts, or even entertainment wagering. It banned one underlying asset. The second is that the stated objection (manipulation) sat rather awkwardly next to the unstated one, which was that studios did not want an external, public, real-time price on a film before they had finished telling everyone how it was going to do.

The ban that didn’t hold

Now open Polymarket.

As I write, there are live, dollar-denominated markets on the domestic second weekend of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, with roughly $1.4 million traded on the main market on its opening weekend and a second book on the higher strikes. There have been comparable markets this year on Scary Movie, on Nate Bargatze’s The Breadwinner, on Minions & Monsters, and a running market on the highest-grossing film of 2026. Kalshi has approached it from a different angle, launching Rotten Tomatoes score markets in March 2025 that resolve on the Monday after wide release and have become among the most heavily traded on the platform.

Read the statutory language again. “Any index, measure, value or data related to such receipts.” It is difficult to construct a reading in which a contract resolving on a film’s domestic opening weekend gross is not a contract on box office receipts.

I am not a lawyer and I am not going to pretend the position is settled. Polymarket now operates in the US through a CFTC-designated entity acquired for the purpose, the venues are structured as event contracts rather than futures, and there is a long-standing argument that instruments sold only to sophisticated counterparties sit outside the Commission’s remit entirely. But the plain fact is that the thing Hollywood spent a fortune extinguishing in 2010 is now trading in six-figure and seven-figure volumes, and neither the studios nor the exhibitor trade bodies have said a word. Why?

Partly that is because everyone is distracted. Prediction markets are currently fighting for their lives on a different front: Minnesota has criminalised operating one, a New York federal judge has ruled that state gambling law is not preempted by the Commodity Exchange Act, Massachusetts and Nevada have issued injunctions, and the circuit split is heading towards the Supreme Court. Against a fight over sports contracts worth $31 billion in a single month, a market on the second weekend of a Wayans brothers revival is a rounding error.

But it is our rounding error, and it is worth asking what it is actually good for.

Are the crowds better than the trackers?

Short answer: no, and I think the evidence is clearer than the prediction market enthusiasts would like.

The seductive claim is that a market aggregates dispersed private information into a single price, so it ought to beat any individual forecaster. The problem with applying that to box office is that the dispersed private information mostly doesn’t exist. There is no crowd of onion farmers here, each holding a piece of the truth. There is one distributor who knows the tracking, a handful of circuit that knows their pre-sales at scale, and several thousand traders who know what they read on a forum.

You can see this in the markets themselves, which is the part I find genuinely funny. Polymarket’s own market pages describe positions forming around tracking published by BoxOffice Pro and BoxOffice Theory. The market is not discovering a price. It is reading Comscore’s (now Rentrak’s) homework and marking it up.

The academic record supports the same conclusion. HSX has an excellent reputation for accuracy, but when researchers at HP Labs tested a crude model built only on the rate of tweets about a film, it beat HSX on opening weekend, 97.3% against 96.5%. If a Twitter/X firehose with no financial incentive attached can outperform the gold-standard prediction market, the market’s edge is not information aggregation. It is that both are downstream of the same publicly visible buzz.

Worse, the biases run in the wrong direction for our purposes. Comparative work on market and non-market forecasting found that both mechanisms over-predict small films and under-predict large ones. That is precisely backwards. Nobody in exhibition needs help forecasting the middle of the distribution; the tracking does that adequately and has done for decades. What costs the industry money is the tail: the Barbenheimer, the Minecraft Movie, the Sinners, the title that triples its tracking and finds every circuit short of screens and staff on the Saturday. Markets are no better at those than the professionals, for the simple reason that the information that would have predicted them did not exist in advance.

And then there is liquidity. Roughly 87% of Kalshi’s trailing volume comes from sports contracts. Individual film markets trade in the tens or low hundreds of thousands. A market that thin is noise with a decimal point, and every film is a sample of one: no repeat fixtures, no back-tested base rates, a new product with a new cast in a new competitive frame every fortnight.

The trackers win. Not because they are brilliant, so much as because the market is drinking from the same well and paying a transaction cost for the privilege.

Manipulation: three arguments, one of which is serious

The 2010 objections deserve to be separated, because they are not of equal weight.

Insider trading is the one everyone reaches for first and it is the most tractable. Studios see their tracking; circuits see pre-sales by hour and screen. This is a genuine asymmetry, but it is the ordinary condition of every commodity market ever built, and there is now enforcement machinery: in April 2026 the CFTC brought its first insider trading complaint concerning event contracts, and Kalshi disciplined political candidates trading their own races. Solvable, in principle, with position limits and disclosure.

Cornering is the cheapest attack and the least discussed. You do not need a Kosuga-scale war chest to move a market with $60,000 of open interest. Shifting the implied opening weekend of a competitor’s film costs less than a single trailer placement. In 2010 this was hypothetical, but at current volumes it is trivially affordable. Worrying.

Reflexivity is the argument that actually matters, and it is the one unique to this asset class. A weather market does not change the weather. An election market has at least a plausible claim to neutrality. But a visible market price on a film’s opening weekend becomes a story, the story becomes the coverage, the coverage becomes the audience’s prior, and the audience’s prior becomes the gross. We already live with a mild version of this: the Wednesday tracking leak that hardens into a narrative of “underperformance” before a single ticket has been torn. A public, continuously updating flop price industrialises that process.

Hollywood’s 2010 objection was self-interested and it was also, I think, correct. That is an uncomfortable combination and worth saying plainly.

Everyone is asking the wrong question

Here is where I think the debate has been mis-framed for sixteen years, including by the people who tried to build these exchanges.

Per-title markets are the wrong product. They duplicate tracking, they are thin, they are reflexive, and their principal beneficiary is a trader in Ohio with a view on Nolan. They offer exhibition nothing it does not already buy.

The unmet need is not the film; it is the box office year as a whole.

Consider the risk an exhibitor actually carries. A circuit signs twenty-year leases, commits capital to recliners and laser projection and premium formats, and staffs to a forecast, all against a variable it does not control and cannot hedge: total admissions. An airline can hedge fuel. A baker can hedge wheat. A cinema operator facing a strike-delayed slate, a soft fourth quarter, or a summer where three tentpoles move at once has precisely no instrument available. None. The exposure is total and it is uninsurable.

A liquid contract on aggregate territory admissions or gross for a forward twelve months would be genuinely new. It would be useful for staffing and capex phasing. It would give lenders a market-implied view for covenant setting rather than a management projection. It would let a mid-size independent take the other side of a bad year rather than simply absorbing it. And it would be far harder to manipulate or to make reflexive than a single-title market, because no individual actor’s marketing spend or narrative moves a national annual total, and because the resolution source (Rentrak, Gower Street Analytics, Omdia, the national trade bodies) is already published and audited.

That contract does not exist anywhere in the world. It is also, awkwardly, exactly what the 2010 statute prohibits in the United States, since an index of aggregate box office receipts is about as squarely inside “any index, measure, value or data related to such receipts” as it is possible to get. The industry lobbied away the one version of this that would have helped it, in order to kill the version that wouldn’t.

What would actually get disrupted

Assume the aggregate market gets built. The casualties are more interesting than the obvious ones.

Tracking as a paid product. NRG and Rentrak (formerly Comscore) sell forecasts to a small number of buyers at prices that reflect scarcity. A public price is a levelling instrument, and its main beneficiaries are the people currently priced out: independents, smaller territories, single-site operators who today book on instinct because the data costs more than the screen earns.

The Wednesday scoop. A substantial part of the trade press economy is the privileged early number. That has considerably less value when a public price has already moved.

Opening weekend spin. Studio estimates on a Sunday morning are a managed communication. They are harder to manage against a market that has been pricing the answer since Thursday previews.

Film finance. Gap lenders, slate insurers and completion guarantors currently price off comparables and judgement. A forward curve on aggregate admissions changes the cost of capital for the whole sector, and probably not in the direction the optimists assume.

The exhibitor-distributor conversation. This is the one I would watch. Film rental terms are negotiated in a fog that suits whoever has better information, which is usually not the exhibitor. A public forward price is not a magic equaliser, but it does make some positions considerably harder to argue with a straight face.

A European coda

One last thing, and it is the reason I think this is worth the attention of readers on this side of the Atlantic.

The ban is American. Section 13-1 binds US exchanges. Nothing in EU or European countries laws removes box office receipts from the universe of tradeable underlyings, and the Trend Exchange said as much in 2010 when it threatened to list the contracts offshore, before losing interest.

Europe has the exchange infrastructure, it has an established culture of event markets, and through the national trade bodies and the pan-European statistical apparatus it has audited, published admissions data that would function perfectly well as a resolution source. If an aggregate European admissions contract is going to exist anywhere, it will not be listed in New York but in Amsterdam, Paris or Frankfurt, if not London.

Whether anyone in this industry actually wants it is a separate question, and the historical evidence is not encouraging. The last time somebody offered exhibition a mechanism for pricing its own risk, exhibition helped bury it inside a law about onions. Onions!

“Ukrainian cinemas are not dead. But now they have to sell not a film, but an experience.” That was the headline on a recent analysis by the Ukrainian retail trade site Retailers.ua, and it deserves quoting in full. Every exhibitor in the West will nod along with the second sentence; the experience economy is the industry’s favourite talking point from CinemaCon to CineEurope. It is the first sentence that ought to give us pause. Because in Ukraine, “not dead” is not a figure of speech. It is a business achievement, won nightly, in a country under constant missile and drone attack.

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More money, less joy

On paper, 2025 looked like a recovery year for Ukrainian exhibition. Revenues rose roughly 20% year on year to around UAH 4.1 billion (about USD $100 million), according to YouControl data reported by AIN, with companies linked to market leader Multiplex and to Planeta Kino accounting for the lion’s share between them.

Look closer and the picture is less cheerful. As the Retailers.ua analysis notes, admissions are not up; prices are. Tickets cost more, popcorn and bar spend costs more, and a growing share of capacity has shifted into premium formats (IMAX, ScreenX, VIP halls) that carry a higher ticket. There are not more people in Ukrainian cinemas; the people who come are simply paying more. Meanwhile the closures continue. Liniya Kino shut its Ivano-Frankivsk cinema last year and this spring announced the closure of its only Kyiv site, in the Magelan shopping mall, after more than twenty years of operation, citing economics, changed footfall and the cost of maintaining the venue (it also, not coincidentally, faced a newer, stronger Multiplex just down the road at Respublika Park).

Yevgenia Loktionova of the retail consultancy UTG identifies three drivers behind the closures, and they will sound familiar to anyone who follows European exhibition: expiring leases that operators decline to renew on unprofitable terms; ageing sites that have gone 15 to 20 years without meaningful modernisation and cannot compete with the latest multiplexes; and, most fundamentally, the rationalisation of household spending. A Deloitte Ukraine survey found that 56% of Ukrainians now say they save money on out-of-home entertainment. The spontaneous cinema visit (bored, it’s a day off, let’s see what’s on) has been replaced by a deliberate calculation: do I really need this?

So far, so recognisable. Lapsed audiences, premiumisation masking flat admissions, streaming eating the casual visit, piracy that refuses to die: this is the standard diagnosis from Los Angeles to Leicester Square. What makes Ukraine different is everything layered on top.

Programming around the air raid siren

Consider what “showtime scheduling” means when air alerts have an uncanny habit of arriving just as the evening screenings begin. For much of the past four and a half years, an alert meant stopping the film, moving the audience to shelter, and refunding or rebooking en masse; entire evening dayparts became commercially unreliable. Add the nationwide midnight curfew, which lops off the late shows and the post-film drinks that evening economies elsewhere are built on. Cinemas adapted, as Ukrainian businesses do: screenings now resume the moment the all-clear sounds, and tickets can be exchanged for another day without friction. But no yield-management software in the world was built for these variables.

Then there are the blackouts. Russia’s systematic attacks on the energy grid (particularly over the winter) have caused cinemas greater losses than almost anything else. A cinema inside a shopping centre depended on whether the landlord had invested in generators; if not, showtimes were scheduled around the rolling power-cut timetables, which (as anyone who lived through those winters will tell you) did not always hold. Some chains stopped waiting and bought their own generators, taking on serious capital expenditure simply to guarantee that the projector stays on. In the West we debate the payback period on laser projection. In Ukraine they calculate the payback period on diesel.

What is actually working

Against this backdrop, what Ukrainian exhibitors have achieved is remarkable, and instructive. The strategy, as Retailers.ua puts it, is quality over quantity, on three fronts.

The first is content. Distributors can no longer fill screens with filler; the risk of losing a hard-won admission is too great. What works are the big Hollywood tentpoles, family animation, and (increasingly, and most encouragingly) Ukrainian films. The departure of Russian product from the market created space, and Ukrainian producers have filled it with work that audiences genuinely choose. Anton Ptushkin’s Antarctica documentary took at least UAH 75 million in 2025. Pavlo Ostrikov’s sci-fi romance U Are the Universe (Ty – kosmos) became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, running nineteen weeks and finishing on UAH 60.9 million from 327,944 admissions, full halls for a Ukrainian original at a time when originals struggle everywhere. A national cinema drawing national audiences into national cinemas, in wartime, is not a small thing.

The second front is programming beyond the new release: retro screenings (it turns out people in Ukraine will pay to see Twilight or, say, Terminator on the big screen again - just as everywhere else), concert films, sports broadcasts, festival and documentary strands, special events. Ukrainian operators are even eyeing the international “craft cinema” trend, in which audiences knit or draw through a film in half-light.

The third is the experience itself. Rather than opening new sites, chains are shrinking total footprints while upgrading individual halls: recliners, dine-in service, expanded bars, VR and gaming zones in foyers, with IMAX and ScreenX now effectively mandatory for any self-respecting operator. Loktionova argues the future belongs to premium large formats, LED screens and immersive auditoriums, “cinema as an event” rather than a screen with chairs. New construction has not stopped entirely: a five-screen Cinema City opened in Chernivtsi, and Multiplex opened six screens in Kyiv’s Ocean Mall at the end of 2025. And the wider industry has noticed: Multiplex was named International Exhibitor of the Year at CineEurope 2026, with CEO Roman Romanchuk accepting the award in Barcelona in June, recognition of a company that has kept sites running, rebuilt damaged ones and continued investing under conditions its peers in the CCIB’s convention halls can barely conceive of.

Seeing it for yourself

None of this is abstract to me. When I visited Kyiv in the summer of 2023, I expected resilience (of course), but what I did not expect was excellence. The luxury Multiplex on top of Kyiv’s most famous department store TSUM (where President Zelensky used to take his family to the movies before the war), the Oscar Kino in the Gulliver shopping mall, the Planeta Kino multiplex with IMAX at River Mall (from which I broadcast my final CJ Cinema Summit): any of these would hold its own against the best that London, Paris or Berlin has to offer. Some would win. And the halls were not empty museums of pre-war ambition; people were there, buying tickets and popcorn, taking their two hours of somewhere else.

Just as telling were the conversations. I sat down with Natalia Baydan, CEO of Planeta Kino, and was shown around by Alexander Khasin of MAG. Both stressed resilience, naturally. What struck me most, though (as in all my conversations with Ukrainian friends and colleagues), was the sheer normalcy with which they discussed the abnormal: the curfew and what it does to social life, the routine of walking audiences to shelter mid-screening, the grind of doing business in a country with no civilian flights, where importing everyday items is a logistics puzzle. None of it was presented as heroism. It was simply the operating environment.

And Khasin’s company is a reminder that Ukraine’s contribution to cinema does not stop at the auditorium door. The speakers and amplifiers behind the screen in a growing number of cinemas worldwide are designed and built by MAG in Bila Tserkva, an hour south of Kyiv, the family firm founded by Boris Khasin in 1991 and now run by his sons, exporting professional cinema sound across the globe through five years of full-scale war. Let that sit for a moment.

The lesson for the rest of us

Cinemas in the US and Canada took in some USD 2.6 billion less last year than in 2019, and the post-pandemic, post-strikes malaise is real across Europe too. The challenges are genuine and I do not wish to minimise them. Even with the current success of Sir Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey after a very good 1H2026 cinemas still navigate uncertain waters.

But whatever keeps Western exhibitors awake at night (short windows, soft weekday admissions, the cost of recliner refits, energy prices), it pales next to what Multiplex, Planeta Kino, Oscar and every other Ukrainian operator confronts before breakfast: curfews, conscription, blackouts, missile alerts, an audience whose discretionary income is being consumed by survival, and staff whose colleagues are at the front. And still the halls are open, still the popcorn is sold, still the premieres happen. Because those two hours of escapism are not a luxury in wartime. They are closer to a public utility: proof, screened nightly, that life continues.

Ukrainian cinemas are not dead. In their fifth year of war, they are showing the rest of us how to live.

Somewhere between the news pages and the travel supplement in Saturday’s Times, Odysseus is staring out to sea. “A legend in the making,” runs the headline, above a full feature on how Christopher Nolan turned Homer into the first narrative feature shot entirely on IMAX. It reads exactly like the paper’s own arts desk: a byline (Joseph Furey), a pull quote, the measured cadence of a broadsheet film page. Only two faint words in the top right corner give it away. SPONSORED CONTENT.

This is Universal’s advertisement, dressed in The Times‘ clothes, and it’s worth asking why the studio reached for that particular costume.

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Part of the answer is timing. With the film opening this Friday, reviews are still under embargo, which means no critics, no stars, no quotes to hang on a poster of Matt Damon clad in bronze. You cannot sell a film on acclaim that does not yet exist, even if the early buzz is positive. So the copy borrows a different kind of authority: not the critic’s, but the masthead’s. Dress the pitch as journalism and the Saturday reader lends it a credibility that “Book tickets now” never could.

But the more interesting question is not why the ad looks like an article. It ultimately comes down to who the article is for.

Because on the raw numbers, The Odyssey appears to need no persuading of anyone. Domestic U.S. presales have already passed 150,000 opening-weekend tickets, more than double Oppenheimer’s pace at the same point. The BFI IMAX broke its first-day sales record, shifting more than 28,000 tickets in twenty-four hours and comfortably beating Dune: Part Two. Tracking sits around the $100 million mark, ahead of where Oppenheimer stood before it detonated, with some forecasters ranging higher still. That is a film in rude health.

Look closer at the shape of that demand, though. It is scarcity demand, driven by format: only twenty-four theatres in the United States can run the thing in IMAX 70mm, and the enthusiasm skews heavily to men over twenty-five, which is to say Nolan’s core. This is the ceiling of appetite among the people who were always going to come. It tells us remarkably little about the person who hasn’t yet decided.

And that person matters more than usual this time, because of the maths.

Oppenheimer cost around $100 million. It opened to $82 million and ran all the way to $330 million domestically, roughly a four-times multiple off its debut, because the general public kept turning up long after the faithful had been and gone. The Odyssey reportedly cost $250 million. A film that costs two and a half times as much has to reach two and a half times as far, and it cannot do that on the IMAX devout alone. It needs the multiple: the long tail of ordinary Tuesday nights on ordinary screens, in the weeks after the 70mm seats sell out. Nolan’s films have historically delivered precisely that. The open question is whether a three-thousand-year-old Greek poem, rated R, holds the same legs.

Which brings us back to the advertorial, and to its most revealing line: “You don’t need to have read Homer to feel the force of the story.” Read that again, but as marketing rather than criticism. It’s pure reassurance, and reassurance is only ever aimed at the hesitant. Nobody writes that sentence for the cinephile who booked their seat a year ago. They write it for the Times reader who suspects, quietly, that an Odyssey adaptation might be a touch like homework.

That’s the tell. The die-hards are spoken for, so the marketing pound now has to go and find everyone else. An advertorial in a quality weekend paper (older, affluent, culturally engaged, but not necessarily Nolan-obsessed) is exactly how you widen the funnel toward the audience a social media campaign never reaches.

None of this is a prediction of failure. It’s a $250 million film doing what a $250 million film must: reaching past the certain toward the far larger crowd who are merely curious. The sold-out IMAX is the easy part, and arguably the least informative part. The real story of The Odyssey will be written in the multiplex (on the standard screens, in weeks two through six) by the audience that had to be talked into it.

Universal knows this. Which is why, this weekend, Odysseus is staring out to sea from the middle of a newspaper, hoping you mistake him for the news.

Two weeks before this year’s Shanghai International Film Festival opened, a film fan known as Liang Xi designed and printed two thousand replica ticket stubs. They mimicked the quality of official cinema tickets, with “Meet in Shanghai, the City of Cinema” printed where the film title would go, Hall 1 of the Shanghai Grand Cinema as the screening venue, and “For those who love movies” in the director’s column. The back reproduced the full set of standard viewing instructions, down to the admonitions about arriving early and not filming the screen. Then she and her friends went around Shanghai’s cinemas during the festival and gave them all away for free.

Liang Xi is a post-00s (00后, líng líng hòu - China’s term for Gen-Z) film fan from Suzhou who spends her June weekends at SIFF watching restored older films. She was not selling anything. She had simply identified something the industry has spent two decades engineering out of the cinema experience: the ticket as object. The Paper’s closing report on the 28th SIFF is full of such moments. A fan called Dada laying out her sixteen stubs for a “graduation photo” at the festival’s end, rating each film as she flipped through them. Seventy-something Mei Haixing, who has attended every SIFF for over thirty years, whose personal archive of old stubs and commemorative booklets was collected by the Shanghai Grand Cinema and put on public display in a special exhibition. Individual cinemas like Cao Yang issuing their own special festival stubs. In a market where effectively every ticket is sold through an app and admission is a QR code, the paper ticket has come back as the thing people actually queue for.

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Two ticket stub economies

What makes Shanghai more than a nostalgia story is that the ticket stub is doing double duty. The fan-made ersatz tickets are the bottom-up half. The top-down half is what China officially calls the “ticket stub economy” (票根经济), a consumption model that emerged in earnest in 2024 in which tickets from films, concerts, sports and tourism unlock discounts and benefits across other sectors. The National Film Administration and China Media Group built an entire “China Film Consumption Year” around it, and the reported returns are striking: one purchased ticket yields 1.5 to 2 times its face value in follow-on spending, with ticket holders saving 15 to 30 per cent on related services. State media coverage now features academics recommending that stub design be upgraded into collectible souvenirs, with blockchain anti-counterfeiting to prevent misuse. Only in China would the humble ticket stub acquire a five-year-plan energy.

SIFF is where the two halves meet. The festival’s closing figures credit the “ticket stub economy” effect for a total economic impact of over RMB 5.3 billion (roughly USD $730 million) on the city, against festival box office of just RMB 38 million. Some 70 per cent of attendees travelled to Shanghai specifically for the festival and stayed an average of six days, with tourism revenue up 29 per cent year on year. The stub is simultaneously a keepsake, a loyalty instrument and a cross-promotion voucher. That combination should sound familiar to anyone who has watched a customer buy a Dune sandworm bucket without also ordering popcorn (extra charge) to put in it.

The pattern keeps repeating

Because this is, of course, the same phenomenon I have been circling in previous pieces on collectible popcorn buckets and young audiences. US vinyl sales grew for a nineteenth consecutive year in 2025, up 8.6 per cent to 47.9 million units. Gen Z attendance is the fastest growing segment of the theatrical audience, and the Letterboxd-to-repertory pipeline is filling screenings of thirty-year-old films with people born after their release. The generation raised on frictionless digital abundance is the one paying a premium for friction: the record you have to flip, the bucket you have to carry, the screening you have to leave home and show up for.

My own Gen Z nephew regularly asks the staff at his local cinema - the Everyman Screen on the Green in London’s Islington - for used film posters. Not posters of films he has seen, or even necessarily likes, and certainly not posters he has anywhere to put or space on the walls for. He wants them because they are real, they were in the cinema, and now he has them. Even I never did that as a student, though I confess a fair few David Lynch posters followed me home in those years, of which only Lost Highway hangs framed on my office wall. The impulse is the same one Liang Xi printed two thousand times over.

There is a reason the language around this keeps drifting towards the religious. Fans do not simply like these objects; they venerate them. A ticket stub from a screening you attended works exactly like a second-class relic in the Catholic tradition: an ordinary object made extraordinary by contact with the thing you worship. It proves presence. It survives the event. Mei Haixing’s stubs literally ended up in a shrine of sorts, displayed under glass for pilgrims to file past. The Etsy sellers doing brisk trade in custom replica cinema tickets for anniversaries and first dates are, in this reading, dealing in third-class relics: reproductions that borrow the aura of the original. None of this is irrational. It is what humans have always done with objects connected to transcendent experiences, and a great film in a dark room full of strangers qualifies.

Meanwhile, in the West

The Western industry’s response so far has been half-hearted at best. Ticketmaster has sold souvenir printed tickets since 2021, rolled out across hundreds of events, and claims fans love them; the fans themselves have described GBP £3.00 ($4) keepsakes that turned out to be “just paper with a shiny stamp”. US sports teams and concert promoters now sell souvenir paper tickets for USD $15 to $20 each, charging a premium for what used to be included. In cinema, Regal has dabbled with collectible ticket giveaways for IMAX releases, and Japan never abandoned the tradition at all: the MuviTicke advance ticket, sold with exclusive artwork and bonus gifts, has kept the ticket-as-merchandise alive for decades. And there will of course be First Screening paper tickets for The Odyssey. But the direction of travel elsewhere is entirely the other way, towards the QR code, the Apple Wallet pass that deletes itself, the confirmation email destined for the trash folder.

That is a mistake, and Shanghai shows why on both fronts. First, the artefact case: a well-designed printed ticket costs pennies against a GBP £30 injection-moulded bucket, requires no supply chain drama, creates no landfill guilt and no eBay scalping headlines, and yet serves the identical psychological function. If a cinema’s most devoted customers are asking staff for used posters and buying replica stubs from Etsy, the demand is being met by everyone except the cinema. Second, the instrument case: China has demonstrated that the ticket can anchor a web of cross-promotion with restaurants, transport, attractions and retail that multiplies its value well beyond the auditorium. Western operators sitting on loyalty schemes and local partnerships have most of the pieces already; they have simply digitised away the token that ties it all together.

The lesson from Shanghai is not that paper beats pixels. It is that the ticket was never just an access credential, and treating it as one left value on the table that fans are now recreating by hand. Somewhere in Islington there is a bedroom slowly filling with posters for films my nephew has not seen. He is not confused about what cinema is worth, but I think that we may be.

This is a two-part article. Part One is here.

Yesterday I wrote about Cosm, the shared-reality dome that Sony Pictures has just backed with a hundred million dollars, and left it on a question. Of all the Hollywood studios, why did the one in Culver City write the cheque? Here is the answer, and it turns almost entirely on what Sony is not.

First, the deal itself, quickly stated. A hundred million dollars, an undisclosed minority stake, a board seat for Sony Pictures chief executive Ravi Ahuja, and it is the studio’s second experiential bet after buying Alamo Drafthouse in 2024 (under newly established Sony Pictures Experiences division). Start with a note of scepticism, because it is the honest place to begin. A hundred million dollars is a rounding error for Sony. This is a toehold and an option, in the same contained spirit as that Alamo purchase, not a bet-the-company pivot. Anyone reading a grand master plan into a minority stake and a board seat is over-reading. And Cosm itself is unproven at scale. Three domes is not a track record, premium out-of-home entertainment has a well-populated graveyard, and the promise to “expand nicely” is a promise, not a result.

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With that said, the move is far more revealing than its size suggests, because of who is making it. To see why, you have to line up what Sony is not, and notice that the list is unique in Hollywood.

The ‘arms dealer’

Sony is the studio without a mass-market streaming service. Warner Bros. Discovery has Max (sorry HBO Max, or is it HBO again now?), Paramount has Paramount+, Disney has Disney+, Universal has Peacock. Sony has none of them. It is routinely called an arms dealer, the studio that sells its content and technology to everyone rather than building a walled garden of its own.

It is not quite weaponless. It owns Crunchyroll, the anime service, but that is a deep, devoted niche rather than a general-audience play. And it has just lived through the sharpest possible lesson in what the arms-dealer model costs. Sony Pictures Animation made KPop Demon Hunters, the phenomenon of last year, and then watched Netflix reap the franchise, the merchandise and the music, because Sony had sold the distribution under an old output deal. Ahuja, the very executive now joining Cosm’s board, has defended that model, framing Sony as an independent that is glad when its partners succeed. Sony dislikes the ‘arms-dealer’ label, and prefers “independent.” But whatever you call it, the KPop Demon Hunters wound is the motive that makes sense of everything that follows. Make the hit, hand someone else the gold, and you start wanting consumer touchpoints you actually own.

No network, and a foreign owner

Sony also has no United States broadcast network. Disney has ABC, Paramount has CBS, Comcast has NBC, even Warner Bros. had The WB but was lumbered with Discovery. Sony has nothing of the kind, and here is the part that is usually left out: it cannot have one. Sony is Japanese-owned, and the FCC caps foreign ownership of a broadcast licence. That door is legally shut.

Linear television is declining anyway, and everyone knows that its single most valuable remaining asset is live sport. Sony wants exposure to sport, which is profitable and durable, but the network route is barred to it. And this is where Cosm stops looking like a dabble and starts looking clever. An immersive sports venue is not a licensed broadcaster. It delivers the live-sport consumer experience with no broadcast licence required. The venue is not a substitute for the network Sony cannot own, but the workaround.

The pillar everyone (including me) misses: Sony already owns the plumbing of world sport

Here is the fact that reframes the whole deal, and the one I had overlooked myself, until I started discussing the issue with a colleague more knowledgable than I about sports things. Sony does not merely want sport. Sony already owns the production and data layer beneath most of world sport.

Through Hawk-Eye, Beyond Sports and Pulselive, all gathered under Sony Sports (not to be confused with Sony Sports Network - its broadcast channel for cricket and other sports in India), Sony provides officiating and tracking technology to the overwhelming majority of the top global sports leagues, across football, tennis, cricket and the rest. Beyond Sports is the outfit behind the animated, immersive versions of live sport that broadcasters have started experimenting with. Sit that beside Cosm, an immersive sports venue, and the synergy is not vague. Sony sits one layer upstream of exactly the content a shared-reality dome needs, with the cameras, the tracking data and the immersive rendering that almost nobody else can supply. This is not a studio buying into a trend, as much as it looks like a supplier buying a shop window.

The technology exit was pragmatism, not retreat

Sony is strong at both ends of the chain, capture and consumer. It makes the Venice cinema cameras and the image sensors that sit inside half the phones on earth, and at the venue end it makes Crystal LED displays and its 360 Reality Audio spatial sound system.

What it walked away from is the middle. Sony exited digital cinema projection with SXRD, abandoned SDDS sound years ago, and even dropped its accessibility glasses. It is tempting to read that as a studio that gave up on cinema technology. I think it is better read as pragmatism, and the contrast with Dolby makes the case. Dolby’s brand is practically welded to cinema. Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision, Dolby Cinema, the Dolby Theatre where they hand out the Oscars. Pull cinema out and Dolby loses its spine. Sony’s brand spine is everywhere else, in cameras and sensors and PlayStation and music, so walking away from cinema projection cost it almost no brand equity. Dolby is an arms dealer that needs the cinema showcase to sell the licence. Sony walked away from the showcase because it neither needs it nor wants to license it, and is now buying and building the venues outright. Same instinct, opposite relationship to the room.

And this instinct is not a Culver City caprice imposed on a reluctant Tokyo. Tokyo has it too. Ginza Sony Park, which reopened in January 2025 on the site of the old Sony Building, is a pure experiential brand space with, pointedly, no permanent shops at all. Its inaugural programme ran across all six of Sony’s business segments, music, semiconductors, finance, games, entertainment technology and cinema, staged with Sony’s own Crystal LED, spatial audio, 3D capture and haptics, and anchored on Sony’s owned music and anime. It is the same grammar as Cosm, expressed as a brand showcase rather than a financial stake. The experiential gene runs through the whole company. What differs is the vehicle.

No flagship theme park, and the Spider-Man problem

Here is the thread that, for me, ties the whole thing together, and it is also the one I had wrong at first.

The tempting line is that Sony, unlike Disney and Universal, and even unlike Warner Bros. with its Harry Potter studio tour, has no theme park. That is not true, and a sharp reader would catch it. Sony has Columbia Pictures Aquaverse, a theme-and-water park in Thailand, a dedicated location-based entertainment division, a deal to put Jumanji into Merlin’s parks, Ghostbusters rides in Germany and New York, and a chain of Wonderverse immersive destinations in American shopping centres.

The accurate and far sharper claim is that Sony has no flagship owned destination resort on the Disney or Universal scale, and there is a specific reason it does not. Sony cannot build a theme park around its single biggest box-office asset, because Disney controls the theme-park branding rights to all Marvel characters. Sony owns the Spider-Man film rights, not the park rights (Disney owns the Spider-Man theme park rights west of the Mississippi river since the 1990s, while Universal owns it to the east of America’s great river). So the one studio whose crown jewel could anchor a destination park is barred from using that jewel to build one. Add the capital problem, and the awkward fact that for Disney and Universal the parks have long been more profitable than the films, and you have a studio locked out of the most lucrative experiential format by both money and rights.

That is the real argument for Cosm, and it is stronger than “no theme park.” A theme park is the ultimate owned room. It is also ruinously expensive, permanently welded to one universe of intellectual property, and, for Sony, rights-blocked on its best character. Cosm is the asset-light, programmable, catalogue-agnostic version of the same idea. A Disney park is Star Wars and Frozen forever. Cosm can be The Matrix on Friday, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on Saturday and the World Cup on Sunday.

The Spider-Man restriction even has an elegant seam in it. Showing Spider-Verse on a Cosm dome is screen content, which is Sony’s to exploit. Decorating the foyer with webs and web-slingers is venue theming, which is the Marvel park-branding territory Disney holds. And the escape hatch is the audience itself. When fans arrive in costume, as they reliably do, no studio’s rights are engaged at all. Which is precisely why anime is Sony’s cleanest experiential play of the lot. It is owned outright through Crunchyroll, tangled with nobody, and its fandom themes itself more enthusiastically than almost any other. Sony can let anime fans build the room around themselves in a way it can never decorate a room around Spider-Man.

The studio that stood apart

One last piece. While the rest of Hollywood spent the last two years in a merger frenzy, Paramount and Skydance and the pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony Pictures stood entirely apart. Its Tokyo parent has repeatedly resisted pressure to spin off or sell the entertainment arm. Sony, more or less alone among the Hollywood majors, cannot be bought and will not be sold. That is not a footnote. It is the precondition for everything else, because only a studio insulated from the takeover game can afford to play a slow, patient, experiential hand while its rivals are busy consolidating.

What it adds up to

Put the pieces together and a single strategy comes into focus. Call it owning the room rather than the pipe.

Sony has conceded the consumer streaming pipe, the direct-to-consumer arms race, to studios that were willing to burn billions on it. In its place it is buying the rooms, the physical, out-of-home, fandom-driven destinations where it can own the audience relationship directly, plus the sports-data layer that feeds them and the anime IP that fills them. Alamo Drafthouse in 2024. Cosm now. Ginza Sony Park in Tokyo. It is the arms dealer quietly buying the venues.

And that is where this connects to the story everyone else in exhibition is watching. Speculation is rife about who might buy or invest in IMAX. But IMAX is a distribution chokepoint, and any single studio that owned it would sour its relations with the rival studios that depend on IMAX screens for their own releases. It is a prize almost nobody can safely hold, apart from an investment fund. So while the majors circle the chokepoint they cannot own, Sony has done something quieter and stranger. It has bought a stake in a room it can programme with anybody’s content, including, in time, its own.

There is even a neat proof of the flexibility playing out already. It emerged recently that Spider-Man: Brand New Day, likely the biggest film of the year, will play a special engagement at Disney’s flagship El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard in its opening week. A Sony-distributed, Marvel-produced film, invited into Disney’s own showcase house. That is the arms-dealer’s superpower in miniature. Sony’s Spidey can play a Disney venue, and 4DX, and ScreenX, and IMAX abroad, precisely because it is captured by no single studio’s ecosystem. The only room it is not invited into is Disney’s is-it-branding-or-is-it-certification-large-format competitor (Infinity Vision), and that exception rather proves the rule.

None of which tells us whether Cosm is a good business, or whether Sony will let its slate drift towards its own IP or keep it studiously studio neutral because neutrality is what lets a dome play the whole of Hollywood’s back catalogue. The arms-dealer logic says stay neutral. The owner’s logic says tilt. Which way it goes is the thing to watch.

I went to Cosm expecting a novelty and came away thinking about strategy. On the evidence, so did Sony. Whether owning the room turns out to be the smartest seat in the building, or an expensive distraction while the real money consolidates elsewhere, is the question the next few years will answer. But of all the moves in Hollywood this year, this is the one only Sony could have made, and that alone makes it worth watching - immersively.

Sony Pictures has put a hundred million dollars into Cosm, the immersive “shared reality” venue operator, taking a minority stake and placing its chief executive Ravi Ahuja on the company’s board. It is the studio’s latest step into experiential entertainment, following its acquisition of the Alamo Drafthouse cinema chain in 2024, and on the face of it, it is a small cheque for a company of Sony’s size. It is also, I think, the most revealing thing a Hollywood studio has done all year. To understand why, it helps to have stood inside one of these places. So let me start there.

I first came across Cosm earlier this year, as the first stop on the EDCF tour of Los Angeles in early April, the week before CinemaCon. I had not seen it before and had read almost nothing about it, which turned out to be the ideal way to arrive. I was, to use the technical industry term, blown away.

The honest test of any venue is what it does to someone who is not its target customer. I am not a sports fan. And yet, standing inside the dome, I realised at once that I would happily sit through any match, in any sport, purely for the thing itself. The film screenings they then walked us through, The Matrix, Harry Potter, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, looked more astonishing still. I walked out thinking about it for the rest of the week and the following week at CinemaCon, which is not something I usually do after visits to a converted corner of a stadium car park.

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So before we get to why Sony wrote that cheque, it is worth explaining what Cosm actually is, because a surprising number of people in the exhibition industry still have not seen one.

What Cosm actually is

Cosm calls itself a “shared reality” venue, and the distinction matters. This is not virtual reality. There are no goggles, no headset, no strapping a toaster to your face. You walk in, you sit down, and the world arrives.Entertainment is… everywhere!

The centrepiece is a wraparound LED dome, eighty-seven feet across and rendered at 12K, that fills your entire field of vision. There are no edges to remind you that you are looking at a screen. For live sport, and this is the part that does the heavy lifting, Cosm places its own cameras inside the stadium and marries that exclusive footage to the broadcast audio, so the sensation is not of watching a match but of sitting pitchside at one. It is, as their content team puts it, the communal passion of the stadium fused with the familiarity of the broadcast.

Each venue is really three experiences under one roof. The Dome is the immersive part. The Hall, just outside it, is a two-storey sports bar with a wall-to-wall LED wall showing the ordinary linear broadcast. The Deck is where you eat and drink. There are three venues open today, at Hollywood Park in Inglewood, in Dallas, and in Atlanta, which only opened a few weeks ago with an NBA Finals game. Detroit and Cleveland are next. International expansion beckons after that.

The programming skews to sport, but it is not only sport. There have been Cirque du Soleil shows and a run of Warner Bros. film screenings, including Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone dressed up for its twenty-fifth anniversary. Hold that detail. We will need it tomorrow.

Where it sits, and why “virtual reality” is the wrong label

The lazy way to describe Cosm is as a smaller Sphere. The more useful way is to place it on a line between two things it is not.

At one end is the Sphere in Las Vegas. Sphere is a magnificent, exclusive, capital-crushing monolith. It cost well over two billion dollars, and its second building, in Abu Dhabi, is a 1.7 billion dollar project funded by Abu Dhabi itself and not due to open until the end of 2029. The next American venue, near Washington D.C., is a deliberately smaller format. Read that sequence carefully, because it tells a story. Sphere’s own answer to the problem of scaling is to shrink. The round monolith does not replicate, and its operators know it.

At the other end of the line is the sports bar. Cheap, everywhere, and welded to whatever the broadcaster happens to be showing.

Cosm sits precisely between the two, and takes the best of each. It is a fraction of the cost of a Sphere and built to be repeated, three venues and counting, which is the inclusive, scalable model to Sphere’s exclusive one. But it is a very long way above a sports bar, because it owns exclusive footage and an environment nobody can pirate. Where Sphere is migrating down towards Cosm’s economics from the top, Cosm is already sitting at the size that works.

There is a third comparator worth adding, because it comes from my own corner of the world (geographically and culturally). ABBA Voyage in East London is the other great experiential success of the decade, and it rhymes with Cosm in ways that are easy to miss. The ABBA Arena is a fully demountable building, designed from the outset to be picked up and moved to another city. The show has drawn more than four million visitors, and its producers are openly exploring versions in the United States and Germany. Like Cosm, and this is the point, it is emphatically not virtual reality. It is captured reality, ILM-rendered avatars (ABBA-tars, if you will) of the band as they looked in 1979, presented on a giant surface to a room full of people. The avatar-residency format is now being treated as portable, repeatable intellectual property, and it will not stay an ABBA exclusive for long. The Beatles? Michael Jackson? Wham?

Which brings us to the label problem. Some of the coverage of Cosm, and of the Sony deal, has reached reflexively for the phrase “virtual reality.” It is the wrong phrase. Virtual reality, the isolating, goggle-strapped kind, has largely failed. Even Meta has scaled back its ambitions. What has actually worked, at Sphere, at Cosm, at the ABBA Arena, is shared reality, the communal kind, where the spectacle is enormous and you experience it in a room full of other human beings that you can see. Calling that virtual reality is not a small slip. It mistakes the thing that failed for the thing that is working.

The rights question, answered by the World Cup

The obvious worry about a venue that shows live sport is rights. Does this threaten the broadcasters? The clearest answer is playing out on Cosm’s own screens this summer.

Cosm has struck a deal with FOX Sports and FIFA to show forty World Cup matches across its three venues, including all three United States group games and the final on the nineteenth of July. This is not a grey-market replay. Cosm is an official rights partner, positioning its own cameras at host stadiums and pairing them with the Fox feed. And remember the Hall, the two-storey sports bar bolted onto every venue, showing the ordinary broadcast on a giant wall.

So Cosm does not threaten broadcast rights any more than a sports bar does. It goes further than a sports bar, with negotiated camera access, but the direction of travel is additive. It drives the Fox broadcast rather than undercutting it, which is exactly why Fox is a partner and not a plaintiff.

The real question

This is the business, then. It turns live and library film content into a repeatable destination, cheaply, at a scale the megastructures cannot match, and it does so as a licensed friend of the broadcasters rather than a threat to them.

Which is all very well as a description of Cosm. It does not explain the hundred million dollars. Plenty of companies could have written that cheque. The interesting question is not why the money was welcome. It is why this particular studio wrote it.

Because Sony is the one Hollywood major that could not have been anyone else in this deal, and the reasons come down almost entirely to what Sony is not. No mass-market streaming service, in a town where everyone else has one. No American broadcast network, and no legal way to own one. No flagship theme park, and a very specific, faintly embarrassing reason it cannot build the obvious one. Line those absences up and they stop looking like weaknesses. They start to look like the outline of a strategy that no other studio is in a position to copy.

That is where we go tomorrow.

Part two, on why Sony and only Sony could make this move, and what “owning the room” actually means, follows tomorrow.

For most of the last decade, South Korea was where the rest of the exhibition industry went to see what came next - I know because I arranged a study-trip with Germany’s Cineplex myself. 4DX and ScreenX were Korean inventions, born at CJ CGV and now running in 70 and 50 countries respectively. The world’s first commercial cinema LED screen went up at Lotte Cinema World Tower in Seoul in July 2017, later rebranded as Samsung Onyx and now selling into Europe and the United States. Korean operators turned dead projection booths into private boxes, built recliner houses and dine-in auditoriums, and treated the multiplex as a design problem rather than a utility. All of it sat on top of the soft power that Parasite, Squid Game and three decades of K-Pop music had bought. For a few years Korean cinema was both the product and the showroom.

And then the audience left.

Korean admissions peaked at 226.67 million in 2019, the year the average Korean went to the cinema 4.37 times, the highest rate in the world. The pandemic dropped that to 51 million, and the recovery stalled well short of the old line. 2024 closed at 123 million, still 45.6 per cent below 2019. The first half of 2025 managed just 42.5 million, and full-year box office came in at 1.05 trillion won, down another 12.4 per cent.

Here is the part worth dwelling on if you run a cinema in London, Paris or Los Angeles. Across much of Europe and North America we have quietly agreed that roughly 80 per cent of 2019 is the new 100 per cent, the level at which a healthy modern cinema business now operates. Korea is running at little more than half, i.e. 50% of pre-Covid level. The country that wrote the premium-cinema playbook has fallen below the floor the rest of us treat as the baseline.

This is not, to be clear, a total collapse. The market has polarised rather than emptied: 2026 has already produced real hits, with the period drama variously translated as The Man Who Lives with the King (or The King’s Warden) passing 16.89 million admissions, second on the all-time list. But a handful of tentpoles flocking with crowds while everything beneath them starves is precisely the symptom, not the cure.

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It was never really the streaming

The convenient story is that OTT killed the cinema. The Korean data does not support it. In a recent Affity survey of MZ-generation (Gen-Z in the West) viewers, only 14.9 per cent said streaming was simply “sufficient” as a replacement. The most common reason for staying away was that there were fewer films worth watching (38.9 per cent), followed by the price of a ticket (30.8 per cent). When the same respondents were asked why they still go, 59.8 per cent gave one answer: the big screen and the sound, the immersion you cannot reproduce at home.

That is a diagnosis, not a death certificate. It says the theatrical proposition still works when there is something worth seeing and a reason the living room cannot match. It says the two levers that matter are programming and value, not the existence of Netflix. And it says something about the asset Korea is in danger of losing. A Romanian visitor recently marvelled that Korean cinemas barely check tickets and happily let you bring in a McDonald’s, describing the multiplex less as a destination than as a normal part of daily life, somewhere you drift into after work. That habit, cinema woven into the ordinary week, is exactly what is now fraying.

Note, too, how industrially literate ordinary cinemagoers have become. Asked what the government should prioritise, plenty backed ticket subsidies, but strong minorities wanted more production support and an end to screen monopolies. The audience is, in effect, diagnosing its own supply chain.

The innovations are thriving. Abroad.

The awkward truth about Korea’s technology lead is that it has become an export business that does little for the home turnstile. CJ 4DPLEX now earns around 90 per cent of its revenue overseas, with 4DX in 773 sites and ScreenX in 480, and a stated target of more than 2,000 premium halls by 2030. Samsung is pushing the latest Onyx into the United States and Europe. Korean films and series travel as well as any in the world.

None of this refills a multiplex in Daegu on a wet Tuesday. The premium format and the prestige title are real revenue and genuine soft-power assets, but they are not, by themselves, a domestic-attendance strategy. Korea’s exhibitors know it, which is why the more interesting work is happening at home.

Reprogramming the box

The most striking response is the least technological: redefining what a cinema is for. Megabox has turned its Hongdae branch into Korea’s first anime-specialised multiplex, relaunching with an Evangelion retrospective, a permanent merchandise shop, fan exhibitions and a Detective Conan run, on the bet that fandom plus a physical space plus things to buy is a reason to leave the house. Nexon booked five Megabox sites for a theatrical documentary about its game Ark Raiders, with limited-edition merch handed out at the box office. Lotte Cultureworks has gone furthest, staging a stand-up comedy show and an immersive “Death Game” theatre piece inside its auditoriums, the comedy selling out in under a minute.

This is the same instinct that turned collectable signature tickets and theme cafes into a genuine revenue line for the Korean chains, and it answers the survey’s central complaint head on. If the problem is “not enough films worth a trip,” the response is to widen what counts as a trip: anime events, game premieres, comedy, immersive theatre, concerts and sport on the big screen. Lotte is now explicit that it sees the auditorium as a multi-format venue, and its Onyx LED rooms, bright enough to run in ambient light, are being sold for precisely that. The screen Korea invented to show films better is being repurposed to show everything else.

Cinema as infrastructure, not business

A quieter, more radical experiment runs in the provinces. Korea now has 73 “small cinemas” across 66 cities and counties, single or double-screen houses built by local governments in places the market would never give a multiplex. The framing is the point. The Korea Small Cinema Association argues these are not facilities to be judged by admissions or revenue but a guarantee that people far from Seoul have the same claim on culture as those in it. Some, such as Gochang’s Dongri Cinema, are programmed and run by people in their twenties to forties who shape the slate themselves.

It is a deliberate rejection of multiplex logic, cinema treated as a public good like a library or a swimming pool, with the deficits underwritten as the cost of keeping a region liveable. It speaks directly to a problem the West shares: how to keep the lights on where the spreadsheet says no, and whether some sites are better understood as civic assets than as businesses at all.

Then there is the blunt instrument. Seoul has expanded “Culture Day” to every Wednesday and pushed out millions of 6,000-won discount coupons; 72.3 per cent of surveyed viewers called them effective, which tells you how hard price is biting. But the same audience that welcomes the coupons doubts they are sufficient, and they are probably right. A discount changes the maths on a film you already want to see. It does nothing about the thinness of the slate behind it.

The crack under the floor

All of this is happening while the Korean cinema industry’s plumbing is under real strain. In June, five affiliates of the JoongAng Group, including the third-largest chain Megabox and its distribution arm Plus M, filed for court rehabilitation, days after sister broadcaster JTBC defaulted on its debt. The Korean Film Council has opened a damage-reporting centre, and distributors are watching nervously over whether box-office settlements will clear on time if Megabox’s assets are frozen. The summer’s event release, Na Hong-jin’s roughly $33m Hope, sits inside the affected company.

The episode exposes what the premium screens and the anime stores cannot paper over. Korean exhibition is a tightly vertically integrated oligopoly, three chains that also distribute and invest, and the proposed Megabox and Lotte Cinema merger, now in doubt, would have cut that to two. The survey respondents fretting about screen monopolies were not imagining things. A structure this concentrated is wonderfully efficient in the good years and dangerously fragile in the bad ones, because a single company’s collapse runs straight through every distributor and small operator downstream. Korea is now finding out which kind of year it is in.

What to take, and what to leave

For operators elsewhere, the Korean experiment offers a clear set of transferable ideas and one clear warning.

Take the diagnosis first. If Korea, the most cinema-going nation on earth only a few years ago, is losing admissions for want of films worth seeing rather than because of streaming, the same is almost certainly true of markets stuck at 80 per cent. Take the programming response, which is the cheap and promising part: widen the reason to visit through anime and game and comedy events, fandom and merchandise, live content on premium screens, the cinema as a venue rather than a single-purpose film box. Take the infrastructure idea too, if only as a question worth asking out loud: which of our sites are businesses, and which are closer to civic assets that deserve a different funding model?

And leave the consolidation. The lesson of Megabox is not that scale is bad but that a heavily indebted, vertically integrated oligopoly transmits one firm’s failure into the whole ecosystem at once. That is a conversation the West has coming.

Korea built the premium cinema and is now, out of necessity, trying to reinvent the reason to walk into one. It may not get there. But it is running the experiment in real time, at the sharp end, ahead of everyone else, which makes it the most instructive place in the world to be watching right now.

There is a new film club in Kyiv, and its premise is the part of the experience the industry has spent a century treating as an afterthought: the conversation that starts once the lights come up.

After the Credits (Після титрів) held its first meeting on 23 June at the Havana restaurant in the Ukrainian capital. The opening theme was knowingly chosen: the television series that raised a generation, the iconic stories of the 1990s and early 2000s revisited through a contemporary lens (the psychology of the characters, the evolution of women on screen, how twenty years have reshaped the way we read a romance). It is, by design, the opposite of a lecture. What makes it worth a column I feel is not the format itself, which is old, but who is running it, why, and what it tells the rest of us about where young audiences are heading.

The three co-founders are not film academics or cinema operators. They are Marina Schultz, a film blogger and founder of the film magazine Cinemais; Marina Sinyoka, communications director at the #knygolav publishing house; and the stylist Anton Vasiliev. Cinema, fashion, books and social trends, deliberately pointed at the same screen from different angles.

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In their own words

The founders are clear that the appeal is the talking, not the watching. (The quotes below are translated from the original Ukrainian.)

Schultz frames it as a long-held wish:

“I have loved cinema since childhood, and that is why for several years I have dreamed of a closed, intimate film club, a place for those who love cinema not just to watch, but to live it. After the Credits is a space for like-minded people, where you can remember your first on-screen loves, argue about the endings of your favourite films and discover new stories for yourself. We choose each topic of the meeting with special care, so that each evening leaves behind the same feeling for which we love cinema so much: emotions that do not end even after the credits.”

Sinyoka makes the lineage explicit, and it is one worth noticing:

“There are many book clubs where people discuss what they have read, so why not create a film club where everyone can express themselves, about people, choices, relationships, culture, and the times we live in. That is why we created After the Credits, a place where a film does not end with the final shots, but becomes the beginning of a lively dialogue.”

Vasiliev gets closest to why this format lands now:

“I think this club will be special because we’re not talking about movies as textbook experts, but as people who lived these stories with the characters on screen. For me, After the Credits is a kind of time machine. An opportunity to return to an era when there were no social networks and streaming services, when we waited for premieres, recorded our favourite films on discs and together experienced the changes in the world, from analogue reality to digital. This is a club about nostalgia, the shared experience of a generation and how cinema helps us better understand ourselves, our time and the changes we have witnessed.”

The launch drew the kind of guest a new venture wants in the room (the television presenter Oksana Gutzait, who left saying she had already started rewatching the series under discussion) and the kind of branded extras a partner-backed event runs on. But strip away the cosmetics drop (ten incredibly soft cosmetic bags with useful content for care and beauty by the Ukrainian brand Miso) and the publisher gifts, and the proposition is simple: the film is the prompt, the people are the point.

Far from the first

None of this is new, and that is the most interesting thing about it.

The film club is actually one of cinema’s oldest institutions. Louis Delluc and Ricciotto Canudo are credited with forming the first important ciné-clubs in 1920s France, the Club des Amis du Septième Art followed in Paris, and London got its own Film Society in 1925, founded by H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes among others, precisely to see the French, German and Soviet pictures that commercial exhibitors would not touch. The movement was a genuine mass phenomenon: Les Amis de Spartacus reportedly enrolled more than 75,000 subscribers in 1928. By 1947 the world had a federation of them, and the same impulse gave us the Cinémathèque française.

The defining feature was never just access to rare prints. It was the ritual: an introduction before the film, then a discussion afterwards, audience and organisers (and sometimes the filmmakers) trading views. After the Credits has not invented a format, but simply put the discussion in the title.

Ukraine has plenty of its own precedent. A 2020 Weekend round-up counted at least five active Kyiv clubs alone: Polotno, screening documentaries and features on professional kit at Urban Space 500; the Club of Anonymous Filmaholics on Andriyivskyi Uzviz, bean bags and arthouse; Rakurs, a veteran founded in the 1980s by a cinema director devoted to watching “real movies from film”, heavy on Tarkovsky; the 42-seat CINEMA42 in Podil, run by people from the “86” festival; and the Evropa Cinema Club inside the Plomin educational space. Most striking of all is the psychological film club at the Paragraph youth centre in Ivano-Frankivsk, which began as monthly support sessions for internally displaced people (i.e. domestic war refugees), grew into weekly Thursday meetings led by a psychologist, and has now run for nearly three years (one of its most memorable evenings paired a screening of Pamfir with a visit from one of the film’s actors). Kyiv film clubs, the 2020 piece noted drily, appear quickly and disappear just as fast. The ones that last are the ones built on people, not programming.

Why young audiences are leaning in

The reason a restaurant film club in Kyiv is worth the attention of exhibitors in London or Paris is that it is riding the same wave the box office is.

The data on Gen Z has flipped the post-pandemic panic on its head. In North America, under-30s made up 39 per cent of the cinema audience in 2025, up from 34 per cent in 2019, and Cinema United reckons Zoomer attendance grew by a quarter in the past year. The generation written off as lost to the small screen has turned out to be the one rebuilding the habit. The why matters more than the numbers. Fandango’s research finds that where millennials treated moviegoing as a personal escape, Gen Z treats it as a social activity. They value the social contract of the auditorium (a room where nobody is on their phone), and they increasingly want the human layer that the algorithm cannot supply: the post-screening Q&A, the argument in the lobby, the discovery that comes from a person rather than a feed. TikTok and Letterboxd send them toward the theatre, not away from it. I have heard it first-hand from young cinemagoers who tell me they will not leave the auditorium after a film until they have logged and reviewed it on Letterboxd (the online book club of the cinema world). The film is not finished, in other words, until it has been talked about.

This is the same instinct driving the boom in book clubs, run clubs and every other in-person “third place” young people are improvising to claw back connection from a life lived online. After the Credits is the cinema-shaped version of exactly that.

The lesson for the industry is uncomfortable and obvious in equal measure. The demand here is being met not by a cinema but by a film blogger, a comms director and a stylist, in a restaurant. The product young audiences are buying is not only the film; it is the gathering. Exhibitors who think of a screening as a transaction that ends when the credits roll are leaving the most valuable part of the experience on the table, while someone else picks it up. Membership, curation, themed evenings, a moderated conversation, a reason to come back next month and bring a friend: none of this requires new technology. But it requires treating the audience as a community rather than a footfall figure. The clubs that endure, as Kyiv’s own history shows, are built on people.

And it is happening in the middle of a war

It is worth holding on to one detail. This club launched in a city under regular missile and drone attack, in a country in the fifth year of a full-scale invasion.

That context runs all the way through Ukraine’s film-club scene. The Ivano-Frankivsk club exists because cinema turned out to be a workable way to give displaced people somewhere to talk and steady themselves. After the Credits carries a charitable mission of its own: part of the proceeds from the first meeting goes to support the Artillery Reconnaissance Division of the National Guard of Ukraine.

So this is not only a story about the social future of moviegoing, though it is that too. It is also a small, stubborn act of normal life maintained under abnormal conditions, and a reminder that the thing cinema does best (putting people in a room together to feel something and then talk about it) becomes more valuable, not less, when the world outside is hard. Schultz wants evenings that leave behind emotions that do not end even after the credits. In Kyiv in 2026, that is a more loaded promise than it sounds.

The pitch, if you have been anywhere near the trade press the last couple of months, runs roughly like this. Cinema was dying. Then a wave of YouTubers rode in, and now it isn’t dying.

Backrooms, a horror film made by a twenty-year-old who built his following on the platform, recently handed A24 the biggest opening weekend in its history (around $81m off a $10m budget). Iron Lung turned Markiplier’s lo-fi video-game adaptation into roughly $50m from $4m. Curry Barker’s Obsession came from the same world and pulled the same trick. The Financial Times duly asked whether YouTubers could save Hollywood.

It is a lovely story. It is also far too small.

The cinema medium is not being rescued by a few young men who learned to direct in their bedrooms, welcome as they are. It is doing well for a much broader reason, and the single most promising part of that picture is a genre the industry barely thinks to name. (More on her shortly.)

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Not a content creator

Start with the framing, because it is wrong before we even reach the money.

Ask Kane Parsons, who directed Backrooms, and he will tell you he is not really a YouTuber at all. He does not optimise for an algorithm or chase a feed. He is not a Mr Beast (ask your kids). He is a film-maker who happened to find his first audience online, which is a different animal (beast?) entirely. The distinction is not vanity; it is the whole point. What is happening is not that “content creators” have cracked cinema. It is that storytellers have found a stage the old gatekeepers no longer control, and a few of them are very good.

There is a reason that audience and that material fell for each other, and it leads, of all places, through a dating site. Years ago OkCupid worked out that one of the sharpest predictors of whether two strangers would last as a couple was whether they both liked horror films. The horror was never the point, because it simply stood in for something underneath: openness, a taste for being unsettled. On that test, Gen Z and the cinema are extremely compatible. They have been on a very good date, and they bonded over being scared.

But the saviour story misreads what that means. Horror did not begin on YouTube and it does not end there. As Charlotte Jones of Omdia will argue at CineEurope this coming week, young audiences want to see their own heroes on the big screen, not ours. (Sorry, Tom and Harrison.) The heroes change. The appetite does not.

Horror is a broad church

Look at the genre across its full span and the YouTube wave starts to look like one tributary of a very wide river.

There is comedy horror, with a new Scary Movie posting a franchise-best opening. There is franchise horror, with Scream still moving tickets a quarter of a century on. There is the arthouse end (Saint Maud, The Substance) and the auteur end, where Ryan Coogler’s Sinners showed that a director with something on his mind can still own a summer, with Zach Cregger’s Weapons staking the same claim for the autumn. None of that came up through a feed.

Horror is not a platform’s gift to a dying art form. It is a healthy, sprawling church, and Gen Z simply likes the service. See them worship in couples.

The real headline is breadth

Which is the actual good news, and it is bigger than horror.

Cinema is doing well right now not because one saviour appeared but because a great many different things are working at the same time. Anime has gone from niche to powerhouse, with Demon Slayer now playing like a tentpole. The video-game adaptation, for years a guaranteed embarrassment (Bob Hoskin’s Super Mario Bros. movie, anyone?), has become a dependable earner, with Minecraft leading the way. Original, non-franchise stories such as Project Hail Mary are holding their screens for weeks instead of front-loading and disappearing. Even the formats are multiplying, with concert film, event cinema and faith-based films all now a serious line of business in their own right.

Some of the old engines are cooling, true. Superhero fatigue is real and Star Wars has lost a little of its gravity, though I would not write off either just yet; both have come back from worse. The point is that the health of the business no longer hangs on any one of them, or stands and falls with one tent-pole. Gower Street Analytics has 2026 landing near $34.7bn, the strongest worldwide total since 2019, and Rentrak/Comscore’s reading is the same. A good year, built on width, which is great news for cinemas.

So when someone asks what will save cinema, the honest answer is: nothing, because it does not need saving, and everything, because the strength is in the spread.

The genre that keeps getting overlooked

And sitting right there in that spread, doing some of the heaviest lifting and getting almost none of the credit, is the female literary adaptation.

This is the part that puzzles me, because the evidence is not subtle. The Housemaid, Paul Feig’s version of Freida McFadden’s bestseller, made north of $400m on a $35m budget. Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell, cleared $100m and won Jessie Buckley a very-deserved Oscar. Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and The Devil Wears Prada 2 (Lauren Weisberger, $666m [!] and counting, opening to a crowd that was nearly three-quarters women) round out a run that is hard to miss if you are actually looking.

The trouble is that the industry tends not to look. As Comscore’s Nena Loncar sets out in the current Cinema Technology Magazine, three of the top five releases of the first quarter of 2026 (Wuthering Heights, The Housemaid and Hamnet) were female-skewing titles, and between them they took close to a quarter of all box office in the period.

A quarter. From the category that still gets filed under counter-programming.

None of this is a one-quarter fluke either. Where the Crawdads Sing did it. The last Bridget Jones did it - a theatrical hit here in the UK, but oddly dumped straight to streaming in the States. It Ends With Us did it, with a whole Colleen Hoover pipeline lined up behind it. Materialists cleared $100m as an original romantic drama with no franchise to lean on. And Barbie, of course, turned the proposition into a watershed.

Women buy the tickets

Here is the structural fact the saviour stories keep skating past. Cinema is, and always has been, a female-driven business. (Write it one-hundred times with chalk on the blackboard. No, really, do!)

Women decide. The girlfriend, the date, the wife and, more than anyone, the mother are the people choosing what the household goes to see. Loncar’s data has mothers now making up a record 59% of the parents on family cinema trips. The Housemaid drew a 65% female audience, its awareness driven by TikTok and turned, by word of mouth, into a fear-of-missing-out event. These are not soft, hard-to-reach viewers on the margin. They are the centre of the market, and they come in groups, repeat the visit, and make a night of it. (Sometimes they even end up getting arrested as a result.)

You can see the same truth in a film that is not a literary adaptation at all, or even a film as such. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour was concert film rather than a novel on screen, but it had a female lead in the most literal sense (Taylor herself), and it posted a 77% female audience on its way to becoming the biggest event-cinema release the UK and Ireland has ever seen. Different format, same lesson. When women turn up, they turn up in numbers that move the chart.

And the engine driving the literary side of this is hiding in plain sight. We talk endlessly about creepypasta, about how a meme on YouTube can mint a horror hit. BookTok does precisely the same thing, for a larger and more devoted audience, and it does it for books written by and for women. If one feed can build a franchise, so can the other. It already is.

Put romantasy on the big screen

Which brings me to the bet I would actually make.

If you want to name the next breakout cinema genre, my money is on “romantasy”, the romance-fantasy hybrid that BookTok has turned into a publishing phenomenon. Fourth Wing, A Court of Thorns and Roses and their many descendants sell in the millions, to readers who are organised, vocal and openly desperate to see these worlds on a screen.

So far, the studios are pitching almost all of it at the streamers. That is a strategic mistake, but a revealing one. The reflex comes from the streaming success of YA adaptations such as Enola Holmes, which has quietly persuaded the industry that this audience belongs in the living room. But shared fandom does not reach full voltage on a sofa. It reaches it in a dark room full of strangers who came for the same thing. The big screen is where a fanbase becomes an event (ask Barbie), and an event is what turns a book into a box office break-out star. Would The Hunger Games or Twilight have been better or had more impact as a Netflix or Amazon Prime series? I’d argue, no.

The proof is already dated on the calendar. Paramount is taking Tomi Adeyemi’s YA Children of Blood and Bone to cinemas and IMAX in January 2027, with Gina Prince-Bythewood directing a cast most franchises would envy. That is the move, and it should not be a rarity. The shelves are heaving with books, written by women and for women, young and old, waiting to do on the big screen exactly what the industry keeps assuming can only happen on the small one. If cinemas do not claim that material, television will, and the moment will pass.

The compatibility test

So, back to that dating site.

The horror question worked, the theory went, because it was never really about horror. It measured openness, a willingness to be surprised. The cinema business is being asked a version of the same question now, and it can answer it two ways.

It can answer narrowly, by deciding its future is a handful of gifted twenty-year-olds from YouTube, and in the process miss most of what is actually working. Or it can answer the way the numbers keep gently insisting, by staying open to who is really buying the tickets, across genres and formats and feeds.

Gen Z and the cinema like horror. So do the couples who last. But if the industry wants this particular relationship to go the distance, it might finally notice the person who has been sitting at the table the whole time: the one who read the book, picked the film, booked the seats, and has been waiting, with no small patience, to be asked. Please, don’t keep her waiting.

There is a reflex, when a company announces it is leaving the stock market, to read the move as a confession of failure. The headlines on 16 June duly arrived in that register: a turbulent period, a torrid run, an upmarket chain beating a retreat. Look past the framing and the opposite is true. Everyman’s proposal to cancel its AIM listing is not a white flag. It is the most clear-headed decision the company has taken in years, and it is being made from a position of operational strength rather than distress.

Start with the numbers the delisting statement was bundled with, because that pairing is not accidental. In the 21 weeks to 28 May, admissions rose 23.1% to 2.2 million, revenue climbed 26.5% to £58.5m, and adjusted EBITDA jumped 45.2% to £9.4m. Market share ticked up to 6.7%, and average net debt fell by almost a quarter. This is a business that is working. Interim chief executive Farah Ramzan Golant has done what she said she would do: frozen the land-grab, steadied the estate of 49 venues, and pointed the cash at the balance sheet. The recovery is real and it is early. Which is precisely why now is the right moment to take it private. Come and sit next to me on one of their comfy sofas and let me explain why.

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The listing built the chain, then trapped it

Everyman’s relationship with the public market was, for a long time, a happy one. The 2013 flotation gave a chain that owned a handful of sites the currency and the credibility to go national. The market funded the velvet-sofa rollout that turned a Hampstead curiosity into a recognisable brand with venues in market towns and city centres across the country. Nobody should pretend the listing did nothing. It did a great deal.

The problem is what the listing then demanded in return. A public growth story has to be fed, quarter after quarter, and Everyman fed it the only way an exhibitor easily can, by opening more sites. Those upbeat trading updates, the ones that kept the share price aloft, were increasingly a function of constant expansion papering over softness underneath. The bill arrived in the accounts. More than £56m of pre-tax losses over six years, no pre-tax profit since 2019, repeated impairment charges as the company quietly conceded that some of those new sites were not earning their keep, and a debt pile that grew alongside the estate. The quarterly treadmill did not cause every one of those problems, but it rewarded exactly the behaviour (expand at all costs, keep the story moving) that produced them.

A turnaround runs on the opposite logic. It is slow, unglamorous, and largely invisible from the outside. Paying down debt does not generate a press release. Closing or fixing an underperforming site is a loss to be booked, not a ribbon to be cut. Public markets, and AIM in particular, are poorly built to reward that kind of patience.

Everyman’s own share register makes the point: the market value sits at around £32m, almost exactly where it listed in 2013, and the shares are down something close to 80% over five years. After thirteen years on the market, the listing has delivered neither a meaningful valuation nor a usable acquisition currency. It is, by any honest measure, a sunk cost the company keeps paying to maintain.

A market that is hollowing out

This is not only an Everyman story. AIM is in structural decline. The number of companies listed has fallen to around 679, the lowest since 2001 and well under half the 1,694 that crowded the market at its 2007 peak. New listings have all but dried up, with roughly ten IPOs in a year. The British Business Bank reckons it costs about £600,000 to come to AIM and £500,000 a year to stay there, money that buys ever less as trading thins out.

The pool of nominated advisers a company needs in order to remain listed has shrunk to a couple of dozen. And from April this year the inheritance-tax relief that gave many private investors a reason to hold AIM shares at all has been halved, removing one of the last structural supports under valuations across the market. Everyman is not abandoning a thriving marketplace. It is stepping off a shrinking one.

For Everyman specifically, the liquidity case is starker still. This is a tightly held company. The three director-shareholders backing the delisting (Adam Kaye, Charles Dorfman and Michael Rosehill) account for 45.6% of the shares between them, Blue Coast (the Lewis family behind River Island) sits at close to 29%, and Gresham House holds another 9.5%. Strip those out and the genuine free float is slim. A stock that barely trades cannot offer real price discovery or an easy exit, which is the entire point of a listing. Everyman has been carrying all of the cost of being public while enjoying almost none of the benefit.

The obvious endgame

Read the situation as a whole and a delisting looks less like an ending than a clearing of the decks. Once the quarterly glare is gone, the founding families can let the recovery mature on their own timetable, and the company becomes a far cleaner asset to sell when the moment comes. Note who has not joined the delisting camp: Blue Coast, parked just below the 30% threshold that would trigger a mandatory bid. Whether that is patience or positioning, it points at the likely destination. [CORRECTION: I have been reliably informed that Blue Coast are onboard, as Michael Rosehill is the Lewis family’s representative on the board. Mea culpa.] A take-private by the founders, or a sale to a strategic buyer, is easier to engineer off-market than under the harsh strip-lighting of AIM, with every wobble priced in real time.

And there is a buyer profile that fits Everyman almost too neatly. As I have argued here before, premium experiential cinema is exactly the sort of asset the luxury conglomerates have been circling, and at roughly £30m Everyman would be a rounding error for an LVMH or a Kering. A turnaround completed quietly, in private, is a more attractive shop window than one conducted in public with the share price flickering on every soft week of box office - not that there’s been many of those recently, forsooth.

A word for the minorities

None of this is cost-free, and the minority shareholders deserve a mention. Cancelling a listing strands ordinary holders in unquoted, near-untradeable stock, and doing so after an 80% fall invites the fair charge that insiders are quietly buying back the recovery on the cheap. The board owes those investors a proper mechanism, whether a matched-bargain facility or, better, a clean offer at a defensible price. Getting that part right is the difference between a smart move and a shabby one.

But the strategic logic is not in doubt. The listing was scaffolding, useful while the building was going up. The building now stands. Everyman no longer needs the market, and the market, frankly, stopped needing Everyman some time ago. Going private lets the chain back its own model on its own terms, which is what it should have been free to do all along. The sofas, you will be relieved to hear, remain comfy.

For the better part of a decade, the cinema industry’s working fear/assumption was that we had lost them. Gen Z was the streaming generation, the TikTok generation, the cohort that would never form the cinema-going habit because the sofa, the phone and the algorithm had got to them first. That assumption is now being demolished in real time, with several reports worth highlighting landing this very week.

Dazed ran a feature this week on why young Britons are keeping cinema alive, citing cinema advertiser Digital Cinema Media’s finding that 78% of 16-34s now identify as regular cinemagoers. (Yes, more than three-quarter!) The same day, the Indian markets outlet Whalesbook reported that the country’s multiplex major PVR INOX is betting its growth on Gen Z, pointing to Ormax Media data showing under-30s account for 57% of Hindi box-office collections and a remarkable 70% of first-day revenue. Both sit on top of two heavyweight pieces of research — Cinema United’s annual Strength of Theatrical Exhibition update in North America and the CNC’s ongoing work on the 15-24s in France.

The trend is real, and it is not confined to one market or one culture. So before we uncork anything (non-alcoholic preference for Gen Z), it is worth asking the less comfortable question. If young people are the future of cinema - now what?

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The data, briefly

In North America, Cinema United reported that Gen Z’s moviegoing frequency grew 25% in a year, the largest jump of any age group; 41% saw six or more films, up from 31% in 2022. Comscore puts Gen Z at roughly 40% of the North American audience, up from 34% in 2019, and Fandango found they now average around seven films a year - level with Millennials and ahead of their elders (c’est moi). Loyalty-programme sign-ups rose 15%. The engine is specific: anime, video-game adaptations and horror - Demon Slayer, A Minecraft Movie, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2.

In France, the CNC found 85% of 15-24s went to a cinema at least once in 2023 - against 64% of the general population, and the 2025 barometer shows the average audience age has dropped three years, to 34, on the back of anime, horror and family titles.

In Japan, 2025 was the highest-grossing year on record - ¥274.45bn, up 32% and past the 2019 peak - driven overwhelmingly by domestic anime (Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle) alongside the surprise prestige hit Kokuho. In China, the box office rebounded around 20% to $7.4bn, but largely on the shoulders of a single phenomenon, Ne Zha 2, the year after the market had crashed 23%. And in Saudi Arabia, the youngest market of all - around 70% of the population is under 35 - exhibition has gone from zero screens in 2018 to over 700 by 2025, with premium formats over-indexing among a digitally native young crowd.

Different countries, different content, one common denominator: the young are no longer the audience cinema is trying to win back. They are the audience it already has.

The catch: 80% is the new 100%

Here is the note of caution that the celebratory coverage tends to skip. Gen Z’s rising share is partly a statistical reality of older audiences not returning. North American admissions still sit around 23% below 2019; France fell 13.6% in 2025 alone (admittedly after a strong domestic-hit heavy year). The over-45s who embraced streaming during the pandemic have, in large numbers, simply stayed on the sofa. So part of the “youth dominance” story is arithmetic: a bigger slice of a smaller pie.

That reality-check demands an honest strategic conversation rather than a reflexive “we’ll do both.” Cinemas cannot write off families, the 35-plus and seniors, because those demographics still matter, and abandoning them would be reckless. But every euro/dollar/pound/yen and every programming hour spent clawing back a reluctant older audience is a euro/dollar/pound/yen and an hour not spent deepening the young one that is already turning up. Where is the marginal return higher? In most markets the uncomfortable answer is: with the people already in the building. That is a genuinely difficult resource-allocation choice, and it should be named, not fudged. 80% is the new 100%. The job is to make the absolute most of the audience you have, not to mourn the one that left.

The engine is narrow — which is both the risk and the opportunity

The youth surge is concentrated. Anime, games and horror are doing the heavy lifting; China’s recovery is essentially one film; Japan’s record is essentially two. When the tentpole pipeline thins, the surge thins with it. PVR’s counter-bet - leaning into original and regional content to smooth blockbuster volatility - is the most interesting hedge, and also the right instinct.

But there is a far more encouraging way to broaden the base, and it is already happening: repertory. The Letterboxd generation (let’s agree to call them that instead of the ‘TikTok generation’) has rediscovered old films with an enthusiasm that should make every programmer sit up. Letterboxd has passed 15 million users, up from under two million in 2020, with half under 35. That online enthusiasm converts to ticket sales: Studio Ghibli reissues, the Coolidge Corner programming more rep than ever, Bristol’s Watershed moving a screening of Edward Yang’s Yi Yi to a bigger room when 170 turned up instead of the expected 40 - most of them young.

So taste can be broadened, because the appetite is already there; it just discovers films through Letterboxd and TikTok (Ok, also that) rather than a quarter-page newspaper ad. The bad habits to kill off are the ones calibrated to an older comfort audience: treating repertory as a graveyard slot, programming by prestige reflex, and the lazy assumption that “young” means “franchise only.” Distributors take note too, please - restorations now have a paying young audience. It matters more than (it pains me to write) a BluRay release.

Habit is the prize — and Cineville is not available everywhere

The French data is the real warning. High reach, thinning frequency: 15-24s went 4.2 times in 2023, down from 6.3 in 2016. Once-a-year attendance is not a business, but sad end of event-based cinema viewing. The single most valuable thing exhibitors can do is currently convert occasional young viewers into habitual ones… and subscriptions are the proven lever.

Cineville is the standout. Between 50% and 66% of members are under 35, the average member is 35 - a full generation younger than the typical arthouse crowd - and it has crossed borders from the Netherlands into Belgium, Austria, Germany and now Sweden, where members have started listing it on their dating profiles. Membership as identity. It returns roughly 85% of the average ticket price (€9.50) to cinemas. The North American loyalty schemes growing 15%, and Paris’s CinéPass, tell the same story from different angles.

The rub: an unlimited model like Cineville suits collaborative arthouse networks and doesn’t exist in most territories. So what does a single-site operator in a market without one do? Build the lightweight version. Student pricing (a New Jersey cinema near Rutgers sells $5 matinees on a campus ID). Local membership and festival-style passes. A regular events calendar that gives people a reason to come back next month, not next year. The brand doesn’t transfer everywhere; the principle does, which is to make attendance a habit and an identity, not a one-off transaction.

They spend — and the collectibles play is the vinyl play

Encouragingly, the youth audience monetises well. In France, 57.7% of 15-24s bought popcorn on their last visit, against 38.7% overall, and Fandango finds Gen Z spends more per trip on concessions and premium screens. The economics are healthier than the frequency figures alone suggest.

The collectibles opportunity maps almost exactly onto the vinyl boom. Vinyl sales have grown around 18% a year for five years, about 60% of Gen Z buy records, and - tellingly - roughly 40% of US buyers don’t own a turntable. They are buying the object: the aesthetic, the limited edition, the variant, the thing on the shelf you photograph for your followers. Marketers call it symbolic consumption.

The cinema equivalent is the popcorn bucket that breaks the internet, the numbered ticket, the variant poster, the exclusive screening merch. This is not gimmickry (asI have written about before), as much as the same instinct that turned a sandworm-shaped tub into a cultural event. The Letterboxd “loggable” visit and the vinyl “trophy on the shelf” are the same impulse, so give them an artefact to take home and share. (The same instinct, incidentally, is reviving Blu-ray and DVD among the young. Finally!)

A reality check — and a word to the old guard

Much of the coverage sells cinema as the antidote to loneliness and digital fatigue - the phone-free sanctuary. There is truth in it: the Marmalade Trust found 67% of young Britons feel lonely at least weekly, and as drinking and clubbing decline, the cinema is becoming, in Europa Cinemas chief Fatima Djoumer’s phrase, “a new kind of night out.” But two cautions. The social story is messier than it looks; France logged a record level of solo attendance in 2025. And, more importantly, cinema is a pleasure and a balm, not a treatment. Sell the dark, the room, the shared pulse - but don’t oversell the multiplex as a substitute for genuine mental-health support. A film is two hours of escape, not a care plan.

Finally, a cultural adjustment for the industry’s old guard. The audience keeping the lights on dresses up as its favourite characters, claps at the screen, cosplays Demon Slayer in the stalls, takes photos of the film intro for InstaGram (the subject of a future article), films the foyer for TikTok and turns up in suits to Minions sequels. This is what a healthy young audience actually looks like. The instinct to tut at it (so delulu) is the instinct to lose it. So expect more Gentleminions, more weird anime outfits, more lobby content and get used to it, Gen Xers. Because it beats an empty auditorium. No cap.

Young people are the future of cinema, to state the bleeding obvious. The hard part - the now what? - is refusing to coast on the headline: accept that 80% is the new 100%, make ruthless choices about where to spend, turn occasional visitors into members, programme for a taste broader than you assume, sell them something to take home, and let them enjoy the room their own way. Then tell me whether Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc is canon a movie.

Imagine walking into a bookshop where every title on the shelves was published in the last twelve months. Want a copy of Middlemarch, or Beloved, or last decade’s prize-winner? Sorry. Out of print. You can have it on an eReader, possibly, if the licence has not lapsed and the file has not been quietly delisted, but a physical copy is simply not available, and neither is the audiobook. Your book club, meanwhile, is permitted to discuss only books published this season. Anything older is off the social table.

It sounds absurd. No literate culture would tolerate it for even a fortnight. Yet swap “book” for “film” and “bookshop” for “cinema” and you have described, with only mild exaggeration, the situation that the moving image has lived with for most of its existence. The overwhelming majority of screens, on any given week, play the overwhelming majority of titles released in the previous month or two. The back catalogue is treated as someone else’s problem (the streamer’s, the archive’s, the collector’s), and the audience is gently trained to believe that cinema is a thing that happens to new films and only new films. A fresh produce counter, if you will, not a wine cellar, to mix in a few more more metaphors.

The strange part is that this is no longer remotely necessary. And a growing, mostly young audience has worked that out faster than the exhibition industry has.

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The appetite is already here

Repertory cinema has never been more popular (read that again), and it is younger audiences driving it. The clearest barometer is Letterboxd, which passed 27 million users in early 2026, having added roughly 9 million in a single year, with more than half of the base under 35. The telling number is not the headcount but the behaviour. Letterboxd’s own year-in-review data has long shown that current-year releases make up under a quarter of everything its members log. People are not joining to fire off star ratings of this weekend’s blockbuster. They are logging, ranking, listing and arguing about old films, in volume, for pleasure.

This is a genuine shift in literacy, not a fad. A generation raised on infinite catalogue, fan edits and clip culture has developed a fluency in film history that simply did not exist on this scale before. They will travel for a 4K restoration. They will queue for a midnight screening of something their parents have never heard of. The American Cinematheque in Los Angeles has tripled its membership since before the pandemic, and the average age in the auditorium has fallen, not risen.

The technology has never been less of an excuse

Here is where the bookshop analogy breaks down in cinema’s favour. The supply problem is, for practical purposes, solved.

Park Circus alone licenses over 25,000 back-catalogue titles from the major Hollywood, British and French libraries, available to any cinema that wants them, from a single-screen community venue to a multiplex chain. Fathom has built an entire business on event re-releases and packs auditoriums nationwide with films that are decades old. Set that against the streamers, whose libraries quietly shrink year on year as licences lapse and the strategy tilts towards originals. Netflix in the US now carries fewer than 8,000 titles in total (films and series combined), and a much-cited audit once found only 31 of IMDb’s top 250 films available on the service. Put bluntly, a cinema today has more old films to choose from than the world’s largest streamer offers its subscribers.

The plumbing has caught up too. A 35mm or 70mm print still carries the highest cachet, and rightly so, but the everyday workhorse is the DCP, and an enormous and growing slice of the repertory catalogue now exists as one. On-demand fibre connection pull means a cinema can order a title and have it on the server almost immediately, with no print to ship, insure or return. The friction that once made a one-off rep screening a logistical headache has largely evaporated.

And crucially, cinemas have never been better at speaking to their own audiences. The direct relationship (mailing lists, memberships, social channels, Letterboxd HQ pages) means a venue no longer needs a distributor’s marketing spend to fill a room. It can find the people in its own postcode who have rated every Hou Hsiao-hsien film four stars or above and tell them precisely when the print is going up.

So the technology is not the bottleneck. The catalogue is not the bottleneck. The audience is demonstrably not the bottleneck. So what is?

The bottleneck is inertia

What stands in the way is the booking grid, and the habits/contracts baked into it.

Inflexible booking patterns mean cinemas are still contractually playing family animation in slots long after the children it was made for are in bed. If a film underperforms on its opening weekend, a venue frequently cannot simply play it less from Monday. And when an unexpected hit lands (think of the way something like The Backrooms over-performed against every projection), there is barely room to add the showtimes the demand is screaming for, because the grid was locked weeks earlier.

Serena Black of Everyman put her finger on exactly this at the recent UKCA conference in London: the rigidity of the schedule is what trips up repertory ambition [she OK:ed the attribution, at this otherwise Chatham House rules panel]. When you cannot flex your showtimes to meet a surprise, you cannot carve out reliable space for the planned, curated, lower-certainty programming that repertory by its nature requires. The blockbuster grid does not just compete with the back catalogue for screens. It removes the slack that would let the back catalogue exist at all.

This is why, for now, it is overwhelmingly the cinematheques and the dedicated independents reaping the reward of this new literacy. When Bristol’s Watershed programmes an obscure Taiwanese title, or Swedish Film Institute’s Cinemateket puts on a Georgian film, young audiences turn up in numbers that would have been unimaginable ten or twenty years ago. That is wonderful. But it is also a quiet indictment. Why should this be the preserve of the specialist venues? Every multiplex has the kit, the catalogue access and the audience data to run its own cinematheque screen. One auditorium, programmed with intent. The barrier is not capability; it is the will to break the grid.

The shadow over all of it

There is a longer-term reason this matters, and it is not a sentimental one. We can only screen what survives.

The Academy’s Digital Dilemma reports laid the problem out with uncomfortable clarity well over a decade ago, and almost nothing about the underlying physics has changed since. There is no digital archival format with anything close to the proven, century-plus longevity of properly stored film. Keeping a 4K digital master costs many times more per year than a film master, and a fully born-digital production more again. The Council found cases of digital content becoming unreadable after eighteen months. A film can sleep in a cold vault for fifty years and wake up fine. A hard drive cannot. (Heard the one about how Toy Story 2 was almost completely wiped and only saved by WFH?)

So picture the failure case. We celebrate a repertory boom, we let preservation drift, and in fifty years the only “old” films reliably available to screen are the handful that someone took the trouble to keep alive: an eternal loop of Nolan in 70mm and whatever else happened to be shot on, or backed up to, something durable (like the current arthouse fad for VistaVision). A stack of dead drives where a heritage used to be. The richest cinema history any audience has ever had access to would have been allowed to rot, not for want of demand, but for want of good housekeeping.

Let this be the start, not the peak

The encouraging reading is that we have every ingredient. An audience that has taught itself to love old films. A supply chain that can deliver almost any of them within hours. Venues that can market straight to the exact people who want them. We are not at the summit of the repertory revolution. We are at the foothills, looking up, and mistaking base camp for the view from the top.

Getting higher does not require new invention. It requires flexibility in how cinemas book and schedule, the nerve to give the back catalogue a permanent home on the grid rather than the occasional indulgent one-off anniversary-related screening, and a serious, funded commitment to preserving far more than we currently bother to.

The cinematheques and specialist screens have shown what the appetite looks like. The rest of the exhibition industry should treat that not as a niche to admire from a distance, but as a proof of concept to scale. Let us be the people who started the renaissance, not the ones who happened to inadvertently be standing at its peak.

The Wall Street Journal reported on 21 May that IMAX has approached entertainment companies as potential buyers, with the stock jumping roughly 15% on the news and Benchmark lifting its price target from $44 to $60. The process is, by every account, early. A source told CNBC that IMAX has held only “preliminary talks” through intermediaries and that no formal pitches have been made. None of which has stopped the analyst community from publishing buyer lists running to nine and ten names.

It is worth slowing down before working through those lists, because the IMAX situation is not what most coverage is making of it. (I wrote in December about how Wall Street finally learned to love IMAX; this is what happens next.) Let’s dive in on what is actually likely to happen next.

Two stories, one company

What broke last week is two stories that have been quietly merging for months.

The first is the strategic one. At IMAX’s investor day on 4 December, CEO Rich Gelfond told shareholders that the company was “an incredibly valuable player, either as a wholly differentiated publicly-traded company or as part of a larger company with the keys to unlock even greater value.” That was the formal signal. Wall Street heard it, and the share price has reflected it ever since.

The second story is harder to write about, but cannot be left out. On 30 March, IMAX announced that Gelfond was on temporary medical leave undergoing treatment for pneumonia. He has since returned to work. Gelfond is 70. He bought IMAX in a leveraged buyout in 1994, became co-CEO that year and sole CEO in 2009. His current contract runs to 2028. There is no publicly identified successor. He is Warren Buffett without a Greg Abel, let alone a Charlie Munger.

The senior team that covered during his absence (Natasha Fernandes as CFO, Anne Globe as CMO, Rob Lister as Chief Legal Officer, Mark Welton as President of IMAX Theatres) is genuinely strong, but none of them is currently positioned as the heir - even if there might be a Josh D’Amaro amongst them. Board Chair Darren Throop ran point. That is a holding pattern rather than a succession plan, and Wall Street understands the difference. Once you accept that the company is at a transition point that does not have an obvious internal answer, a sale process looks less like opportunism and more like prudent governance.

What is actually being sold

The single most important thing to understand about an IMAX sale is what the buyer would actually be acquiring. IMAX is not a cinema operator. (Read that again.) It owns and runs almost no theatres. What it owns is:

• A proprietary projection, audio, and remastering technology stack (including a small but expanding 70mm film footprint).

• A licensing relationship with roughly 1,860 sites across 91 countries, which pay for installation, maintenance, and a share of box office.

• A globally recognised consumer brand that audiences will demonstrably pay a premium ticket price for, even when they cannot quite articulate why.

• An increasingly entrenched position in the production pipeline through “Filmed for IMAX,” with directors from Christopher Nolan to Ryan Coogler treating it as a creative format rather than a distribution upcharge.

• IMAX China, fully consolidated in 2023 at $124 million when the parent took the Hong Kong-listed minority private.

That is an asset-light, royalty-driven, brand-led business. It happens to live inside cinema, but it is much closer in shape to a Dolby or a Bose than to an AMC or a Cineworld. Any buyer analysis has to start there, because it disqualifies most of the names being floated.

Who probably will not buy

The Hollywood studios are the first to fall away. Texas Capital’s Eric Wold made this point cleanly: a studio that owns IMAX would immediately face every other studio refusing to share box office and release windows with a competitor.

The IMAX calendar works because it is a neutral utility, fought over by everyone but owned by no one. The moment Disney or Warner controls the slate, half the value walks out. Disney’s announcement of Infinity Vision at this year’s CinemaCon (the de-facto PLF certification programme born out of being locked out of IMAX screens for the upcoming Avengers film, which lost out to Warner’s Dune: Part Three) tells you precisely how studios feel about needing IMAX. They resent the dependency. They are not going to deepen it by paying a $3 billion premium for the privilege. The exception, which proves the rule and is treated below, is Sony. (More on them later.)

The cinema circuits fall away for the same reason in reverse. Exhibitors privately refer to IMAX as “four blue letters” and the only thing they resent more than having an IMAX is when their competitor opens one. Cinépolis turns up on analyst lists, presumably because someone needs to put an exhibitor on the page, but no chain wants to control the slate that its competitors play. Kinepolis’s acquisition of Emagine in February (a $105 million deal for 14 sites and 177 screens with proprietary PLF brands) shows where exhibitor M&A is actually going: buying real estate and operations, not buying a licensor that the rest of the circuit has to deal with.

Who could, but probably will not

Netflix is on every list. It should not be. Netflix has spent a decade signalling that it does not believe in the theatrical model, and even its recent softening (the willingness to engage with exhibitors at CinemaCon, the longer windows on Greta Gerwig’s Narnia) is at most a course correction, not a conversion. Buying IMAX would commit Netflix to a theatrical strategy that the company has spent its institutional energy avoiding. Reed Hastings’s departure as Chair gives Netflix room to change direction. There is no evidence it wants to change this far.

Comcast/NBCUniversal could afford it and would understand it, but the regulatory environment for vertical integration in the US is what it is, and Universal already has its own complicated history with windows. (Tower Heist, anyone with a long memory?)

Who actually fits

That leaves four candidates worth taking seriously. Let’s look at them in turn.

Apple. Apple has the cash, the patience, and a content business (Apple TV) that is still searching for a theatrical identity (still waiting for the F1 follow-up film.). Buying IMAX would give Apple instant credibility at the premium end of cinema, a brand that consumers already associate with quality, and a technology platform that fits inside the broader Apple ecosystem story (the Vision Pro work, the audio business, the obsession with format ownership from Lightning to ProRes). The objection is cultural rather than strategic. Apple does not buy brands. It absorbs them. The 2014 $3 billion Beats acquisition, still Apple’s largest-ever deal (!), is the template: the streaming service was folded into Apple Music within eighteen months, the engineering talent was rolled into the in-house audio team, and the Beats marque now survives as a secondary line in a category dominated by AirPods. IMAX is a brand that does not absorb well, and a consumer franchise whose value depends on being visibly IMAX in every market it operates in.

Amazon. Amazon has been the most theatrically committed of the streamers since the MGM acquisition. Project Hail Mary opened to $28 million in IMAX in March and has since cleared $670 million globally. Amazon understands that prestige theatrical releases drive Prime Video subscriptions and that IMAX is the most efficient way to manufacture event-film positioning. The strategic logic is real. The regulatory friction is also real, and the China question (Amazon has effectively no Chinese consumer business; IMAX has 770+ locations there) is awkward. So is the fact that Amazon is no longer really a streamer with a sideline in theatrical. With MGM integrated, a growing originals slate, and a CinemaCon presence increasingly indistinguishable from a major studio’s, Amazon now sits inside the same studio-distrust problem outlined above. The other majors would no more want to share IMAX release windows with an Amazon-owned IMAX than with a Warner-owned or Universal-owned one. The strategic logic that gets Amazon to the table is also what would make every other studio walk away from it.

Sony. Sony is the one studio that has already crossed the line. Its $200 million acquisition of Alamo Drafthouse in June 2024 put a major Hollywood studio back in the exhibition business for the first time since the Paramount Consent Decrees were rescinded in 2020, folded into a new Sony Pictures Experiences division alongside the Wonderverse and Wheel of Fortune Live touring assets. Sony also owned the Loews chain in the 1990s before selling it to AMC, so there is institutional muscle memory here. On the content side, Crunchyroll gives Sony a niche but profitable streaming platform with the largest anime subscriber base in the West, and the December 2024 capital and business alliance with Kadokawa deepened the Japanese IP pipeline that feeds it. All of which maps directly onto IMAX’s expanding fourth silo of anime and local-language tentpoles. Tony Vinciquerra has been the most arm’s-length of the studio chiefs on theatrical economics, and Sony does not have a Disney+ or a Peacock to defend.

The objection is structural and specific to IMAX. Sony’s track record in cinema technology is a graveyard. SDDS, the digital sound format that competed with Dolby and DTS through the 1990s and 2000s, was quietly retired. SXRD, Sony’s digital cinema projector platform, was wound down in 2020, leaving Christie, Barco, Sharp (NEC), and IMAX itself as the surviving names in the auditorium. Sony Entertainment Access Glasses, the closed-captioning eyewear that briefly looked like a real accessibility standard, was also discontinued. The pattern is consistent: Sony enters cinema technology with conviction, and walks away when the unit economics get hard. IMAX is fundamentally a cinema-technology business. The question for Sony’s board is not whether they want the brand, the licensing network, and the filmmaker relationships (they probably do). It is whether they have the institutional patience to keep the technology stack alive once the integration honeymoon ends. That is the kind of question that gets you a discount on your bid, not a premium.

Sphere Entertainment. Benchmark’s Mike Hickey flagged Sphere as the most compelling strategic fit, and on the substance he is right. Sphere has just secured a $1.7 billion deal with the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi for a second full-scale venue on Yas Island, plus the planned “mini-Sphere” at National Harbor. The Sphere segment generated $266 million in revenue in Q1 2026, up 69% year-on-year. The company has a thesis (immersive premium experience as a venue category) and is in expansion mode. IMAX would give Sphere a 1,860-site distribution network it cannot replicate organically, a filmmaker ecosystem it does not have, and a way to push immersive content through cinema while it builds the venue footprint. The objection is balance-sheet size. Sphere’s market cap sits around $1.6 billion. IMAX’s is around $1.9 billion and the takeout premium would push the deal toward $3 billion. James Dolan would need outside capital, almost certainly from the same sovereign-backed pool that just underwrote Yas Island. That is not impossible. It might even be the most likely combination on the board. (A dark horse here is Cosm, which was valued at USD $1 billion in a recent $250 million funding round.)

The buyer of last resort

The phrase “sovereign-backed entertainment investors” appears in almost every analyst note this week and is doing a lot of work. PIF, Mubadala, ADQ, and QIA have all been writing entertainment cheques. None of them needs a Hollywood operating thesis to justify owning a global premium-cinema brand. If a strategic buyer cannot get to a number, a sovereign vehicle (possibly in partnership with Sphere, possibly alone) is the structurally cleanest exit. Unless the Strait of Hormuz remains closed much longer.

Why this question does not go away

Even if these talks lead nowhere (and IMAX has been transparent that they may not), the underlying question is now permanent. The CEO succession is unresolved. The business is at peak operating performance: a record $1.28 billion at the 2025 global box office, a path to $1.4 billion in 2026 with Dune: Part Three, The Odyssey, and Mandalorian and Grogu, and a premium-format share that has roughly doubled since 2019. You sell into strength, not weakness. Wall Street knows this, the board knows this, and Rich Gelfond signalled in December that he knows it too.

The interesting question is no longer whether IMAX gets sold. It is whether the eventual buyer treats the four blue letters as a brand to protect, a technology to absorb, or a distribution network to repurpose. Each of those answers would reshape the premium-format market in a different direction, and would change what every operator who has an IMAX screen, or wants one, should be planning for next.

Somewhere in Universal’s North Hollywood marketing offices this month, a team is staring at a calendar with 1 July circled and trying to predict the unpredictable. Minions & Monsters opens that day in the United States (24 June across most of EMEA), and it arrives at the end of a four-year stretch in which audience behaviour at family-film tentpoles has become genuinely difficult to model. The studio knows a viral moment will probably happen. It does not know what shape it will take. And it knows that being visibly seen to manufacture one is now the surest way to kill it.

That is a different problem from the one Universal faced in July 2022, when Minions: The Rise of Gru opened to record numbers and a TikTok trend that nobody at the studio had predicted but which the official Universal Pictures account embraced within 24 hours. (”To everyone showing up to @Minions in suits: we see you and we love you.”) The #GentleMinions moment, in retrospect, was the watershed. It established that a teen-driven, costume-based, performative-for-camera cinema-going behaviour could move tickets in measurable numbers. It also established that the cleanup costs (the £1,300 in refunds at one Vue site over a single weekend, the bananas on the screen, the formal-attire bans at Odeon) would land on the exhibitors rather than the studio.

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Whose Cinema Is It, Anyway?

It is worth pausing on what Gentleminions actually was, before the cleanup invoices coloured the industry’s memory of it. In July 2022, with cinemas still nervously rebuilding from two lost years, a generation that had been told it would never return to the multiplex turned up in suits, in groups, performing for each other and for TikTok. It was the first post-Covid mass assertion that going out together collectively was something Gen Z still wanted to do, and the cinema was the venue they chose. In hindsight, that was the more important signal than the £1,300 in refunds.

The numbers have since caught up with the cultural cue. Cinema United’s December 2025 “Strength of Theatrical Exhibition” report established Gen Z as the most active moviegoing demographic, with average attendance of 6.1 visits per year (up from 4.9), and 41% of the cohort attending six or more times annually (up from 31% in 2024). Fandango’s January 2026 study reached the same conclusion through different methodology and added the detail that Gen Z spends more per visit on concessions and premium formats than older audiences. The generation that exhibitors quietly worried they had lost to the smartphone is now propping up the recovery.

That changes the frame for everything that follows. The question is not whether Gen Z should be allowed into cinemas behaving the way they do. The question is what the industry does with its most valuable customer base. Wishing they would sit silently like an idealised Boomer audience is both commercially foolish and historically illiterate: Boomer cinema-going included plenty of its own unruly chapters (the screaming Beatles film screenings of the mid-1960s, the dance-along culture around Saturday Night Fever, the early Rocky Horror Picture Show tradition that essentially invented the modern participatory model from 1976 onward), and silent-era audiences before that were rowdier still. Only the stoners watching 2001 - A Space Odyssey were truly chill. Every generation has performed its cinema attendance in its own way. This one is just doing it with phones in hand and an algorithm watching.

What has happened since is harder to summarise as a single trend, because there has not been one. There have been at least (count them) three.

Three Audiences, Not One

The instinct after #ChickenJockey was to say that audience behaviour had escalated linearly, from suits-and-cheering in 2022 to popcorn-throwing and live chickens in 2025. That is half right. The disruptive ceiling has certainly risen. But the more interesting story is the trifurcation of the cinema audience into three quite distinct participation cultures, and the very different commercial implications of each.

Engineered chaos. This is the Chicken Jockey lineage and the late-stage evolution of Gentleminions. It is meme-driven, performed primarily for the smartphone camera rather than the screen, and the disruption is the point. The demographic skews young (often pre-teen and unsupervised), the merchandise opportunity is minimal, the operational cost is high, and the cinema becomes effectively inaccessible to neurodivergent and disabled patrons in the process. Cinema United’s voluntary guidelines memo in April 2025, the police call-outs at Apple Cinemas and elsewhere, the New Jersey theatre requiring parental supervision for a PG film: these were the sector’s belated attempt to put a fence around a phenomenon it had previously celebrated. Worth noting that A Minecraft Movie will eventually still clear over a billion dollars worldwide (it’s currently resting at $961 million), so the studio’s internal calculus on whether the chaos is “worth it” is straightforward. The exhibitors’ is not.

Curated event. This is the Barbenheimer lineage and, since early 2024, the collectible-bucket economy. Dune: Part Two‘s sandworm bucket was the inflection point, and the Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 limited-edition metal tin (which I watched costumed kids eagerly buying while their parents hoovered nearby, after a Stockholm screening last autumn) sits squarely in that lineage. Behaviour stays within bounds, the audience tends to attend in family or friend-group configurations, and the studio captures real revenue from ancillary merchandise. The participatory energy is converted into spend rather than mess. Wicked sat awkwardly between this category and the next, with its sing-along culture mostly self-policing but occasionally tipping into the disruption that prompted exhibitor warnings. The Devil Wears Prada 2 girls’-night-out phenomenon belongs here too, and its now-routine screen-filming has quietly turned the copyright headache into a year-round problem rather than a four-tentpoles-a-year one.

Reverent fandom. This is the category that gets least attention in the trade press and that the wider exhibition industry should arguably be studying hardest. Anime theatrical releases (the Demon Slayer infinity castle run, the Jujutsu Kaisen features, the steady Ghibli reissue circuit, the neverending Crunchyroll-Sony output) consistently produce packed, costume-heavy, deeply engaged screenings that almost never generate cleanup invoices or police call-outs. Japanese cinema-going norms (silence during the screening, applause at the end, at most a cheer-along) have travelled with the IP, and Western anime fandom has largely adopted them as part of the authenticity package. Cosplay is treated as honouring the work rather than performing for an algorithm. Per-cap spend tends to be high. The category exists. It is profitable. It causes no operational pain. The wider industry has not yet asked itself why.

What Universal Can Actually Do

Against that three-part backdrop, Universal’s Minions & Monsters marketing team has a finite set of levers, and the interesting question is which combination they pull.

The film itself is unusually well-suited to influencing the outcome. Set in 1920s Old Hollywood, framed as a pastiche of the silent-era monster movie, with Christoph Waltz as a director, Jeff Bridges as a studio head and Trey Parker in the cast, it carries enough cinephile DNA to plausibly attract an older, more reverent audience alongside the under-15s. The Universal Monsters cosplay community is real, adult, and historically well-behaved. The studio could, in principle, push the marketing toward category two or even category three rather than passively waiting to land in category one.

The levers that will signal which way they are leaning:

Trailer engineering. Chicken Jockey worked because the line was already in the trailer; the audience simply had to claim it. Watch the next two M&M trailer drops for the moment Universal is hoping the audience will pick up. The lesson of the last four years is that this signalling has to feel discovered rather than provided.

The bucket and the merchandise tier. A 1920s film canister, a director’s clapperboard, a Universal Monsters-style coffin: any of these would be a deliberate steer toward the curated-event category and would convert participation energy into ancillary revenue. A Minion-in-tux 2.0 collectible would be a Gentleminions callback. The absence of a marquee bucket announcement would suggest Universal is content to let the under-15s decide.

Creator seeding. Paramount’s TikTok secret-screening deal in January 2026 is the new template: pre-release access for influencers in exchange for shaped pre-release conversation. If Universal runs a similar play with Minions-adjacent creators in the fortnight before release, expect a coordinated category-two roll-out. If it does not, the studio is betting on (or accepting) organic category one.

The dual-messaging problem. The 2022 “we see you and we love you” tweet cost exhibitors real money. The interesting question for 2026 is whether Universal’s social team has reconciled the tension between studio social media (which gains from the chaos) and exhibitor relations (which pays for it). Watch whether the public messaging this time around is markedly more restrained than four years ago.

The exhibitor briefing. Post-Chicken Jockey, the smart play is to give Cinema United, UNIC, the UKCA and the major European chains an early heads-up with coordinated guideline notes, possibly at CineEurope or even sooner. Whether that happens, and how visibly, will tell you a great deal about how the studio has internalised the last three years. Universal were confident and bold at their CinemaCon showcase, but M&M is a tricker beast to manage than The Odyssey.

The Honest Landing

None of these levers are guarantees. Audiences this side of TikTok have a fraud detector calibrated to the millisecond, and being seen to manufacture a viral moment kills it. Universal almost certainly knows this, which is why their actual strategy is probably less “engineer the moment” than “be ready for any of three moments and respond fast.” What they are building this month is contingency: a category-one playbook, a category-two playbook, a category-three playbook, and the discipline not to commit to any of them until the first weekend’s social signal arrives.

The honest answer to whether Minions & Monsters will spark another Gentleminions, then, is: probably yes, in some form, and Universal will partly shape it but will not control it. The more interesting question, and the one worth watching this summer, is whether the wider exhibition industry has finally learned the lesson that the anime distributors have been quietly demonstrating for a decade: that participatory cinema can be deeply profitable and operationally manageable at the same time, provided someone has thought about the architecture in advance rather than reacting to it on the morning shift.

We will know by mid-July which category the audience picked. I will write the follow-up. Until then, fittingly enough given where the participatory cinema tradition really started, the entire exhibition sector sits in the dark, shivering with antici...

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...PATION!

There is a moment, somewhere around the end credits of One Piece Film: Red, when the auteur Eiichiro Oda is still talking. The film has finished. The lights are coming up. And yet the commentary, piped through one earbud while the other ear catches the last strains of Ado’s vocals from the cinema speakers, runs on for another three minutes. Oda has more to say, and a sufficient number of One Piece obsessives are willing to sit there and listen that nobody is getting up.

This is not, strictly speaking, a film screening any more. Instead, it is something closer to a live event with a recorded co-host: a hybrid format that Japan has been quietly developing for nearly a decade, that the United States has just discovered via Project Hail Mary, and that the rest of the global exhibition industry would be wise to start paying attention to. At the SAWA Global Conference in London last week (which I had the pleasure of moderating) Max Nakano of Sunrise Company presented to the world’s cinema advertising community on the HELLO! MOVIE app and noted, in passing, a fact about Japanese cinema-going that landed harder than perhaps was intended: audiences in Japan routinely return to see the same film five, sometimes ten times. Audio-enhanced screenings are not the only reason this happens. They are, however, one of the levers being deliberately pulled to make it happen.

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Japanese exhibition has spent two decades building an entire ecosystem around the assumption that a sufficiently engaged viewer will come back. Weekly-changing admission gifts (the recent Demon Slayer release reportedly cycled through around twenty different bonus items), parallel screenings in 4DX, IMAX and Dolby Cinema, cheer-along screenings (応援上映), in-character dub variants, and now audio-enhanced commentary tracks. Shunsuke Morishima, who handles distributor communications for HELLO! MOVIE at Sunrise, was precise about this, explaining it to me: the five-to-ten-times figure is the cumulative result of these initiatives working in combination. HELLO! MOVIE is one ingredient among several, not the whole recipe. But it is an instructive ingredient, because the technology and the audience behaviour underneath it travel particularly well.

The Japanese template

HELLO! MOVIE, developed by the Tokyo-based audio specialists Evixar, began life as accessibility infrastructure. It is a free smartphone app that uses audio fingerprinting (the same fundamental technology that powers Shazam) to recognise what film you are watching and play synchronised content into your earphones, with no input required from the cinema and no special data files to deploy. For the visually impaired, it provides audio description. For the hearing impaired, paired with EPSON Moverio smart glasses, it superimposes Japanese subtitles. So far, so admirable, so niche.

The interesting part is what happened next. Around 2019, the One Piece franchise (never knowingly under-merchandised) experimented with offering an additional commentary track via the same app, branded “SBS” after the long-running Shitsumon o Boshū Suru (質問募集) reader-questions section in Eiichiro Oda’s manga. By the time Film: Red arrived in 2022, this had escalated into something quite remarkable: a special “fukuonsei jōei” (副音声上映, secondary-audio screening) of the film featuring Oda himself plus director Goro Taniguchi, answering 35-odd questions from fans about the making of the picture, the colour theory of the visuals, the relationship between the manga and the film, and a great deal more besides. Film: Red went on to gross more than $137 million in Japan alone, sitting in the all-time top 10 for domestic releases, and the commentary screening was widely cited as one of the reasons audiences kept coming back.

What is striking, looking at the slate of titles HELLO! MOVIE now supports, is how mainstream this has become. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle. Detective Conan. One Piece. Trillion Game. The Studio Ghibli back catalogue. Kokuhō. ONE OK ROCK Detox Japan Tour 2025 at Nissan Stadium in Cinemas. The format has quietly expanded from accessibility tool to entertainment add-on to a recognised category of release, with its own promotional poster treatment (the distinctive “副音声上映決定!!” callout) and its own dedicated fanbase. And it would be a mistake, looking at that list, to file the repeat-viewing phenomenon under “Japanese fan culture for animated content.” Sunrise specifically point to Kokuhō, the live-action kabuki drama which became one of 2025’s defining Japanese releases, as a film whose audiences returned for multiple viewings. The behaviour is not anime-specific. It is engaged-audience-specific, which is a meaningfully different thing.

That fanbase is where the repeat-viewing claim starts to make sense. A widely-shared Rocket News piece from 2021, in which the author tries the HELLO! MOVIE secondary audio track for Gintama The Final, ends with the writer announcing they are heading back for a fourth viewing of the film: first three times for the picture itself, fourth time for the commentary, fifth time (presumably) to watch it “clean” again now that they know what to look for. The Evixar case study on Film: Red describes audiences sitting through the credits to hear Oda finish his thoughts, then explicitly recommending viewers watch the regular version of the film before attempting the commentary screening. Built into the format, in other words, is the assumption of the second visit. The commentary is for fans, and fans see things twice.

The American moment

On 3 April 2026, almost exactly the dynamic Japan has been refining for seven years arrived in North America, although it is being marketed as a brand new invention. TheaterEars, a Florida-based mobile audio platform best known for delivering Spanish-language tracks and audio descriptions in US cinemas, launched what it is calling “The Director’s Experience”: a free, synchronised, in-theatre director’s commentary by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller for their hit adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary. The technology is essentially the same as HELLO! MOVIE: download the app, plug in your earbuds, press play, and audio fingerprinting handles the sync within about thirty seconds. The film’s full theatrical mix continues to play through the cinema’s speakers; the commentary slips in between the dialogue, mixed for personal listening.

What makes this culturally significant, rather than merely technically novel, is timing and scale. Project Hail Mary’s 45-day domestic total now sits at $318.3 million, with $638.4 million worldwide, with critic and audience scores in the mid-nineties. It is one of the year’s defining sci-fi releases. The Lord & Miller commentary therefore lands not as an accessibility footnote but as a genuine event for a genuinely large fandom, and the response on social media has been, by turns, evangelical and slightly bewildered. Many viewers appear not to realise that director’s commentaries used to be standard on physical media, and are reacting as though the format itself has been invented from scratch.

Which, in a sense, it has. In-theatre commentary has prior art. Rian Johnson released DIY downloadable commentary tracks for The Brothers Bloom (2008), Looper (2012) and Knives Out (2019), the last of these accompanied by detailed instructions on when to hit play and a request not to disturb fellow patrons. Kevin Smith famously tried to get a Clerks II commentary out as a podcast during its theatrical run and didn’t quite manage it. But none of these had synchronised playback. They required the user to start the file at exactly the right moment and pray the cinema didn’t run a long advert reel. TheaterEars and HELLO! MOVIE remove that friction. The commentary just works.

Why this is a premium format, not a gimmick

The instinct of European exhibitors, in my experience, is to file this kind of thing under “interesting accessibility innovation” and move on. That would be a strategic error, and the reason it would be a strategic error connects directly to a thesis I have been developing in a separate piece on repertory cinema and music-streaming catalogue dominance.

The argument there is straightforward: as theatrical releases compress and the back catalogue becomes infinite via streaming, the cinema’s commercial future increasingly depends on giving audiences reasons to value a specific viewing (a particular print, a particular format, a particular event, a particular cinema) over the generic streamed version they could watch tonight. IMAX has built an empire on this principle, which Dolby Cinema and EPIC by Vue, with its HDR by Barco, are racing to catch up with. 4DX and ScreenX work the same lever. Premium large-format generally is a bet that you can charge more for the difference between a cinema screening and a sofa.

Audio-enhanced screenings sit precisely in this commercial space, but with three structural advantages that the haptic and visual premium formats do not have. They are essentially zero-cost to the exhibitor: no projection or speaker upgrades, no special data, no bookings system changes, the audience brings their own device and their own earphones. They are repeatable: a single film can support a regular screening, a director’s-commentary screening, a cast-commentary screening, an audio-description screening, a Spanish-language or French-language screening, all from the same DCP (NB: remember that studios HATE multiple DCP formats). And they are demonstrably stackable on top of demand the cinema already has, rather than requiring a separate auditorium build. The HELLO! MOVIE icon in the corner of a Demon Slayer poster does not displace the standard 2D screening. It adds a reason to come back.

This is the same insight that has powered Japan’s cinema sector to a record ¥274.4 billion box office in 2025: a structural shift in which long-running domestic hits hold prime afternoon slots and Hollywood blockbusters like Avatar: Fire and Ash get squeezed into 8.30 a.m. shows. The Japanese exhibition sector has worked out, ahead of everyone else, that fan culture monetises through repetition, and that audio commentary tracks turn the second viewing into something materially different from the first. The structural lesson for the West is not “we should do more anime.” It is “the economic logic of repeat-viewing fandom can be engineered, and audio is one of the cheapest engines available.”

The Caveat

The obvious objection (the one being made energetically on film Twitter/X as I type) is that any technology asking audiences to look at, or worse pick up, their phones during a screening is incompatible with the etiquette cinema is currently fighting to defend. The Alamo Drafthouse phone-payment row earlier this year captured the mood. There is genuine concern about audio bleed from earbuds, about the brightness of phones being checked mid-film, about the 0.7 percent of the audience who will inevitably have forgotten to charge their device and decide the solution is to plug into the wall socket on the back wall. These are real risks. They are also, in the Japanese experience, materially smaller than they look from the outside. Sunrise note that the HELLO! MOVIE app automatically minimises screen brightness during playback, and that to date they have not received reports of significant in-theatre incidents, in a context where Japanese audience etiquette is generally very strict. Audiences will need to be trained, and exhibitors will need to be honest about which screenings are commentary-enabled and which are not. But the etiquette problem appears, on the evidence so far, to be more solvable than the discourse suggests. It is not a reason to dismiss the format.

What to watch

For the global cinema advertising community at SAWA in London, the audio-enhanced screening format raises a question that Sunrise itself flagged on its closing slide: what happens when the synced audio in your ear is not a director’s commentary but an advertising message? Sunrise has been explicit that it is exploring this application of the technology, and it is easy to see why. An audio ad delivered through the viewer’s own earphones, geo-locked to the cinema, triggered by the actual film audio rather than fired off blindly, addressed to a self-selected fan who has gone to the trouble of installing your app: this is a meaningfully different proposition from a pre-show slide reel. Whether audiences will tolerate sponsored content in a format they currently associate with director’s confidences is the obvious risk. Whether that risk is greater than the one cinema advertising already runs with declining pre-show attention (and on-stage opposition from Sony Pictures at CinemaCon!) is a fair counter-question.

For European exhibitors, the parallel question over the next twelve months is not whether audio-enhanced screenings will arrive (they already have, in the form of TheaterEars-style accessibility apps that several territories are quietly piloting, for example Greta & Startk) but whether the local industry will lean into the premium-format opportunity or treat it purely as compliance infrastructure. The likely flashpoint will be a major studio release, possibly an animated tentpole or a prestige sci-fi title in the Lord & Miller mould, that ships with a synchronised commentary in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian on day one of its theatrical window. The first distributor to do this in EMEA has, I suspect, a quiet competitive advantage waiting. Ask me about it at CineEurope.

The longer-term question is more interesting still. If you accept the Japanese template (that this format is not really about accessibility, or even about director’s commentaries, but about giving the most invested members of an audience a structural reason to return for a third, fourth or fifth visit) then the addressable surface for audio-enhanced content extends well beyond commentary tracks. Cast Q&As, score-only mixes, in-universe radio plays, language-learning subtitle tracks, sponsored brand experiences, even live audio drops from the director on opening weekend or a send-up of the film by comedians and podcasters, for think-skinned film releases.

For a hundred and thirty years, cinema has sold one experience per ticket. The Japanese have spent a decade quietly proving you can sell several. The whisper in your ear, it turns out, might be the next thing the industry monetises.

A festival in Montreal has just done something that, judging from the reaction, you would think involved setting fire to the negative. On 25 April, the Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma screened Anne Émond’s Amour apocalypse (English title: Peak Everything) at 1.5 times its normal speed, compressing a hundred-minute film into sixty-six. The initiative, branded Les Moins Longs Métrages, was conceived to provoke a conversation about how a younger audience actually consumes moving images in 2026, and to drag that conversation into a cinema rather than letting it happen, as it usually does, on someone’s phone.

It worked. The film-maker François Delisle pulled his own film Le temps from the festival in protest, writing in Le Devoir that “projeter un film à une vitesse multipliée par 1,5 ‘afin de s’adapter aux habitudes de visionnement de la génération Z’, ce n’est pas une idée audacieuse. C’est une capitulation”. The columnist Patrick Lagacé in La Presse called it “L’apocalypse en accéléré” and dismissed the whole exercise as a betrayal of young cinephiles. RTL France reported the experiment as a worrying new habit infiltrating the cinema industry. Émond herself, who consented to the screening alongside her producer and distributor, told Radio-Canada that she had found the proposition “à la fois audacieuse et risquée”, and would not have agreed if her film were beginning its theatrical life rather than nearing the end of it.

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This is, in other words, the rare cinema-industry story where everyone gets to feel righteous. Which is usually a sign that the actual argument is being avoided.

The history we are pretending not to have

The first thing worth saying is that watching cinema at the wrong speed is not new, and the people most affronted by it tend to be the people who know the history least well.

Any projectionist of a certain vintage will tell you, with varying degrees of guilt, that on a quiet late-evening shift the last reel of the last film often ran a little faster than 24 frames per second. The motivation was rarely artistic. The bus home, the pub, a partner waiting up. Carbon-arc projectors had a tolerance for it, and by the time anyone in the auditorium noticed (and they generally did not), the credits were rolling and the house lights were up. Whole generations of cinemagoers watched the closing minutes of films at something closer to 1.05x or 1.1x without knowing, and the films, by and large, survived the indignity.

The PAL television standard turned this into industrial practice. Films shot at 24 frames per second have, for the better part of seventy years, been broadcast across European television at 25 frames per second, which speeds the picture up by roughly four percent and raises the audio pitch by a corresponding semitone unless corrected. Lawrence of Arabia, Apocalypse Now and Once Upon a Time in America have all been routinely transmitted to British, German, French and Swedish living rooms in slightly accelerated form for decades, and the protests have been, to put it mildly, muted. The directors went on collecting their residuals. The audiences went on watching.

Variable playback speed on YouTube is older than most of the people the Rendez-vous is trying to reach, having been available since 2010. Netflix rolled out 0.5x to 1.5x playback on Android in July 2020, having been called everything from a vandal to a grave-robber the previous October when the test was first spotted. Spotify, Audible and every podcast app on earth allow the same. A sizeable share of the younger audience has, in effect, never known a world in which the playback speed of recorded media was not something they got to set themselves.

Against that backdrop, treating the Rendez-vous experiment as a unique civilisational threat is a slightly precious position. The argument was settled, in industrial terms, around 1962.

What the festival actually did

What is genuinely novel about the Quebec experiment is the consent. The organisers did not strip a film off a hard drive and run it fast for laughs. They went to Émond, to her producer and to her distributor, secured agreement from all three, scheduled a single 1.5x screening on 25 April alongside a normal-speed presentation on the same day, and bolted on a panel discussion afterwards with the content creators Mounir Kaddouri and Ariane Brunet plus Bruno Dequen of the Association québécoise des critiques de cinéma. Laura Rohard, the festival’s director, told Radio-Canada the aim was to ask “comment peut-on faire en sorte que la jeune génération se réapproprie le cinéma québécois, en consomme et se déplace en salle?”, while making clear she would still rather young people watched films at normal speed.

This matters, because it is precisely the model the protest tradition (Apatow, Bird, Aaron Paul, Peter Ramsey, Delisle, et al) has spent the last seven years claiming Netflix violated. In late 2019, when Netflix’s variable speed test was first reported, Judd Apatow tweeted, in a line later quoted by Variety: “That’s not how it works. Distributors don’t get to change the way the content is presented.” He was wrong as a matter of fact (distributors do this all the time, and have done since the carbon-arc era), but he had a point as a matter of principle. A unilateral, blanket, every-title speed-up imposed on creators by a streamer is a very different proposition to a single, opt-in festival screening with the director on the panel afterwards. The Rendez-vous did the latter. It is hard to see what is being capitulated to.

The market research the festival pointed to is not gentle reading for anyone in exhibition. Quebec’s Observatoire des technologies des médias found that fifty percent of 18-to-34-year-olds had watched a video on accelerated playback in the previous month. Surveys cited by Netflix in its 2020 rollout post claimed that perceptions of content quality were not measurably affected by speed adjustments within a 0.5x-to-1.5x band. Studies on time-compressed speech have generally found that comprehension holds up to around 1.5x and degrades sharply beyond that, with memory retention falling faster than comprehension. None of this proves that 1.5x is a desirable way to watch Stalker. It does suggest that pretending the audience for Amour apocalypse on a Friday night and the audience for a Tarkovsky retrospective are the same audience, with the same tolerance for stillness, is a marketing strategy rather than an observation about humans.

What the directors are actually defending

When you strip away the language of art and intention and rhythm, what most of the protest is actually defending is runtime as currently practised. And runtime as currently practised has, by any honest measure, gone up.

Stephen Follows’ analysis of tens of thousands of theatrical releases between 1980 and 2025 found that the average runtime for wide theatrical releases rose from around 106 minutes in the 1990s and early 2000s to roughly 114 minutes in the current decade. Action films now average 128 minutes. Indiana Jones went from 115 minutes for Raiders to 154 minutes for Dial of Destiny. Mission: Impossible expanded from 110 minutes to 170. Killers of the Flower Moon ran 206 minutes. The Brutalist went past 215. Oppenheimer, at three hours, is now considered the safe end of Christopher Nolan. The average runtime of the top ten US box office films in 2022 was 141 minutes, up from 110 in 1981. A 2024 Talker Research poll of two thousand Americans found the median preferred feature length was 92 minutes; only fifteen percent thought films should run longer than two hours.

There is something a little awkward about a generation of film-makers who have presided over twenty percent runtime inflation suddenly discovering that pacing is sacred. Not all of them, to be fair. Plenty of working directors deliver tight, propulsive, ninety-five-minute features and would happily flog a studio executive who suggested another draft to “open it up”. But the loudest voices in the speed-watching argument have, almost without exception, been the directors with final-cut clauses and three-hour assemblies. Their problem is not really that the audience is in a hurry. Their problem is that the audience is voting with the playback slider on a thing that, twenty years ago, the editor would have trimmed before anyone outside the room saw it.

A modest proposal, in two parts

The Rendez-vous experiment is worth defending, with caveats. It involved consent. It was a single screening, not a policy. It treated young viewers as adults capable of having an opinion, and treated the director, her producer and her distributor as adults capable of giving permission. It is a model any festival, anywhere, could adopt without burning the temple down: one accelerated screening per edition, fully consented to, paired with a discussion, paired with a normal-speed screening of the same film on the same day. If a film-maker says no, the film does not run fast. If they say yes, you have a conversation worth having.

What it should not be is a default. Streamers offering 1.5x as an opt-in playback control on a phone is reasonable; algorithmically nudging anyone toward it, or shipping films pre-compressed, is not. The PAL speed-up survived because it was uniform, transparent and applied to a broadcast environment with its own technical constraints. A festival speed-up survives because it is opt-in, single-occasion and accompanied by a panel. The line between those uses and a streamer’s content-management algorithm deciding which seven minutes of your film nobody really needs to see is a real line, and worth holding.

But the directors who do not want their films watched at anything other than 24 frames per second have a much simpler remedy available to them than letters to Le Devoir. They could make the films shorter than three hours.

If the work earns its 180 minutes, audiences will sit through it without reaching for the slider; Oppenheimer grossed nearly a billion dollars at full speed. If it does not, no amount of moral pressure on a teenager in a Cinémathèque seat is going to fix what should have been fixed in the edit suite. The contract between film-maker and audience is, fundamentally, that you get the time you can justify. A projectionist sneaking ten percent off the last reel of a tired Tuesday-night double bill knew that. So, in their way, do the people running the Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma. So does Anne Émond, who wrote in La Presse that the discussion afterwards mattered to her more than the screening itself.

The audience has always been able to leave. Now it can speed up instead. That is not the death of cinema. It is a question, addressed to the people who make the films, about whether every minute they have asked us to sit through is genuinely worth the asking.

If the answer is yes, run it at 24fps. If the answer is no, we already know how this ends.

A full review of the key themes from CinemaCon 2026 will follow shortly. But one moment from last night’s Disney presentation at the Dolby Colosseum - named for the audio giant that sponsors the venue for the duration of CinemaCon - was too pointed to leave sitting in a longer piece.

There is a particular flavour of awkwardness reserved for those who have publicly bitten the hand that feeds them, only to return later asking to be fed again. Anthony and Joe Russo experienced it in concentrated form on Thursday evening in Las Vegas, in a room full of the very people they had spent the better part of four years insulting.

The brothers - who directed four MCU films that together grossed over $6 billion and are now back helming Avengers: Doomsday - previously told the world that the idea of the theatre as a sacred space is “bullshit” , and described the notion of going to a cinema as “elitist.” They said this while pivoting enthusiastically to streaming, describing Netflix as “easier to work with than a traditional studio” with a “more hands-off” approach. They made the comments while promoting The Gray Man in 2022 to a room of trade journalists. The room at CinemaCon on Thursday was rather different: 6,000-plus theatre owners and exhibitors crowding in for the Disney slate presentations, the people who built the careers the Russo brothers are now trying to revive.

The welcome they received was notably muted. This is not an impression I formed in isolation - a senior European exhibition executive I spoke to afterwards confirmed that I was not reading too much into it.

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The contrast with the reception given to Robert Downey Jr. (making his dramatic entrance in Doctor Doom’s green robes from the back of the Dolby Colosseum) could scarcely have been sharper. Downey made a dramatic entrance to the delight of CinemaCon attendees , the kind of reception that leaves no ambiguity about how a room feels. Chris Evans, similarly, was greeted warmly in his surprise return as Captain America. The Russo brothers were brought to the stage by Kevin Feige. They were politely received.

To understand why this matters, it helps to trace the arc of what happened in between the Russos’ two stints in the Marvel universe. Both Cherry and The Gray Man received negative reviews from critics. But it was their most recent directorial effort for Netflix that turned a pattern into a verdict. The Electric State, made for a reported $320 million - one of the most expensive film budgets of all time - was a catastrophe of almost operatic proportions. It sits at 15% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critical consensus reading: “Lumbering along like a giant automaton, The Electric State has plenty of hardware to back it up but none of the spark that’d make it come to life.” Its opening weekend drew 25 million views - below The Gray Man, below Damsel, below any number of modestly-budgeted Netflix originals, and leagues behind the streamer’s record-holder Red Notice, which scored nearly 80 million views in its first week. Plans for sequels and spin-offs appear to have been put on hold. A $320 million film that barely outperformed a Lindsay Lohan Christmas comedy. The home viewing experience that the Russos championed so enthusiastically turned out not to be particularly enthusiastic about them in return.

So here they are. Back at Marvel. Back in front of an audience they publicly dismissed. And the material they are bringing - Doomsday, a film that continues directly from Endgame, restores Steve Rogers, and delivers Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom - is genuinely exciting. The footage screened at CinemaCon drew strong reactions. Joe Russo described Doom as “not simply a villain - he’s one of the most complex Marvel characters. He’s always three moves ahead.” Nobody in that room doubts the commercial potential of the film. That is not really the question.

The question is whether exhibitors will prioritise it. And here the competitive landscape introduces a layer of genuine intrigue.

Avengers: Doomsday will have its US premiere on 18 December, the exact same day as Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three. Both films are among the most anticipated releases of the year, from filmmakers operating at the peak of their cultural capital. This is not Barbenheimer, where two very different films drew complementary audiences in a moment of collective theatrical enthusiasm. This is two major franchise tentpoles competing for the same premium screens on the same day - and critically, for IMAX.

Marvel confirmed at CinemaCon that Avengers: Doomsday will not be changing its December 18 date , despite the IMAX complication. The reason became clear almost immediately in the presentation: Disney announced Infinity Vision.

Infinity Vision is not a technology. It is not a new projection system, a new audio format, or an equipment specification that any cinema has to install. It’s not HDR, VDR, XDR or even IV-DR. It is effectively a certification for premium large format theatres, designed to tell audiences which auditoriums offer the biggest, brightest, and most immersive cinematic experiences, based on criteria including laser projection, premium audio, and screen size. Think of it as somewhere between the old THX quality stamp and the Kodak Screen Check - a brand promise layered over existing infrastructure. There are currently 75 Infinity Vision-certified PLFs in the United States, with 300 abroad. It will debut with the September re-release of Avengers: Endgame before rolling into Doomsday in December.

This is not, in fairness, an entirely novel concept. Disney did exhaustive auditing of premium cinema formats ahead of both recent Avatar films, and that work clearly informed what has become Infinity Vision. The studio has long wanted to reduce its dependency on a single premium format partner - the unspoken word in any discussion of Infinity Vision is, of course, ‘Four Blue Letters’ (i.e. IMAX). By moving away from the date and launching a competing certification at the same moment, Disney has confirmed that the studio intends to fight this battle rather than retreat from it.

Whether Infinity Vision gains meaningful traction may well be tested sooner than December. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, opening July 31, has already set an all-time 24-hour trailer record with 718 million views and is a Sony release - not Disney. But it sits squarely within the MCU ecosystem Kevin Feige oversees, and if Infinity Vision screens are prioritised for Brand New Day this summer, it would be an early and very public proof of concept. Plus buy-in from a non-Disney studio. Given that prediction markets currently have Spider-Man: Brand New Day as roughly a 45.5% probability to be 2026’s highest-grossing film globally (slightly ahead of Doomsday) the stakes of this summer’s exhibition conversation may exceed those of the December clash it nominally precedes.

All of which brings us back to the Russo brothers, standing on that stage on Thursday night, receiving their polite applause.

The film they have made may be excellent. The box office case for Doomsday is strong regardless of anyone’s personal feelings about its directors. Exhibitors are commercially rational actors, and a film tracking as a potential record-breaker will be programmed accordingly, cold shoulder or not. But cinema owners have long memories, and the Russos spent several years articulating, at volume, why those owners’ businesses were neither sacred nor particularly relevant to the future of film. The Electric State was supposed to be the proof. It was not. They are back asking for the big screens and the premium formats and the marketing partnerships they once derided.

The room in Las Vegas was polite. It was not warm.

There is a lesson in that, and it has nothing to do with Doctor Doom.

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