How Often Will Americans Go to the Movies From Here on Out?

In considering the North American box office few bother to acknowledge just how much more avid North Americans have long been about moviegoing compared to their counterparts even in other comparably affluent advanced industrialized countries. After the bottoming out of the post-TV crash in theater attendance in the 1960s they averaged around 4 trips to the theater per capita for a half century, up to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. By comparison Germans and Japanese were making less than 2 and usually more like 1 trip to the theater each year.

The result is that it was easy to picture Americans' moviegoing falling off significantly--with potentially huge implications for the size of the American box office, their attendance coming to look like that of Germans or Japanese reducing the grosses by half, two-thirds or even more, and indeed I wondered if we could not expect this to eventually happen.

My earlier expectation was that there would be a gradual decline, but instead we had the dramatic shock of 2020--and if subsequent years saw recovery that recovery still seems only very partial. As it happened in 2023 North Americans averaged just a little over two trips to the theater per year--still going more often than the pre-pandemic (and current) norm in Germany and Japan. Considering that by that year Americans' habit of moviegoing seemed to no longer be inhibited by the pandemic, while the year had a pre-pandemic-like slate of blockbusters, it seems plausible to think of it as (flops and all) constituting a "new normal"--the box office essentially stabilized at its current level (2023's take a bit under two-thirds of the pre-pandemic level in real terms, with a little less predicted for 2024).

That being the case the question becomes whether Hollywood can adjust to a new situation where the domestic box office is, thanks to the reduction in the number of American trips to the theater, 50-70 percent of what it was just a few years ago. Thus far I see little acknowledgment of the reality, let alone plans to make accommodation for it--just box office commentators grading the box office performance of big movies on a curve in line with their duties as claqueurs.