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I cover audience and moviegoing trends. I broke down how fandom is upending Hollywood, went inside PostTrak to find out why movies flop and looked at the lost movie palaces of L.A. Email me at matthew@theankler.com

Last October, a theater owner in Coshocton, Ohio, vented to me about everything that had gone wrong at his business since Covid. “People kind of got out of the habit of coming to the theater,” he said. “There haven’t been the movies there were before [the pandemic], and then you had the writers and actors strike.” The walkout lasted almost five months, further choking off the flow of new movies. All in all, he said, ticket sales had dropped 20 percent since pre-pandemic times.

The thing that kept him optimistic: “They’re saying 2026 is supposed to be back to a normal year.”

Last week at CinemaCon, that long-promised comeback was everywhere. Following the success of Project Hail Mary and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, fresh engines behind the purported comeback were on full display: extended theatrical windows, new large formats and several potential box office monsters (new Avengers, live-action Moana, Toy Story 5, the fourth Tom Holland Spider-Man film, The Odyssey).

Around Caesars Palace, the business of moviegoing looked like it was evolving in real time. At the candy counter, theater owners lamented missing the Dubai chocolate trend. In drinks, prebiotic sodas like Poppi are emerging as an important category. On the tech front, an interactive system called CtrlMovie is set to debut across 1,000 domestic screens early next year, allowing audiences to vote on narrative choices during a film.

But the most important conversations weren’t about concessions or gadgets. They were about the forces quietly reshaping the theatrical business: fewer movies, fiercer competition for premium screens and a growing reliance on platforms like TikTok to determine what actually breaks through.

I’ll get into the battles over Premium Large Format screens and TikTok’s expanding role in a moment, two topics that did not generate headlines (but really should have).

But first, the issue that underpins everything…

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I cover audience and moviegoing trends. I went inside PostTrak to find out why movies flop, looked at the lost movie palaces of L.A. and the coming IP that Gen Z will make or break. Email me at matthew@theankler.com

To understand why The Super Mario Galaxy Movie grossed $372.5 million worldwide during its five-day opening — the biggest tally for a title this year so far — start thinking like a fan.

“So many incredible moments that called back to my favorite moments of playing Mario from when I was a kid, all the way to my adulthood,” wrote one user on Rotten Tomatoes, where the blockbuster has an 89 percent rating from the site’s “Popcornmeter,” which tracks fan sentiment. (Critically, Super Mario Galaxy is rotten with a 42 percent score.)

“Every action scene and every sequence feels like a dream come true for Nintendo fans,” wrote another.

It’s not new to suggest media viewership has fragmented to the point where, excluding Taylor Swift and the NFL, monoculture no longer exists. But what has grown in its place is a collection of fanbases that build around properties, big and small, whose members feel they own the IP just as much as studios do — if not more. In this landscape, passionate communities — superfans who maintain extensive lore wikis (see Game of Thrones hub Wiki of Westeros), generate content around existing shows (check out one of the thousands of fanfic stories about The Pitt) and rabidly discuss it all online (the Marvel Studios subreddit receives more than 1 million visitors weekly) — act as the spark that lights the wider cultural fire.

On one recent tentpole action sequel, a prominent marketing executive associated with the film tells me, the biggest decisions revolved around how to handle easter egg character reveals.

“During testing,” he says, “they found that people would stand up and start cheering if they were fans of the original movie.” Enticing, then satisfying, that base became the campaign’s focal point.

In other words, the tail now wags the dog.

There are more ways than ever to go deeper on a property — from lore breakdowns to endless archives of clips and analysis. Even for any sitcom that’s had at least five seasons on air — think Malcolm in the Middle, Modern Family — there are online rabbit holes. Two-thirds of Gen Zs spend more time with fan-created content than with the official titles, according to a December 2025 Ogilvy Consulting study.

The barrier between creator and audience hasn’t just blurred. It’s disappeared.

Across platforms, fans aren’t just engaging with IP — they’re extending it, remixing it and, in many cases, outperforming the official versions studios control.

Roblox granted users the ability to create IP-based games with the rights holders’ approval. A user-generated game called Ink Game, based on Netflix’s Squid Game, has been played over 2.9 billion times. On social media, fans of specific films and TV shows create clip channels. And in the merchandising space, fans design their own apparel and goods based on existing titles — often with more skill and success than the studios’ own teams (more on that below).

USC professor Henry Jenkins has a name for this shift. Forget “appointment television.” Now it’s “engagement television,” where the audience never really leaves — and fandom becomes the most important part of the audience.

So how do you compete in a world where fans hold the power?

Today I’ll tell you what winning in this new system actually looks like:

• How a fan with 2 million Instagram followers became one of Hollywood’s most valuable marketing assets

• The fan platform that’s become one of the most valuable intelligence operations in entertainment

• The question nobody in Hollywood has answered yet: How much IP do you hand over before you lose the plot entirely?

• The fan who designed his own Scream 7 poster — and ended up getting paid for it by Paramount

• Why the PR person handling fan relations on a recent Disney tentpole was all wrong

• Why Disney licensing its characters to OpenAI was the most important signal in fandom this year

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I cover audience and moviegoing trends. I looked at the lost movie palaces of L.A., the coming IP that Gen Z will make or break and the struggle for films to stay memorable in the streaming era. Email me at matthew@theankler.com

Amazon MGM spent $75 million acquiring and marketing Melania, the Brett Ratner documentary about the First Lady. Reviewers hated it — the film currently has an 11 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes — and it was widely viewed as a naked attempt by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with the Trump administration. It grossed $16.4 million in the U.S. and Canada. Though that’s a healthy sum for a documentary, the pricey vanity project was still deemed a flop.

But there was one group of people who loved Melania: the handful who actually paid to see it in theaters.

Audience members surveyed by PostTrak, which polls moviegoers as they leave theaters, gave Melania 5 out of 5 stars, with an unheard-of 89 percent saying they would definitely recommend it.

“It was incredible, because I was reading the information coming in from PostTrak, and I was like, wait a second — for the people who wanted to go and see it, they love the movie,” says Aaron Feuer, VP of the movie group at Screen Engine/ASI, the research and data analytics firm that co-owns PostTrak with Comscore. Melania’s audience was older (72 percent were 55 and over) and left happy. The social media outlook online — which powerfully shapes sentiment about movies, especially among younger audiences — and the in-theater reception might as well have been about two entirely different films.

This gap is what PostTrak — the film industry’s standard currency for box office exit polling — exists to measure and explore. In an era when social sentiment, Rotten Tomatoes and algorithmic discourse shape how we talk about movies before most people have even had the chance to see them, PostTrak makes an old-fashioned argument: The only signal that matters is the person walking out of the theater.

“We’re saying, don’t listen to that noise,” says Kevin Goetz, the founder of Screen Engine/ASI and the architect of PostTrak. “Listen to the people who are actually showing up — or not.”

But even Goetz acknowledges a limit to what data can do. PostTrak can tell studios who showed up, what they thought and why — but it can’t force anyone to act on it. In an industry still driven as much by instinct, politics, relationships and precedent, evidence is often available. Whether Hollywood chooses to follow it is another question.

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How It Works

This disconnect comes at a precarious moment for the theatrical business. Despite a handful of breakout hits, including last weekend’s Project Hail Mary, box office remains well below pre-pandemic levels, and studios are still struggling to get audiences to show up consistently. Domestic box office for 2025 was barely up over the year before, and the future of theatrical is now a central fault line in Hollywood’s biggest strategic debates — from streaming-first models to David Ellison’s improbable promise of 30 movies a year in theaters under Paramount-Warner.

The question of who is actually going to the movies — and what will get them there — is now existential.

That’s what PostTrak is built to answer. Created in 2013, the company surveys audiences entering and leaving movie theaters. Its chief rival, CinemaScore, has been tabulating audience ratings on an A+ to F scale since 1978. Since CinemaScore began almost 50 years ago, its method has remained the same, handing out physical cards at a handful of locations. PostTrak, on the other hand, conducts 17- to 20-question surveys that go beyond an A+ to F metric.

Anytime you see demographic data from a film’s opening weekend — the percentage of attendees who were white, Latino, Asian or Black, the male/female split, the share over/under 35 — it’s likely coming from PostTrak. Each major studio pays in the mid-six-figure range annually for access to all the data, and many indie studios also subscribe at lower rates.

The operation collects data at 21 theaters across the U.S., selected to reflect demographics of the general population and align with what Goetz calls the “regular audience” (i.e., not art-house, not heavy media consumers, just out for a movie). Two PostTrak theaters are in Southern California — one in Anaheim, another in Long Beach — and others are in Chicago, Dallas and Phoenix. PostTrak occasionally will swap out a theater to stay aligned with census data. (One studio executive who uses PostTrak bemoans that there are no Canadian theaters, given that they count toward the North American box office total.)

The on-the-ground work is conducted by Entertainment Works, a research company that specializes in amassing audience data. Eworks, as it’s commonly called, deploys freelance workers to each theater in six- to 10-hour shifts.

PostTrak’s post-film survey takes less than five minutes to fill out and includes about 20 standard questions, including:

• How would they rate the film

• Whether the viewer would recommend it

• And what specifically brought them to the theater

But what studios are really paying for are the “tack-ons” — questions they tailor to each film. These can include whether audiences have seen previous movies in a franchise, what they thought of specific characters, what trailers they remember seeing, and what would stoke their interest in a future release.

“The smart studios are asking more questions,” says Tim Hardy, co-founder of Eworks.

A second longtime studio exec emphasizes that tack-ons are “usually very picture-specific” and especially valuable for gauging how viewers responded to various marketing hooks.

“You want to see if the marketing choices resonated,” this person adds. “Did those motivate someone to see this film?”

Typically, PostTrak collects 800 responses across three or four survey sessions (usually Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday afternoon and evening). For larger family films or what Hardy calls “hybrid” films (think superheroes), the target rises to 1,200. In a film’s second week, those targets drop by half. Studios collect this data for every movie they release and can also track other studios’ film performances (PostTrak operates as a catch-all source for everyone).

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In the Field

On a recent Thursday evening at the Regal Edwards Long Beach, six Eworks emissaries, clad in head-to-toe black, are circulating the lobby with stacks of tablets as patrons file in for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights — it’s opening night, Feb. 12. Mostly, these survey ninjas are gig workers on a three-night-a-week rotation.

Outside the 140-seat IMAX theater, a team member hands a tablet to moviegoers, who spend about a minute answering demographic questions. They’ll be asked to complete the survey on their way out. Hardy notes that PostTrak has great success hiring film school grads and liberal arts majors because these “artistic” and “people-oriented” workers find it naturally easy to strike up conversations with exiting audiences. On a given survey day, six workers making approximately $120 apiece for the evening tabulate around 80 people.

Wuthering Heights will emerge from this opening weekend with a 51 percent definite recommendation rating on PostTrak. Critics will be divided on the film, with some dismissing it as “sexy fan fiction” of Emily Brontë’s classic novel and others praising it as “cinematic and ambitious.” The audience: 53 percent were 18-34 for the weekend; 76 percent were women on opening night.

“When you walk out of that movie, and I say, ‘Hey, we’d just like to know what you think of the movie,’ and I hand you a tablet, you’re not getting the people that are running home to Rotten Tomatoes,” Hardy says — by which he means extremely online movie lovers with often intentionally provocative points of view.

“It’s hard to beat,” Hardy adds of the response from a theatergoer in the lobby. Once you’re out the door, the PostTrak pros say, you’re someplace else. You’ve exited the experience.

A third veteran studio executive I spoke with says that PostTrak is “very good at audience specifics,” such as “women under 30 loved it, but guys over 40 hated it.”

“That’s where we use it,” they say.

To gauge whether a movie will have legs, though, this executive relies more heavily on Rotten Tomatoes user ratings. “I think people are all on the same page on this,” the exec tells me. “CinemaScore is a joke, PostTrak is directional and they know they have a hit or a miss based on the audience score of Rotten Tomatoes.”

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The Wizard Behind the Curtain

Goetz, a 40-year veteran of the film polling business, talks to me over Zoom from his spacious home library in Beverly Hills. He believes he has the answers to just about every question plaguing Hollywood: what makes a film a hit or a flop, and the bar a movie needs to clear for consumers to leave their homes. He’s written two books — Audience-ology: How Moviegoers Shape the Films We Love (2021) and How to Score in Hollywood (2025).

After founding Screen Engine in 2010 to conduct studio test screenings and build audience awareness for new films, he came up with the idea for PostTrak. “If I could get the U.S. population to match with these theaters,” he recalls thinking, “I could then deduce where the moviegoing population was over-indexing and by whom — ethnically, racially, gender and age.”

His central catchphrase: “Every movie, if made and marketed for the right price, should make money.”

It’s a bold claim in a landscape where the factors behind success are harder to read than ever. Goetz believes the single biggest mistake the industry makes is using poor “comps,” or previous comparable titles, when trying to predict a future film’s financial performance. Oftentimes, he says, studios choose comps that have “nothing to do with” the film’s actual audience — and are frequently selected by business affairs execs trying to mitigate financial risk. For example, in the rom-com space, he says studios are “fooling” themselves if they’re comping, say, to the 2023 Glen Powell-Sydney Sweeney romantic comedy Anyone But You — a box office outlier given its broad success ($88 million in North America and over $220 million worldwide).

Another recent example: Searchlight’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, just out this past weekend. The first studio exec, who works at a different major studio, wonders whether marketers properly comped the sequel to its 2019 original — since, in his opinion, it was predictable that it would appeal to a similar demo as Project Hail Mary. “It’s not that you can't counter-program against something as big as Project Hail Mary. You absolutely can,” the first exec says. “But you can't counter-program against it when you have, in essence, the same audience.” Ready or Not 2 finished slightly below expectations, in fourth place at $9.1 million.

PostTrak can show studios exactly who their audience is and how they’re responding — often in real time. But changing course is another matter. Data doesn’t always win the argument, and the business increasingly writes off movies that underperform opening weekend without trying to course-correct.

More often than not, PostTrak data is valuable for hyper-targeting a narrow niche that loved the film during its opening weekend. If a movie over-indexes with men over 35, a studio can shift ad spending to ESPN. If a franchise film underperforms with younger audiences, marketing can pivot accordingly.

But as the third exec puts it, “The days of spending millions and millions of dollars post-opening to keep movies going are done.”

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Who’s Listening

The executives who oversee PostTrak say they receive limited information on specific second-weekend marketing decisions informed by their data. When I press Goetz on whether he has any clear examples, he says no, but he knows “PostTrak is used a lot in the second weekend,” and that’s all he can glean from the studios he works with.

Hardy notes that studios have largely become more savvy about the benefits of tack-on questions (he calls them “tacks”). As PostTrak adapts to the modern theatrical landscape — for example, by including a standard question about whether moviegoers would be interested in a sequel — studios have narrowed down which data points can help them make future decisions.

“At the end of the day, we’re tracking real people — actual moviegoers — and bringing that insight forward,” Feuer says. “We’re partners in the process, providing an important tool for the studio.”

Goetz, for one, is skeptical of overly optimistic industry narratives regarding the future of moviegoing, such as the widely held idea that Gen Z will return in droves and save the box office. “There’s never been a bigger gap than there is today,” he says, between the “haves and have-nots.” Yes, younger generations are showing up to the theater, he concedes, but only for “elevated” or “experiential” films (like Wuthering Heights and Project Hail Mary) that give them a definitive reason to leave their homes.

To successfully navigate this challenging future, studios must change how they approach budgets. Goetz says. At least, he attests, that’s what the data says.

In other words, PostTrak can tell studios exactly what audiences think. It just can’t make them care.

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↑ A 1991 image of the Million Dollar Theater marquee, where the Los Angeles Conservancy ran — and still runs — repertory screenings. (LAC Archives)

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I cover audience and moviegoing trends. I looked at the coming IP that Gen Z will make or break, dissected the struggle for films to stay memorable in the streaming era and covered the return of MoviePass as a prediction market. Email me at matthew@theankler.com

Movies once defined the culture of Los Angeles — not just the films themselves, but the red carpets, the premieres, the choreography of glamour that surrounded them.

At the center of it all were 12 movie palaces, temples to Hollywood, clustered across an eight-block stretch of Downtown L.A.: The Million Dollar, Roxie, Cameo, Arcade, Los Angeles, Palace, State, Globe, Tower, Rialto, Orpheum and United Artists.

These theaters were destinations in their own right, lionized by swarming press hoping to catch Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford in the silent era, Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s, and Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway during the New Hollywood boom of the 1970s.

“For 25 cents, you could be transported to an exotic environment you could never hope to see in your actual life,” says film critic Leonard Maltin of the ornate, themed palaces that once defined Los Angeles moviegoing.

As Loew’s Theatres founder Marcus Loew famously put it: “We sell tickets to theaters, not movies.”

It’s a line worth considering today. None of L.A.’s 12 historic movie palaces still operates as a full-time, first-run commercial cinema. The State Theatre is now leased to a church. The Rialto in Downtown L.A. has become an Urban Outfitters. Elsewhere in the city, preservation battles rage on — from the petition to save the Cinerama Dome to actor-director Kristen Stewart’s effort to bring back the Highland Theatre, a cinema built in 1925 that she calls “an antidote to all the corporate bullshit.” Director Jason Reitman is also personally leading the restoration of the Fox Village Theatre in Westwood.

“We often like to think of movie theaters as churches,” Reitman said last fall. “If so, the Village is a cathedral.”

During Hollywood’s Golden Age, studios poured money into these palaces as monuments to ambition, ego and showmanship, helping drive tens of millions of weekly ticket sales and turning moviegoing into a shared ritual, a national habit as those photos circulated through newspapers and magazines, marketing Hollywood and its stars to the world. What remains now are echoes: faded marquees, cavernous ghostly lobbies and architectural splendor — frozen in time.

“When these movies would premiere at these theaters, you’d have sometimes up to 30,000 people in the street just waiting for a glimpse of their favorite movie star,” explains Marcus Lovingood, chairman of Broadway West — an organization dedicated to activating downtown L.A.’s historic theater district. “It was the epicenter of entertainment for the entire world.”

At its peak, Hollywood had eight studios, producing 300-400 films each year. Today, of course, it’s a far different story. The Big Five studios — which, pending Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros., will shrink down to four — produce around 80-120 films each year for theatrical release.

Since Covid, roughly 5,700 North American screens have been lost. More and more, theaters are having to pivot, hosting screenings of old movies due to a dearth of popular new ones and turning their venues into catch-all “event spaces.”

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“If you think about a theater and it being reused as something else, a church is very easy,” says Alex Inshishian, program manager at the Los Angeles Conservancy. “You have a big stage, you have all the seats already set.” Following its closure as a cinema, Million Dollar served as a church for a period of time — a fate currently shared by two nearby movie palaces: the Rialto Theatre (a different one) in South Pasadena and the State Theatre on Broadway.

What follows is a look back at L.A.’s great lost movie palaces — beginning with the epic Million Dollar Theatre — and the ghosts of glamour they still hold.

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Million Dollar Theater

↑ MILLION DOLLAR THEATER — The interior facade, pictured here in 1945, features sculptures and illusions that reference characters from the children’s fairy tale The King of the Golden River, including dog figures and anthropomorphized wind figures set in the orchestra grilles. (LAC Archives)

Location: Downtown Los Angeles
Current function: Repertory screening theater, event space, filming location

The Million Dollar Theater opened on Feb. 1, 1918, with a showing of the silent Western film The Silent Man, accompanied by a 30-piece orchestra and attended by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Pickford and Chaplin. Marking the West Coast’s first-ever movie palace, Million Dollar was also Sid Grauman’s initial entry into the exhibition space.

“It was a big experience to come and not just see the movie but to experience the theater in and of itself,” says Inshishian. “Opening night on some of these films had 2,400 people. It’s just an experience that I think most people don’t really get anymore.”

These days, the theater — which now seats 1,996 due to some interior adjustments — is at its most crowded during private rentals. In October, a beauty brand’s conference filled almost every seat, except for a few in the upper level. The Conservancy also partners closely with Million Dollar, allowing the organization to regularly use the venue for weekly walking tours and repertory screenings. Last October, their showing of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, replete with a Frankenstein’s monster on stilts, drew about 1,000 people.

Roughly three or four times a month, Million Dollar opens its doors to local productions, ranging from music videos from stars like Miley Cyrus, a W Magazine feature highlighting Oscar nominees and the upcoming Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, which used the theater to recreate a Grammys performance.

↑ MILLION DOLLAR THEATER — A crowd queues up for a showing of the 1941 Preston Sturges classic Sullivan’s Travels in 1999. Though the theater continues to show movies, it is at its most crowded during private rentals. (LAC Archives)

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Los Angeles Theater

↑ LOS ANGELES THEATER — An exterior marquee advertises a repertory screening of 1932’s Grand Hotel in 1991, three years before the space stopped operating as a movie theater. (LAC Archives)

Location: Downtown Los Angeles
Current function: Special events, filming location

Los Angeles Theater marked its opening in 1931 with the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, where the star’s guest of honor that night was Albert Einstein.

As the last movie palace built in the city, it’s also the most elaborate and lavish of the bunch. A periscope in the projection room projected the film’s image onto a ground-glass screen at the center of a lower-level lounge, allowing patrons to follow the movie even while visiting the restrooms. It had two balconies instead of one and even a room with double-thick glass and speakers for parents with toddlers to watch the movie without disturbing anyone.

These days, Los Angeles hosts the occasional special event and film shoot, most recently, Taylor Swift’s music video for “The Fate of Ophelia.”

↑ LOS ANGELES THEATER — The venue marked its opening in 1931 with the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, where the star’s (center) guest of honor that night was Albert Einstein (left). (Getty Images)

Wiltern Theater

↑ WILTERN THEATER — The Mid-City theater in its current era, where it plays host to nearly nightly concerts and comedy shows. (Mike Hume)

Location: Mid-City Los Angeles
Current function: Concert venue

At the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue — hence the “Wil-tern” name — is the Wiltern Theatre, a 1,850-seat venue that originally seated 2,344 when it opened in 1931 with George Arliss-starrer Alexander Hamilton. The theater, then operated by Warner Bros., welcomed a bevy of stars on its opening night, including James Cagney, Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, as a staggeringly large crowd of 100,000 fans watched.

The theater struggled with attendance early on and shut down in May 1933, less than two years after opening. The Wiltern — that name came on the second go-around — reopened in April 1934, though it continued to plummet relative to the nearby Uptown Theatre.

Ironically, the Wiltern is now one of the most successful movie palaces left in Los Angeles, serving as one of the city’s liveliest concert venues. Among other performers, singer Zara Larsson is playing there for two nights this month, and during the 2020 election, the Wiltern also served as a polling place.

↑ WILTERN THEATER — Originally called the Warner Bros. Western Theater, the Wiltern first opened in 1931 with the premiere of George Arliss’ Alexander Hamilton. (Getty Images/Bettmann)

↑ WILTERN THEATER — Crowds at the West Coast premiere of Eddie Cantor's The Kid from Spain at the Warner Bros. Western Theater, on the corner of Wilshire and Western, in 1932. (Getty Images/Bettmann)

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Rialto Theatre

↑ RIALTO THEATRE — A northward view of Broadway from Ninth Street with Christmas decorations and neon store signs, circa 1930. (Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries)

Location: Downtown Los Angeles
Current function: Urban Outfitters

The Rialto Theatre opened in May 1917 with a screening of the silent film The Garden of Allah. Sid Grauman assumed ownership of the venue two years later and operated it until 1924. The original structure has been remodeled several times over the decades — that marquee, one of the longest on Broadway, dates to 1930 — and little of the original interior design remains. But the marquee was designated a historic landmark by Los Angeles city officials in 1989, and it remains there.

Now, though, it’s the signage for an Urban Outfitters store that opened in 2013. The Rialto isn’t the only Broadway movie palace that’s been turned into a retail venue — Tower Theatre, which opened in 1927 and was the first film venue in L.A. to be equipped for talking pictures, became Apple Tower Theatre, the tech company’s L.A. flagship store.

↑ RIALTO THEATER — The theater’s marquee, which now displays its retail occupant’s name, has been designated a historic monument, though the space itself hasn’t. (Adrian Scott Fine/L.A. Conservancy)

United Artists Theater

↑ UNITED ARTISTS THEATER — Opened in 1927, it was the tallest privately owned structure in Los Angeles until 1956. (LAC Archives)

Location: Downtown Los Angeles
Current function: Concerts, comedy shows, repertory screenings

Operating as a church for a period of time and later owned by the Ace Hotel, the United Artists Theatre is currently one of the more actively programmed theaters among the historic theater district venues. At roughly 1,600 seats, the United Artists debuted in 1927 as part of the United Artists film studio that was formed by D.W. Griffith, Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks eight years prior.

“[United Artists] really has this beautiful Gothic feel to it. It’s like you’re walking into the Sagrada Familia,” Lovingood says. “It’s almost like the architecture is built off candle wax. It’s just absolutely stunning.”

During its time under the Ace Hotel’s ownership, the venue underwent updates and renovations, with its carpets replaced and seats modernized, making it a “much further along” theater in terms of its readiness to host modern programming, Lovingood says.

Currently known as the United Theater on Broadway (and owned by the hotel chain Kasa), the theater hosts a variety of acts, including music events, comedy shows and repertory screenings. A notable highlight is their Halloween programming, which features movies screened alongside a live orchestra playing the score (such as a past screening of Get Out).

↑ UNITED ARTISTS THEATER — Now called the Ace Theater, the venue formerly known as United Artists Theater hosts concerts and events, like this 2016 Red Hot Chili Peppers fundraiser concert for then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

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Orpheum Theater

↑ ORPHEUM THEATER — Patrons enter the lobby of the Orpheum Theatre in 1932. (Dick Whittington Studio/Corbis via Getty Images)

Location: Downtown Los Angeles
Current function: Event space (concerts, premieres, etc.)

Celebrating its 100th anniversary just last month (Feb. 15), the Orpheum Theater is the most actively programmed theater on historic Broadway. Similar to United Artists, it primarily hosts outside entertainment acts, such as concerts and comedy shows, including the Netflix Is A Joke Fest this May, when the venue will host eight stand-up shows and live podcast recordings.

The Orpheum is also the most renovated theater on the block, featuring modern amenities like elevators, and was the first theater on the street to replace its traditional marquee with a digital billboard. Similar to the Los Angeles Theater, the interior resembles the Beaux-Arts style of the Palace of Versailles.

Because of its preserved beauty, one of the Orpheum’s primary uses today is as a filming location. The theatre has been home to American Idol, a scene from Spider-Man 3 and yes, another Taylor Swift music video (“Mean”).

↑ ORPHEUM THEATER — Today, the Orpheum hosts concerts and premieres along with quirkier events like “An Evening with The Dude: Jeff Bridges” and Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers’ Las Culturistas Culture Awards. (Michael Tullberg/Getty Images; Michael Tullberg/Getty Images)

Palace Theater

↑ PALACE THEATER — Patrons flock to the entrance of the theater for a night of vaudeville in 1987. (L.A. Conservancy)

Location: Downtown Los Angeles
Current function: Event space

Designed in the style of an early Renaissance palazzo, the Palace Theater opened in 1911 as a home for vaudeville before transitioning to movies in 1926. The Palace is one of the smaller venues on the street, housing about 1,000 seats, though it originally could house nearly 2,000 attendees.

According to the L.A. Conservancy, it is the oldest remaining Orpheum theater in the U.S. Harry Houdini, Will Rogers, Fred Astaire and a young Rita Hayworth all performed there, and currently, the venue serves as home to a rare piece of performance history: an original lift that Houdini used during his magic acts.

Among other historical applications, the Palace famously appears in Michael Jackson’s iconic “Thriller” music video during the opening scene, where Jackson and his girlfriend walk out of a movie theater. Now, the Palace is home to the occasional repertory screening, live performance and special event, along with more recent film shoots, including David O. Russell’s 2022 crime caper Amsterdam.

↑ PALACE THEATER — A view of the Palace Theatre in 2011 after a renovation. (Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)

↑ PALACE THEATER — To celebrate its 100th birthday, the Palace Theatre hosted three sold-out shows of Sunset Boulevard. (Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

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State Theatre

↑ STATE THEATRE — The large theater has served as a church worship space since the mid-2000s. (Mike Hume/LAC Archives)

Location: Downtown Los Angeles
Current function: Church

Down from its original 2,450-seat capacity, the State Theatre now seats just over 2,000, allowing it to still hold the title of biggest venue on Broadway — though now, it’s the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God reaping the benefits.

After the State closed its doors as a first-run movie house in the 1990s, it reopened in the mid-2000s as the Universal Church of Christ, a Protestant denomination with a strong Los Angeles contingent.

Back in the day, though, like many of the movie palaces on Broadway, it originally operated as a vaudeville movie house, later becoming a venue for more modern fare. Along with several other movie palaces at the time, the State’s first-run Spanish-language films became the primary driver by the 1960s and into the subsequent decades.

↑ STATE THEATER — James Mason kisses Sue Lyon on her cheek as they arrive at the premiere of Stanley Kubrick’s controversial Lolita in 1962. (Getty Images/Bettmann)

Highland Theatre

↑ HIGHLAND THEATRE — Pictured here in 1962. The Highland was built in 1924 and closed in early 2024; its final showings included Madame Web and Bob Marley: One Love. Over the last two years, the venue has been used for film and television productions, including the Marvel series Wonder Man and the upcoming Netflix movie The Adventures of Cliff Booth. (Courtesy of HPI Film Festival)

Location: Highland Park, Los Angeles
Current function: Mid-renovation

Six days before its 100th anniversary in early 2024, Highland Theatre shut down after a post-pandemic revival attempt failed to turn around the theater’s attendance issues. But this year, in one of the more hopeful signs for any of these palaces, actor-director Kristen Stewart purchased the Highland with plans to renovate it.

“I didn’t realize I was looking for a theater until this place came to my attention. Then it was like a gunshot went off and the race was on. I ran toward it with everything I had,” Stewart told Architectural Digest. “I’m fascinated by broken-down old theaters. I always want to see what mysteries they hold.”

↑ HIGHLAND THEATRE — Pictured here recently. “I didn’t realize I was looking for a theater until this place came to my attention,” Stewart told Architectural Digest. “Then it was like a gunshot went off, and the race was on. I ran toward it with everything I had. I’m fascinated by broken-down old theaters. I always want to see what mysteries they hold.” (Kelsey Stefanson for The Ankler)

Now From Letterboxd: Advances in Theatrical

This week, the importance of the experience of watching films on the big screen

Since the advent of television, theaters and Hollywood have sought to make the theatrical experience distinct from what audiences could get at home.

Some of these changes, such as the widescreen format, became the new standard. Others, however, struggled to take hold, such as the audience electing the picture’s outcome, as in Kinoautomat and I’m Your Man. One current format that seems to have found a foothold is 4DX, a theatrical experience akin to a theme park ride where audiences not only view the movie in 3D but also sit in chairs on gimbals, get misted with water and experience wind effects. It’s not for everyone. (I went to a press screening of Red One in 4DX and had to check out after 20 minutes because it was all too distracting. Can’t Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans save Christmas without me getting misted in the face?)

Still, others have found 4DX to be a worthwhile endeavor. Georgia notes in their review of 2024’s Twisters, “watched this in 4DX (as the lord intended) and I genuinely cannot imagine a better use of those wind machines and mist sprayers and rocking seats and flashing lights. Exhilarating. I actually started crying at one point and I’m not sure why.” For Megan, 4DX is the only thing that saved 2025’s Jurassic World: Rebirth: “If I hadn’t seen this in 4DX, I would have fallen asleep.” Other times, 4DX can just be bizarre, as KYK describes on a rewatch of this year’s Send Help: “Funniest part was my chair moving when she’s storming into Dylan O’Brien’s office in one of the early scenes.”

But it appears these rocking seats are here to stay, with their box-office growth ticking upwards in 2025, so hold on tight. — Matt Goldberg for Letterboxd

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I cover audience and moviegoing trends. I dissected the struggle for films to stay memorable in the streaming era, and covered the return of MoviePass as a prediction market and what the Marty Supreme Wheaties box says about fandom. Email me at matthew@theankler.com

There are successful movies, and then there are generational events.

Zootopia 2 is the latter. The Disney sequel has grossed more than $1.8 billion worldwide, earned an Oscar nomination for best animated feature and drawn a strikingly young audience — 56 percent of its opening night crowd was 18-34. At our Crowd Pleaser Live screening of the film last week in L.A., producer Yvett Merino said watching it in a theater is still “completely mind-blowing,” adding, “One of my favorite things to do is actually sit and watch it with an audience.”

Merino got to do just that at our jam-packed event at The London West Hollywood.

After the screening, my colleague Katey Rich spoke onstage with stars Ginnifer Goodwin and Ke Huy Quan, co-director Byron Howard and Merino about everything from building an animal world that mirrors our own society to the technical challenge of designing a snake group hug. Animation may pose unique challenges — and employ more than 700 artists, as Quan noted — but as Goodwin put it, the result can feel startlingly human. “They brought something to life that’s tangible… I don’t think we can do it with live-action.” (Catch the full Q&A at AnklerEnjoy.)

But Zootopia 2 isn’t just a hit — it’s a signal.

Hollywood can greenlight all the intellectual property it wants. But increasingly, Gen Z decides which of those bets actually win.

Now, as a crushing amount of nostalgia-fueled IP is about to be turned into movies (the list is below), studios are trying to capitalize on the childhood attachments of Gen Z, young millennials and even Gen Alpha.

Since Zootopia 2’s release last year, the sequel has become the ninth-highest-grossing film of all time.

But what works and what doesn’t? For every A Minecraft Movie that turns into a meme-fueled event, there’s a Snow White that simply falls asleep.

Which upcoming IP swings will Gen Z embrace — and which will they ignore? Here are seven that are about to find out.

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First, Some Parameters

This past year was actually a strong one for original films at the box office. That’s because only three movies in the top 20 at the domestic box office were original — Sinners, F1 and Weapons — up from zero originals in 2024.

The rest of last year’s top 20 — 17 other movies — were a mix of reboots or remakes (like live-action versions of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon), sequels (Wicked: For Good, Avatar: Fire and Ash) and superhero movies (Superman, Thunderbolts, The Fantastic Four).

If you like original storytelling, it’s not good — you could even argue F1, since it’s set within a massive global sport, is a non-original; and yet, there has been a shift.

Just look at the top two movies: A Minecraft Movie and Lilo & Stitch. Both features spoke specifically to the Gen Z audience that was raised engaging with the source material. Contrast that with the ill-fated remake of 1937’s Snow White. Last March, the Rachel Zegler-led movie was a major miss for several reasons — it became embroiled in a culture war that certainly didn’t help its cause — but the biggest issue might have been that its target audience simply didn’t care about a movie from 90 years ago.

“For Gen Z and younger millennials, long-running franchises can feel institutionally managed and narratively over-explained. They’re just not cool,” says film industry analyst Stephen Follows. “What is cool are fast-moving, meme-able, cross-platform properties.”

No film better exemplifies that shift than A Minecraft Movie. It debuted two weeks after Snow White bombed, with an opening-weekend haul of $301 million; it finished its run worldwide just shy of $1 billion.

Minecraft isn’t alone. Video game titles across the entertainment landscape, which have seen a sharp rise in popularity, have become blockbuster hits, from Universal’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie (and its upcoming sequel this April) to HBO’s The Last of Us.

“You had 15 to 20 million people who had played The Last of Us, and they all spent 12 to 18 hours going through the game. All that time soaking in these characters, soaking in this story — there was no outlet then for fandom of that,” Hub Entertainment Research principal Jon Giegengack says. “When this TV show came out, it was not a big leap for people who had already spent that much time and money on the game to jump in and get involved.”

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7 Coming IP Contenders

“Because people are going to fewer films, they are choosing which ones to see with greater scrutiny,” Universal’s chief marketing officer, Michael Moses, told my colleague Richard Rushfield recently. A Minecraft Movie, Moses suggested, was an “urgent” movie for its target group, the kind of feature with a real gotta-see factor.

Will these films have what it takes to draw young audiences to theaters?

1. Call of Duty

• Popularity Peak: Early 2010s

  • Although Call of Duty reached its highest player count during Covid in 2020, its cultural peak likely occurred between 2009 and 2012 with Modern Warfare II and Black Ops II.

• Target Demo: Young millennials; early Gen Z

• State of Production: In development

Arguably the most popular first-person shooter game ever, Call of Duty is finally getting the film treatment from Paramount, with Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan and Lone Survivor director Peter Berg tapped to shepherd.

In the game, players compete against each other in small teams through fast, cinematic combat across modern and historical battlefields. Since 2003, the Activision franchise has attracted hundreds of millions of players worldwide and released a new game every year, most recently in 2025 with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. The average Call of Duty player is male and ages 18-34.

When the project was announced, Paramount CEO David Ellison, who at 43 is an elder millennial, indicated that he’s “spent countless hours playing this franchise,” and, “as a lifelong fan,” developing the property is “truly a dream come true.” As the only under-60-year-old in charge of a major Hollywood studio, this tracks.

FANDOM SCORE: 9 out of 10. Franchise bros, assemble!

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2. Madden

• Popularity Peak: 2000s-early 2010s

  • Madden peaked culturally when Michael Vick graced the cover in 2004 and became a cheat code. The game has maintained its cachet with younger football fans in the following two decades, though.

• Target Demo: Millennials; older Gen Z

• State of Production: Releases Nov. 26

This is a weird one, since Madden (the movie) is not technically a direct adaptation of the game but rather a story around the making of the game — and in an Amazon MGM prestige movie that doesn’t scream “chicken jockey.”

Still, you can see the vision.

For non-football fans, Madden NFL is a long-running football game in which players take control of a team, call plays and try to win against the computer or another player. As of 2021, Madden NFL has sold over 150 million copies.

Originally, football video games were more arcade-like. But when Super Bowl-winning coach John Madden was approached to put his name on a new game, he emphasized the minutiae, and the series has released an improved version every year since 1988, generating billions of dollars in sales.

That origin story is chronicled in Madden, an Amazon MGM feature film directed by David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) and starring Nicholas Cage as the titular former coach.

As Moses said to Richard, Gen Z audiences sometimes “want authenticity, and they want authorship.” He was talking about directors like Christopher Nolan and Ryan Coogler, so whether the youth audience will come around for the controversial Russell, whose last two movies were flops (Amsterdam in 2022 and Joy in 2015), could be a squeaker.

FANDOM SCORE: 6 out of 10. Dad-lore with upside

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3. The Legend of Zelda

• Popularity Peak: 2017

  • In 2017, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was released and sold over 34 million units, broadening the game’s appeal from Nintendo loyalists to mainstream gamers.

• Target Demo: Early Gen Z; younger millennials; young Gen X

• State of Production: Filming

After decades of false starts and tight control by Nintendo, a Legend of Zelda movie was greenlit with Sony in late 2023, following Nintendo’s success with Super Mario Bros. And perhaps more than any other video game film out there, this one has the most overlap with a traditional Hollywood film.

The video game series, which originated in 1986, follows Link, a young man from an elf-like race, and Princess Zelda as they fight to save their land from an evil warlord. If that sounds like Lord of the Rings, it’s because the story and setting draw closely on the book and film series.

The film is currently in production and slated for release on May 7, 2027, with Wes Ball (Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes) directing. He’s compared the scale of the film’s visual effects to Avatar.

The Zelda franchise reached the 150 million sales milestone last year, and in 2017, the demographic split was 64 percent male, primarily ages 18 to 34.

FANDOM SCORE: 9 out of 10. Enter the cosplay industrial complex

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4. Hot Wheels

• Popularity Peak: Late 1990s

  • If we’re truly looking back, the late 1960s — when the toy car brand first debuted — has a case here. Hot Wheels has maintained its following over the years and remained a toy-aisle staple.

• Target Demo: Younger millennials; older Gen Z

• State of Production: In development

A Hot Wheels live-action film is hitting the track (sorry, couldn’t resist), with Jon M. Chu (Wicked) handling director duties and J.J. Abrams and Mattel’s Robbie Brenner serving as producers on the Warner Bros. flick.

Brenner, president of Mattel Studios and its chief content officer, notes that the expectations for Hot Wheels are “so high,” given the product line’s pedigree as the number one-selling toy in the world. Given that, “There are a lot of people probably expecting that this is going to be the greatest, most amazing movie ever,” she says. The challenge for her, and Chu becomes, how does a Hot Wheels movie stand out?

“Fast and Furious has done it incredibly well. You have Cars, you have Herbie, Speed Racer, and, in some ways, Cannonball Run. We’ve seen the car movie so many times,” says Brenner. “So where do you go with that?”

The answer, at least judging from what Chu said when he assumed the project, is less of an F1-style emphasis on realism and precision and more on the toy’s ethos.

“Hot Wheels has always been about more than speed — it’s about imagination, connection, and the thrill of play,” Chu said.

In 2024, Hot Wheels generated $1.58 billion in global sales. Mattel also produces a series for Netflix entitled Hot Wheels Let’s Race, about a group of youngsters hoping to become skilled racers, which released its third season in March 2025.

FANDOM SCORE: 7 out of 10. The fast & the curious

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5. Polly Pocket

• Popularity Peak: Late 1990s

  • By the mid-’90s, Polly Pocket was one of the most popular toys for girls under 8.

• Target Demo: Millennials; older Gen Z

• State of Production: In development

Lily Collins was tapped to play the titular Polly, and Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine joined last year as producer. Lena Dunham was originally slated to direct the film, but dropped out after three years spent working on the script.

“I don’t think I have that in me,” Dunham told The New Yorker about why she bailed. “I feel like the next movie I make needs to feel like a movie that I absolutely have to make. No one but me could make it. And I did think other people could make Polly Pocket.”

And yet, during the development of Polly Pocket, the team at Mattel had to grapple with how to make the film stand out. As Brenner puts it, “How do you differentiate that from the Barbie movie?” Since both properties feature dolls with their own worlds (Polly lives in her own Polly world inside a pocket), the project inevitably invites comparison to Barbie. “That’s a hard thing to do, especially when you’ve made a movie that is sort of a unicorn,” Brenner says.

FANDOM SCORE: 7.5 out of 10. Stan accounts, dust off the glitter

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6. Barney

• Popularity Peak: Mid 1990s

  • Barney peaked in the mid-’90s, but the original series lasted well into the 2000s, when it remained relevant.

• Target Demo: Younger millennials; older Gen Z

• State of Production: In development

Squarely in the nostalgia zone of IP development, Barney — based on the round purple dinosaur whose series aired on PBS from 1992 to 2010 — is an A24 film being written by Ayo Edebiri and produced by Daniel Kaluuya and Brenner, who describes the project as “definitely more geared towards adults.”

Explained Kaluuya back in 2020, “Barney taught us, ‘I love you, you love me. Won’t you say you love me too?’ That’s one of the first songs I remember, and what happens when that isn’t true? I thought that was really heartbreaking. I have no idea why but it feels like that makes sense. It feels like there’s something unexpected that can be poignant but optimistic. Especially at this time now, I think that’s really, really needed.”

So, it’s a swing. But with respected artists like Kaluuya and Edibiri behind an A24 movie, arguably the “coolest” film studio currently in the industry (at least on vibes), it’s also something so crazy it just might work.

“I think that for teens and younger audiences, sometimes they want to throw popcorn buckets and yell ‘chicken jockey’ at Minecraft. But then they sometimes want substantial, challenging entertainment,” Moses told Richard. “We’re seeing that, increasingly, brand quality matters.”

FANDOM SCORE: 9 out of 10. Peak trauma-nostalgia

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7. Labubu

• Popularity Peak: 2025

  • Last year, you couldn’t go to a toy store without coming across an array of Labubus. The product, a line of plush dolls sold by the Chinese toy company Pop Mart, sold more than 100 million units worldwide in 2025.

• Target Demo: Gen Alpha

• State of Production: In development

It’s the hottest creepy-looking doll on the market, and now, it’s getting the feature film treatment: Labubu is in development at Sony.

As ridiculous as that sounds, Labubu actually has bona fides. Director Paul King is helming the project, and what Martin Scorsese is to gangster movies, King is to eye-popping kids’ fare. His last three films: Wonka, Paddington and Paddington 2, all hit with under-34s (a whopping 60 percent of the Wonka audience on opening weekend was 18-34; maybe Timothée Chalamet is available to play Tycoco? That’s Labubu’s boyfriend, for the unitiated.)

Labubu dolls generated $418 million in 2024, and in the first half of 2025 alone, the Labubu line accounted for $670 million in revenue. The question the film, still in early development, faces is whether anyone will still care about it at release.

To be clear, little is known about this movie, and audience tastes change rapidly. It’s a straw man, but in 2020, a fidget spinner movie might have grossed more than a Marvel movie. Now? Not so much.

FANDOM SCORE: 9 out of 10. Collectors will not be normal about this

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Now From Letterboxd: Cheat Codes

This week, Hollywood’s complicated history with gamers

For a few decades, movies based on games didn’t make a lot of sense. How could it be more fun to passively watch a film based on a game rather than play the game itself? Plus, it’s not like games inherently lent themselves to deep narratives. Part of the reason 1993’s Super Mario Bros. is so bonkers is that in 1993, there wasn’t a lot of “lore” to build a story upon. But as gamers have grown into storytellers, the difficulties in adapting games to film have subsided, as evidenced by the success of A Minecraft Movie last spring.

That’s not to say that Hollywood always struggled with how to make a game into a movie. While not a massive hit upon its release, Jonathan Lynn’s Clue, based on the popular board game, gained a cult following and remains a high bar for any other game-based movie to clear. As Chris notes, “A movie based on a board game has absolutely no business being this funny,” while Jeaba says, “This is probably the best movie based on a board game.”

Although a remake of Clue has been stuck in development for ages, other game-based movies are already on their second go-round. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves found far greater popularity in 2023 than the 2000 attempt. “Exactly like a real D&D campaign (everyone has maxed charisma and no other useful skills),” observes Gavin, and Elvisthealien adds, “This movie is so great, everything a D&D movie should be.”

Then there are times when the original cannot be beat. The Jumanji legacyquels have been popular at the box office, with a third installment on the way, but in Letterboxd’s Game Night Showdown, the Robin Williams movie reigns supreme. Pablo Honey remarks, “The amount of times I watched this during my childhood was unhealthy! Still a classic that I love to revisit,” and Arnon wryly jokes, “Fun fact: After filming, Robin Williams had to go through back surgery due to carrying the entire film.”

What’s clear is that the connection between games and movies shows no signs of slowing down, with sequels to Mortal Kombat, Sonic the Hedgehog, the animated Super Mario Bros. and more all on the way. Will these new installments eclipse fans’ love for the originals? We’ll just have to press start and find out. — Matt Goldberg for Letterboxd

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I write Crowd Pleaser from Ankler and Letterboxd, which covers audience and moviegoing trends. I covered the return of MoviePass as a prediction market, wrote about what the Marty Supreme Wheaties box says about fandom and scooped how Paul Thomas Anderson landed in Fortnite. Email me at matthew@theankler.com

My colleague Richard Rushfield recently posed a thought exercise: Name five films of this decade that will go down as classics.

Okay, I’m waiting.

…still waiting.

Movies don’t seem to stick the way they used to. They arrive, make a splash (if they’re lucky), dominate a weekend or a week of discourse (if they’re even luckier) and then quietly vanish.

Not flop — vanish.

Few become things we quote, rewatch, stumble into halfway through on cable or feel compelled to return to years later. For a medium once built on repetition and rediscovery, that disappearance feels new — and unsettling.

And if you’ve ever scrolled through a streaming service, landed on a movie you meant to watch — or one you know you liked — and then still kept scrolling, that’s not a personal failure. It’s the system working exactly as designed.

Movies don’t really die anymore. They disappear.

We’re living in The Cinemanesia Age — where movies are seen, consumed, and then almost immediately forgotten.

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Seen by Millions, Remembered by None

That feeling of movies slipping through our fingers has become easy to rationalize. Culture moves faster now. Attention spans are shorter. Social media flattens everything. All of that is true. But it’s also incomplete.

What’s changed isn’t just how we talk about movies. It’s how we encounter them once they leave theaters (if they even get into one).

Which brings us, inevitably, to Netflix.

In 2024, speaking to the New York Times, long before Netflix moved to acquire Warner Bros. and Ted Sarandos found himself extolling the virtues of theatrical exhibition, the Netflix co-CEO made a bold claim. Films like Barbie and Oppenheimer, he said, “definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix.” There was, he added, “no reason to believe” that certain kinds of movies work better in theaters than on his platform.

Months later, Sarandos doubled down. On an earnings call, he suggested that Netflix’s biggest films were the equivalent of billion-dollar box office hits — not just in scale, but in cultural impact.

Netflix, he said, brings filmmakers “the biggest audience in the world,” and still knows how to “pierce the zeitgeist.”

It’s an appealing argument, especially in an era when reach is often treated as a synonym for relevance. Netflix does deliver eyeballs — millions of them — at a scale no movie studio can match. But reach alone has never been what turns a movie into a cultural fixture. While Netflix brings eyeballs, the zeitgeist rarely comes along for the ride.

In 2023, Barbie (a WB title, coincidentally) didn’t just succeed at the box office; it exploded outward — into memes, fashion, marketing tie-ins, think pieces and a shared visual language. By contrast, Netflix’s most-watched movie of that year, Leave the World Behind, starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali, racked up enormous viewing hours. But it was watched, briefly debated (maybe) and then… effectively erased.

That contrast is not about good movies vs. bad ones, but about the battle between being seen vs. remembered.

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When Rewatching Was the Business

For most of Hollywood history, a movie’s life didn’t end when it left theaters. That was just the beginning.

After a theatrical run, films moved through a carefully managed afterlife: re-releases, network premieres, syndication, cable, home video. Each window was designed to reintroduce the same title to audiences in different ways, over time. You might miss a movie in theaters, catch 20 minutes of it on TV years later, rent it on VHS, or stumble into it again while flipping channels on a Sunday afternoon.

That repetition wasn’t accidental.

Rewatching — or even half-watching — was how movies became familiar. And familiarity, more than novelty, is what turns a movie into a cultural reference point. When figures like the late Rob Reiner are celebrated, the response is often a flood of quoted lines and beloved scenes — the kind of devotion that only comes from repeat viewing.

But films didn’t have to be perfect, or even universally beloved. They just had to be present.

Cable television played a huge role. Networks weren’t trying to push viewers toward something new every night; they were trying to make them comfortable with what they already knew. A movie you’d seen before wasn’t a failure, but a feature.

“Movies had great value,” recalls Doug Herzog, the former chief of Comedy Central, VH1 and MTV. “If you picked the right ones at the right network, you could really find things that move the needle.” Those were the films that ran again and again — not because audiences demanded novelty, but because familiarity kept people watching.

This ecosystem rewarded endurance. A movie could underperform in theaters and still become a fixture through repetition. The Shawshank Redemption was a box office disappointment before becoming one of the most replayed films in TV history. Comedies like Austin Powers and Anchorman became cultural touchstones not in a single weekend, but over years of reruns and rewatches of Ron Burgundy lifting weights.

What mattered wasn’t just that audiences liked these movies. It was that they kept running into them.

An interesting touchpoint is the podcast The Rewatchables. The Ringer show has produced more than 300 episodes devoted to films like Top Gun, Heat, Goodfellas and The Devil Wears Prada. Host Bill Simmons has never chosen an original streaming movie.

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Streaming Killed the Rewatch Star

Instead of movies drifting back into our lives through repetition, every watch now requires intention: Selecting a title, starting it from the beginning and committing to it in competition with thousands of other options. There’s no modern equivalent of stumbling into the third act of a familiar movie.

That shift sounds subtle. It isn’t.

Cable television rewarded inertia. Streaming rewards decisiveness. If you don’t actively choose a film, it essentially doesn’t exist. And once you’ve watched it, the system likely will not resurface it.

Streaming services offer more movies than any video store or cable package ever could, but abundance makes casual rediscovery nearly impossible.

For younger audiences, this represents a sharp break from earlier behavior by previous generations. Gone are the days when most people would channel surf and catch 20 minutes of The Fugitive or Superbad on TNT or HBO.

In 2018, streaming subscriptions had doubled digital rentals/purchases, DVD and Blu-Ray in the U.S. as the leading home entertainment. Last May, streaming viewership finally eclipsed combined broadcast and cable viewing.

Even success is invisible. A movie can rack up tens of millions of views, become fodder for earnings calls and press releases, and leave almost no cultural residue.

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The Vanishing Point of Hits

What this new streaming netherworld creates is a strange paradox. Movies are more accessible than ever, yet harder to encounter twice. They’re everywhere, but rarely revisited.

This isn’t just anecdotal. You can see it.

One simple way to measure cultural afterlife is search behavior — not at the moment of release, but in the years that follow. Google Trends lets you track how often people actively search for information about a movie over time, which serves as a proxy for whether a title remains in the cultural mix.

I tried a thought experiment. I took a middle ground — the No. 11–18 domestic box office films from 2012 — and compared them to the same range from 2022. Not the biggest blockbusters of those years, but solid, widely seen hits. Then I tracked how interest in those movies held up over the first four years after their release.

The difference is stark.

The 2012 films — titles like 21 Jump Street, Wreck-It Ralph and The Lorax — show a familiar pattern. A big spike at release, followed by a long, low undercurrent of interest that never fully disappears. They linger.

The 2022 cohort tells a different story. After their initial release window, interest in most of those films — including hits like Elvis and Bullet Train — drops sharply and then flatlines. With one notable exception (Smile, which got a boost from its sequel), the afterlife isn’t there.

What those flat lines represent isn’t failure. These movies were seen. They were talked about. They just weren’t re-encountered.

And just for fun, let’s also look at 2011 vs. 2021 releases.

The most important trend line on these charts is the red line in 2011: Bridesmaids.

Added up over the years, lasting interest is what makes films feel perpetually relevant — quotable, memorable, and a fabric of our culture, as Bridesmaids has become.

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In the Aftermath

So now, if you’re a studio trying to keep its films relevant, how do you even attempt to do that today?

The key for many is in diversification. Studios will license their titles to behemoth Netflix or FAST streamers like Tubi and Pluto, and do so repeatedly to reach different sets of eyeballs.

Universal, Warner Bros. and Paramount are all a part of larger conglomerates with streaming arms, but more than ever, those studios are dishing their titles out to competitors.

Keeping them locked away in their own silo leaves much of the audience in the lurch, and the films lose their value both culturally and financially.

Last month, Netflix re-upped its Pay-1 deal with Sony — under which the studio’s films, like the 2023 hit Anyone But You, arrive on the platform after their full theatrical and home-entertainment windows — for $7 billion-plus. Meanwhile, Universal’s new Pay-1B deal with the streamer — sending the studio’s films to Netflix after theaters, home entertainment and four months on Peacock — began 18 months earlier than expected.

These pacts shore up the initial post-theatrical window and put their films in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Plus: Theatrical films tend to perform better than non-theatrical releases on streaming, which is why Netflix is willing to spend billions on rights — and perhaps why Sarandos promised a 45-day theatrical window for Warner Bros. films pending the acquisition.

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Clips to the Rescue

@bosslifecinema“Now go home and get your fin’ shine box.”* — Billy Batts Directed by Martin Scorsese Goodfellas (1990) #goodfellas #billybatts #joepesci #classicmoviescene #crimeclassics #bosslifecinema #mafiavibes #iconicscenes #fyp #viralvide #mustwatchscene #movietok #filmreel #gangstertalk #mobdrama #TrueCinema #filmlegend #moblife #alphaenergy #powermoves #respectthebosses

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Last September, I reported on how multiple studios discreetly operate genre-specific social media accounts with generic names. Channels like “Crime Clips” aren’t overtly branded by the studio (and are usually not easy to identify as studio-affiliated), but studios use these accounts to monetize — and make visible — their back catalogs.

Interestingly, the way audiences encounter films through social media — in short bursts, in clip form — resembles how audiences used to encounter them through the channels system. And for viewers with limited leisure time, social video is winning out because it replaces “TV you didn’t even intend to watch, or the TV you watched because it was on,” as media scholar Amanda Lotz phrases it.

“Attention is not our problem,” says Matt Klein, a cultural theorist who writes the Webby-winning newsletter ZINE and has advised the likes of Sony Pictures and the NBA. “What I think is beneath the surface here is this idea of control and participation.”

So where do we go from here?

Media expert Peter Csathy believes that in our current “Netflixian world,” where choices are abundant yet fleeting, there will be — and already has been — a shift toward curation and tastemakers, standing in direct opposition to today’s algorithms.

One tastemaker platform Csathy highlights, unprompted: Letterboxd.

“When you’re bombarded with all this stuff around you, human curation can be increasingly important to make sense of it all and identify the gems,” he says. “It’s going to be the conversation around those gems which leads to, ultimately, long-term cultural relevance, because still, at the end of the day, it’s human excitement and passion and conversation that leads to significance.”

Clips don’t recreate the old afterlife. But they may be the closest approximation we have left.

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Now From Letterboxd: Watching This Space

This week, users on their rewatchable favorites

Not every great movie is defined by how often we choose to rewatch it. We can praise difficult, emotionally taxing, thought-provoking pictures, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to pop them on at the end of a long day. Sometimes we need something a little more familiar and a little more uplifting. Even if the material can be dark, there’s some kind of hook here that gets us going. We want to hit play again, even though we know how the story unfolds. It’s one thing to return to a favorite over the years. It’s another thing to keep coming back in the same year.

To make Letterboxd’s list of the “Most Obsessively Rewatched” in our annual Year in Review, the film has to chart at least five watches by a person in a calendar year. The year 2025’s most rewatched movie, Superman, isn’t that surprising. After multiple big-screen iterations of the Man of Steel leaned into the darker aspects of his character, James Gunn had him celebrate kindness as the new punk rock, and that clearly clicked with members. As Joshua notes, it’s “the type of movie that makes a mf wanna do community service,” and Trin adds, “a superhero movie inspiring me to be a good person and do good deeds and finding the beauty in being human. I’m gonna cry.”

Sometimes a movie is just catchy, and it doesn’t get much catchier than the hooks on KPop Demon Hunters. The second-most rewatched movie of the year featured earworms galore with bops like “Takedown,” “Golden,” and “Your Idol,” but it was more than just the music that got members excited for this animated delight. “Painfully relatable representation for Zoe(y)s who would be helplessly obsessed with a boy even after discovering he’s a literal demon,” says Zoë, while Anna sums up the film’s good vibes by writing, “Spectacular give me 14 of these right now.”

A movie didn’t have to come out in 2025 to be one of the year’s most rewatched features. Look at the ongoing love for Joe Wright’s adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. As Kyra calmly observes, “THE RAIN SCENE IS THE SINGLE MOST SEXUALLY CHARGED SCENE IN THE HISTORY OF THE MOVING IMAGE.” Sharing that enthusiasm, Erika points out, “not to be dramatic, but The Hand Flex™ is the single greatest moment in the entire history of film.” Part of rewatchability is that these moments dominate the imagination, and it’s tough to argue when people are still so enthusiastic about a period romance 20 years after its release.

No matter how many times you come back to a movie you love, you can still find new and exciting things about it, and I won’t be surprised if some of these obsessively rewatched films crop up again when it’s time for 2026’s Year in Review. — Matt Goldberg for Letterboxd

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Crowd Pleaser from Ankler and Letterboxd covers audience and moviegoing. I wrote about what the Marty Supreme Wheaties box says about fandom, the small-town theaters fighting against studios and scooped how Paul Thomas Anderson landed in Fortnite. Email me at matthew@theankler.com

There are no second acts in American lives. Just don’t tell MoviePass co-founder and CEO Stacy Spikes.

Spikes’ roller-coaster ride with MoviePass began in 2011, when the brand launched as a movie-theater subscription service that charged a flat monthly fee for up to one movie per day at chains including Regal and Cinemark. At its peak in 2018, MoviePass had about 3 million subscribers. But after Spikes was fired in 2018, and the company went bankrupt due to one of the most ridiculous promotions in the history of moviegoing (more on that below), it seemed to be the end of the line.

Then, in 2021, Spikes — in a redemption arc he likens to Steve Jobs at Apple and Michael Dell at Dell — bought back the assets of his company out of bankruptcy, once valued at around $500 million, for $140,000.

“There have been these times where the founder’s vision, or having people who were so passionate about the product, really just doesn’t beat pure capital and people who think they can do it,” Spikes says.

Immediately, Spikes, 57, adjusted the business model to better align with the company’s sustainability goals. (Users can now subscribe to multiple plans, including a $33-a-month tier that allows up to four movies.)

The company had its first profitable year in 2024, tallying $14 million in revenue. But the comeback had its limits.

A former Miramax VP of marketing, Spikes tells me he realized MoviePass’s future couldn’t be built on just movie tickets.

As competitors like AMC and Regal began bundling Premium Large Format (PLF) screenings — typically the most expensive tickets in a multiplex — into their own subscription services, MoviePass, which doesn’t own theaters, couldn’t compete.

“That was when you just ran the math. The exposure is way too high,” Spikes says. It became a “race to the bottom” to see which company could offer the most value in the cheapest possible package.

If MoviePass couldn’t match the big chains, then what? The answer, as I’ve seen before, came from the predictions market, or as Spikes says, “through gamification.”

The speculation market is projected to become a trillion-dollar ecosystem by the end of the decade. If MoviePass could claim even a sliver of that attention, Spikes reasoned, it could offset long-term decline in its core subscription business — a crucial hedge as the theatrical industry continues to struggle.

For the first time, Spikes goes into detail with previously unreported details on Mogul, a new platform under the MoviePass corporate umbrella that he sees as a way to reach Hollywood’s increasingly 24/7, data-obsessed audience — and to compete for attention in a way MoviePass never could. And it doesn’t hurt that young people, particularly men — the same ones who can make or break an opening weekend — primarily comprise the most-engaged traders on other prediction markets platforms, including Kalshi and Polymarket.

“We want to build the first true hub for entertainment speculation,” Spikes says.

In Mogul’s Series A funding, which valued Mogul at a $50 million valuation, Spikes secured $9 million, over half of which came from major players in the blockchain space. In addition, Global Emerging Markets’ Token Fund committed $100 million in capital, though the full extent of that investment is contingent on Mogul hitting certain token-based milestones. It’s all part of Spikes’ intent to build Mogul on Web3 rails, a decentralized method he believes gives companies an advantage over the “hub and spoke model.”

“We believe in that future, and so we wanted to make the capital investment to be prepared for that,” he says.

Here’s what it is, how he got there and what MoviePass does now.

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First, The MoviePass Meltdown

MoviePass began simply enough in 2011, when the New York-based brand offered customers one movie per day for $30-$50 per month. In 2016, as theater chains like AMC Theatres bristled against Spikes and fellow co-founder Hamet Watt, the duo accepted outside help in the form of a new CEO, Mitch Lowe, and a new majority stakeholder, analytics firm Helios and Matheson.

Spikes stayed on as COO at the company he built and was left to watch (eventually completely from the sidelines after his firing) as Lowe and Ted Farnsworth, the Helios and Matheson chairman, offered a staggering movie-a-day for $9.95/month. In 2017, MoviePass — which was aiming for 100K subscribers by the end of the year — became a phenomenon, hitting that goal in 48 hours and tacking on another 75K the next day. The only issue with the company that routinely drew comparisons to Netflix due to its disruptive nature: It made no financial sense. MoviePass lost $14-$20 per subscriber theater visit, which — since the company failed to cut wholesale deals with theater chains — meant funding each customer visit. MoviePass hemorrhaged $40-$50 million each month.

Amid all this came tales of Hollywood excess, including costly parties at Sundance and Coachella, and an investment in John Travolta’s notorious 2018 flop Gotti, which was promoted at the Cannes Film Festival with a lavish shindig featuring a performance from 50 Cent.

“I got the Sundance Party that they did, but why would you do a music festival and why would you spend a million dollars on a music conference?” says Spikes, who claims he warned against the $9.95-a-month offering, but was ignored.

Around that time, shit really began to hit the fan. As detailed later by the Federal Trade Commission in 2021, MoviePass allegedly went to “great lengths” to “deny consumers access to the service they paid for while also failing to secure their personal information.” In one example, MoviePass reset the passwords of the app’s most active subscribers under the false claim that “we have detected suspicious activity or potential fraud” on the accounts. When those users tried to reset their passwords, they were stonewalled due to unspecified “technical problems.” In another instance, MoviePass blocked most users from seeing 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout after the company was locked out of its line of credit by its bank.

The whole thing came to a head in 2020 when MoviePass filed for bankruptcy. Lowe and Farnsworth were later indicted for securities fraud and separately pleaded guilty to the charges, which included lying to investors while masking losses through tactics such as the Mission: Impossible fiasco. They await sentencing. “Mitch Lowe is a good man with a history of good deeds,” David Oscar Markus and Margot Moss, Lowe’s lawyers, said in a statement early last year. “But, like all of us, he isn’t perfect. He admitted his misconduct in this case early on and is doing everything in his power to make up for it.”

“Mr. Farnsworth was anxious to accept responsibility for his conduct,” Sam Rabin, Farnsworth’s lawyer, said in his own statement last year upon Farnsworth’s guilty plea. “The most important step in doing that was to plead guilty to the crimes with which he was charged. He did that today.”

After all that, Spikes holds the reins once again. Which makes it all the more intriguing that the co-founder has opted to go in an entirely new direction.

“In our mind,” he says, “MoviePass 1.0 lets you save money. MoviePass 2.0 lets you make money.”

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Hollywood’s Stealth Gambling Circus

I’ve covered the prediction markets space as it relates to Hollywood, and it’s a doozy. And Hollywood’s quiet flirtation with them has become one of the industry’s strangest side economies.

To understand how granular — and lucrative — these markets have become: A group of Rotten Tomatoes traders who bet on films’ RT scores use a method called the “Peter Gray Test.” If Gray — an Aussie critic by night, full-time retail worker by day — doesn’t like something, it’s probably really bad. Last summer, Gray was one of the first four critics to screen Smurfs, and he gave it one star. The traders wagered heavily against the film, which ended up with a rating of just 21 percent on the review aggregation site, scoring four- and five-figure windfalls off Gray’s opinion. They made more money off Gray’s review than Gray did himself.

When I interviewed Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour in January last year, he said the company would be pushing entertainment markets “pretty aggressively for 2025.” That declaration turned out to be mostly false, save for a Timothée Chalamet Oscars flyover ad in L.A. the day of the ceremony. Kalshi added sports wagers later that same month; the sector went on to account for 90 percent of Kalshi’s trades during the fall, and the company now has a $11 billion valuation.

Still, entertainment markets punch above their weight. Just weeks ago, Kalshi set a record with $3.8 million wagered on Rotten Tomatoes outcomes for Avatar: Fire and Ash. Polymarket, which operates internationally, has logged nearly $20 million in bets on the film’s box office. Last year came the closest thing yet to an “eclipse” — when betting volume approaches opening-weekend box office — with Novocaine, whose $1.88 million in wagers amounted to more than 20 percent of its $8.7 million North American debut.

Hollywood has seen versions of this before. In 1996, Wall Street figures Max Keiser and current Lionsgate vice chairman Michael Burns launched the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX), a play-money market that let users trade “shares” of actors, directors and films. Attempts to transition HSX to real-money betting in the early 2000s faltered, and a renewed push a decade later ran into industry resistance and a congressional ban on box-office futures.

The concern then was obvious — and remains unresolved: What happens when studios, marketers or insiders can profit from betting against their own movies?

In 2010, when HSX renewed its push, virtually all of Hollywood rebuffed the attempt, and the box office futures ban was enacted into law. “You look at DraftKings, and you look at FanDuel: Why is there not an entertainment version of that?” Burns told me back in 2024.

Since then, though, Kalshi and Polymarket have blown the doors open. Polymarket operates internationally (though users in the U.S. can access it through a VPN), allowing it to offer box office wagering, which regularly attracts millions of dollars in trades. Now, the predictions market is adapting its platform for the U.S. after settling regulatory issues with the FTC. And Congress never accounted for Netflix streaming chart bets (they exist) and RT betting.

Spikes views those prediction markets as the “evolution of social media” — a way of moving past the pollution of social media by creating an ecosystem of people who have real skin in the game. And as HSX once sought to be, he wants to be the DraftKings/FanDuel/Polymarket/Kalshi version of it for entertainment.

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What Is Mogul?

As of now, Mogul sits in its beta phase as Spikes and his team test the platform during its first holiday season. Spikes describes Mogul as a “hybrid” between prediction markets and daily fantasy sports (DFS), allowing users to act as a general manager with a set salary cap to spend on specific films, directors and actors.

Mogul is not intended to be a competitor to the Kalshis and Polymarkets of the world, which Spikes likens to the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange. He wants to be the specific category or volume play that feeds into those larger exchanges, rather than carrying the massive capital and licensing burden required to be a complete marketplace. The goal is also for Mogul to funnel into MoviePass and boost the subscription service. Over 630,000 users were on the waitlist to join the Mogul platform, while roughly 5,000 users played the initial private beta version that launched last May. The plan for Mogul to make money is initially through contest fees for fantasy sports-style competitions, subscription tiers that unlock reduced contest fees and access to limited-entry contests and tokenized trading transactions. Eventually, Spikes hopes studios will sponsor or partner on contests tied to film releases.

Entertainment is not sports — the wagering apparatus is a pebble compared to the ocean of sports betting options out there. In large part, that’s because you can’t bet on film in quite the same way you can on football. (I can wager on what happens on the field. For any number of reasons, I can’t bet on what will happen in a film, although Polymarket did tally $83.6 million on “Who will die in Stranger Things: Season 5?” bets — a controversial market given the ambiguous fate of one lead.)

Spikes, however, argues that while Las Vegas has successfully monetized the awards bucket (Oscars, Emmys bets and the like), no one has capitalized on the attendance bucket — or created a central hub for entertainment data. His thesis is that, as sports data (yards, points, even balls and strikes, as the scandal around MLB pitcher Emmanuel Clase revealed last year) has become gambling fodder, there are entertainment fanatics who would love to get their hands on everything from per-screen averages to sentiment scores, and correspondingly profit from it.

“You can know so much detail and data, and we see the only other place that is as data-rich is sports,” Spikes says. “Well, the closest business that has that level of data that people are predicting and guessing about every Friday is movies.”

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The Wager

Spikes grew MoviePass, which, from the beginning, has operated out of a WeWork in New York City’s West Village, on the belief that there was latent interest and enthusiasm for movies. They just weren’t being served it the right way — subscriptions — something he still believes “there’s not enough industry focus on.”

“Hollywood’s problem is not going to theaters or not,” Spikes says. “If you had a subscription business that didn’t require you to bet the farm on Friday night, you’d have a stable world. But what happens is that you don’t have subscribers, so you have to acquire people every single day. You have to acquire those people to come.”

With subscriptions, which are now present at roughly 60 percent of theaters, “people have already paid for something,” Spikes says, and “they want to get value out of it, so they’re going to tune in.”

The one trait you’ll find if you talk to Spikes is that he’s inherently a believer in the movie business. He’ll readily tell you that more people went to see the new Avatar than went to games this entire NFL season.

Does that belief translate to the gambling space?

It’s a big bet.

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Now From Letterboxd: Oscar Fever

This week, a look at Academy Awards history

There weren’t always 10 movies nominated for best picture. For most of Oscar history, the Academy Awards’ top honor was capped at five nominees — but in the first year of the Oscars ceremony in 1929, only three films were nominated (the winner was Wings), while in 1935, when It Happened One Night won, it did so in a field of 12. In more recent history, the best picture lineup moved on a sliding scale, where anywhere between five and 10 movies could get nominated, before settling back on the set 10 the Oscars has employed over the last few years (and, no surprise, many film fans have found services like MoviePass or similar subscription-based theater programs to be worthwhile investments to make sure they can catch the whole list).

As we look ahead and wonder which movies might join the list of best picture nominees later this month (Oscar nominations voting starts next week), it’s also a great time to consider when the Academy got things right. As Michael Schulman points out in his book Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, Oscar nominees tend to reflect Hollywood’s shifting attitudes and viewpoints: 1967 was a watershed year because it marked the transition from the dying studio system, with a decrepit nominee like Doctor Dolittle, to exciting New Wave-influenced features like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. Academy members, like the rest of us, don’t know what will stand the test of time; rather, their picks represent a snapshot of current preferences that sometimes sync up with classics that endure through the ages.

In that spirit, Letterboxd put together The Best Best Picture Lineup. It’s a list that sorts every group of best picture nominees by the average rating of all films nominated in the category, with each year represented by its highest-rated film.

It’s likely no surprise to see the movies from 1975 on top, a monster of a year sporting the classics Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville and the Oscar-winner, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (one of only three movies to “sweep” the Oscars by winning picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay; the others were It Happened One Night and The Silence of the Lambs). Interestingly, expanding the pool of nominees didn’t significantly affect the averages. For example, Dune: Part Two was the highest-rated film among members in 2024, but even though it was among last year’s best picture nominees, the 2025 class ranks 68th, between 1954 (when Roman Holiday was the highest-rated) and 1989 (when Mississippi Burning was the highest-rated).

As for where the nominees for 2026 might fall, you would think there’s a heavy hitter in the bunch with the presumed front-runner, One Battle After Another, and its 4.3 average. But that’s actually 0.1 lower than Dune: Part Two (which had a 4.4 average). Then again, 2025’s nominees included the polarizing Emilia Pérez, which had a 2.0 average; this year, the slate of Netflix contenders is noticeably stronger, with Frankenstein (3.9 average) and Train Dreams (4.1 average) widely predicted as possible best picture nominees. Still, historically, Netflix’s best picture contenders have a habit of dragging down the overall yearly average for best picture lineups, so if you want to see the higher-rated nominees, you might want to pick up MoviePass and head to the theater. — Matt Goldberg for Letterboxd

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I write Crowd Pleaser from Ankler and Letterboxd that covers audience and moviegoing trends. I wrote about small-town theaters fighting against studios, scooped how Paul Thomas Anderson landed in Fortnite and drove across 20 states to visit 58 U.S. theaters. Email me at matthew@theankler.com

Earlier this month, A24 sold out of a $25 box of Marty Supreme–branded Wheaties — a novelty item tied to Timothée Chalamet’s fictional table-tennis phenom — in a matter of hours.

That might not sound remarkable until you consider that a standard box of Wheaties typically retails for under $6, and that the movie itself had yet to reach a wide audience. But the cereal wasn’t really the product. It was a signal — one that fans immediately recognized and raced to claim.

In the weeks leading up to the film’s release, Marty Supreme merch had already become an obsession online. Fans waited in long lines at pop-up shops in New York and Los Angeles to buy $250 windbreakers emblazoned with the film’s title. Secondary-market prices for the jackets quickly soared into four figures. When A24 partnered with Regal on a custom Marty Supreme popcorn bucket — a giant orange ping-pong ball available to Regal Crown Club members who purchased advance tickets — it was less a concession item than a badge of belonging.

The Wheaties box, in particular, was a reference to an inside joke from the film itself, in which Marty assures a potential business partner that his future success is so inevitable that he’ll one day be “staring at him from the cover of a Wheaties box.” By turning that line into a physical object, A24 wasn’t just selling merchandise — it was collapsing the distance between the movie, the marketing and the fan experience.

That kind of physical-world urgency has become especially potent for Gen Z.

“I know I’m absolutely gonna love it, so that’s why I bought it,” wrote one fan on Reddit. “When it inevitably sells out, I’m gonna wanna buy it on eBay when the price probably skyrockets.”

To understand why moments like this now matter as much as — or more than — opening weekend, I spoke with the five consumer-products chiefs from Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate, along with licensing executives and fan-creators operating in Hollywood’s increasingly porous merch ecosystem.

The Marty Supreme frenzy is less a one-off curiosity than a sign of how today’s blink-and-you-miss-it hype machine works. With the box office under strain, and competition for attention more brutal than ever, merch is a fast, social-first way for studios to tap into rabid fan enthusiasm — and, increasingly, to follow it.

“You’re always aiming for two things,” says Bruno Maglione, president of IMG Licensing, which has overseen campaigns for properties including Fast & Furious and Gabby’s Dollhouse. Revenue, of course, still matters. “But the other utility,” Maglione says, “is serving as a marketing vehicle. Anything that can help to put you into the zeitgeist is going to be useful.”

In other words, in today’s Hollywood, a sold-out cereal box can say more about a movie’s cultural footprint than its opening-weekend gross ever could.

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When Fans Lead the Market

That shift quietly is reordering Hollywood’s merch economy. As studios chase signals like the Marty Supreme sell-out, fans have become the industry’s earliest — and most accurate — market testers, surfacing demand long before anything is officially licensed or mass-produced.

Andrew Ortiz founded Super Yaki a decade ago to serve what he describes as “AMC A-Listers and Letterboxd users” — moviegoers who want merchandise that references a film without simply slapping its title on a hoodie. The appeal is subtle: items that function as an inside joke for people who’ve actually seen the movie (or at least watched the clips and trailer).

That sensibility clicked in a big way with Challengers, the Amazon MGM tennis drama starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. Ortiz designed a “New Rochelle Challenger” T-shirt, a reference to the central event that binds the film’s thorny throuple. Unsure how the studio would react, he emailed a contact at MGM asking whether it was okay to sell the shirt.

“Well, we’re not going to say anything if you do it,” the representative replied — effectively giving him the green light.

“We were sort of promoting the movie for them at that point,” Ortiz says. The shirt quickly became Super Yaki’s best-seller, with thousands of orders pouring in — so many that Ortiz had to rent a U-Haul to transport inventory.

That dynamic — fans identifying demand, studios quietly tolerating it, and success proving the market exists — is increasingly common. But it has also prompted studios to absorb those strategies themselves. Indie distributors, including A24 and Neon, have begun bringing the “if you know, you know” aesthetic in-house, hiring designers to create trend-forward merchandise rather than outsourcing that work to independent creators.

The shift forced Ortiz to adapt. Super Yaki now focuses less on studio-specific IP and more on celebrating moviegoing itself, often partnering directly with independent theaters instead of relying on studio properties. “We had to pivot,” he says. “The studios caught up.”

USC professor Henry Jenkins, who studies media and participatory culture, says the cycle is familiar.

“The fans are usually first to market,” Jenkins says. “That’s where the sense of edging the fan craftsman out — and profiteering off of their risk and success — becomes more of an issue.”

Still, Jenkins notes, studios face their own realities. They have a legal and financial responsibility to control and monetize their intellectual property. The challenge is finding a middle ground that acknowledges fan labor without stifling it entirely.

“We’re seeing some efforts now to reward fan labor through revenue sharing or publicity for the creative work fans have done,” says Jenkins. “That’s where some of the best practices are emerging.”

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How Studios Are Leaning In

Nick Micheels, a 33-year-old school administrative assistant and freelance drummer, rediscovered LEGO during the pandemic, designing concepts in digital studio software. At the same time, he and his wife began an ironic Twilight viewing habit that eventually morphed into genuine affection for the franchise. So, Nick combined his two new passions and spent a couple of hours every couple of nights for a month creating a LEGO Twilight set.

“It definitely was an ironic idea to start with,” Nick says. “I just thought it would be really funny as a LEGO movie.”

He submitted the design to LEGO Ideas, a platform where fans upload design ideas for new LEGO sets. The project hit 10,000 likes in just over 24 hours, making it one of the fastest sets to reach that milestone, prompting the LEGO team to review and eventually approve the design. Lionsgate became involved, IMG Licensing helped negotiate a licensing agreement, and voilà — after a year of monthly meetings with LEGO designers and Lionsgate representatives to refine the product — Nick’s design went on shelves.

“It was very surreal for that to happen. It took some processing just to kind of get through that high,” he says. “LEGO’s team did a good job ultimately of striking the balance of giving fans something serious, and just letting the fact that it is LEGO be what makes it campy and fun and silly.”

As part of the arrangement, Nick receives a royalty of 1 percent of net sales — along with 10 complimentary copies of the set, which costs $219.99 and is available at multiple retailers like Target and Best Buy.

Nick knows that he’s the ideal version of this kind of story. But there are others, too. FanWraps co-founder Nick Murray, whose site specializes in vehicle wraps and car accessories for brands like Star Wars and Fallout, began his journey as an original member of the “R2 Builders Group,” a fan community dedicated to building replica R2-D2 droids. After applying to Lucasfilm for a license to use Star Wars iconography on car graphics, he was approved, and FanWraps was born.

His biggest issue now: other fans. “It’s frustrating,” says Murray, who was undercut on his popular “Child on Board” decal featuring The Mandalorian’s Grogu (the actual name of the character most refer to simply as “Baby Yoda”) by a variety of unofficial knockoffs. “To go through the proper channels, do costly safety testing, only to have people circumvent it and undercut you. That’s definitely caused some disappointment, trying to do everything by the book.”

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Let’s Take a Studio Tour…

The whole ecosystem is quite complex — fans deploying IP from studios, studios taking from fans’ creations, and those same fans being taken advantage of by other fans. But for the studios, often at the center of these situations, it all fits into the larger fold: their outsized consumer products units.

Below, I talked to five studio consumer product heads, who told me how they’re adapting to the new marketplace — one where grownups (or “kidults,” as one executive calls them) are demanding attention.

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Lionsgate: Incorporating the Fans

“We’ve had closer connectivity to our fans now than we’ve ever had before, and that is so much better for them, and for us,” Jenefer Brown, Lionsgate’s president of global products & experiences, says.

Part of what that means, in Lionsgate’s case, is monitoring social media and other channels for audience trends. Fall’s “hoa hoa hoa” season, a fan-led phenomenon that serves as a reference to a song from the Twilight soundtrack, fueled themed merchandise and a fall collection. Likewise, a recent Crocs x Twilight collaboration emerged because fans posted online about wanting it after spotting a different IP’s Crocs collaboration.

The other aspect is actually licensing fan creations (like the Twilight LEGO set). Lionsgate also cut a deal with a fan who knitted a replica of the “shrug” Katniss Everdeen wore in The Hunger Games and sold her design specifically. “Fans have more ways to reach us,” Brown says.

Best-sellers: “Twilight … The Hunger Games, John Wick. Horror is really big, especially the Saw franchise,” Brown says. Nostalgia titles also perform well, with Dirty Dancing remaining a fan favorite and Mad Men seeing a resurgence ahead of its 20th anniversary.

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Sony: Speeding Up the (Digital) Shelves

Jamie Stevens, Sony’s EVP of global consumer products and licensing, says speed has become increasingly important to “meet fans where they are.” The business split is still roughly 60 to 70 percent traditional retail, but the remainder — non-traditional or digital sources (like TikTok Shop) — has been a source of innovation.

While traditional retail domains like toys still require lead times of 12-18 months, print-on-demand and digital storefronts get products to market in “a matter of weeks or days,” Stevens says. Take Vince Gilligan’s recent Apple TV hit Pluribus, a Sony television production. As the series soared to become the platform’s most-watched show ever, Sony quickly set up shop on the Sony Pictures website.

“Wherever fans are, we meet them,” Stevens attests. “If it’s traditional retail, we have products there. If it’s on TikTok shop, if it’s online, we’re really much more focused on being nimble and being able to reach fans wherever they are.”

Best-sellers: Ghostbusters stands strong as Sony’s crown jewel. “That is an evergreen property for us,” Stevens says, “both the original movie and then all of the iterations of the franchise.” Other top performers include Hotel Transylvania, Jumanji, The Boys and Breaking Bad.

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WB: Value of Long Leads

Like other studios, Warner Bros. has been keen on speeding up parts of its consumer products arsenal. When season three of The White Lotus took off, it quickly jumped into luxury collaborations with Bloomingdale’s and CB2. After Sinners became a hit back in the spring, the team rushed to ensure the film would become a Halloween staple.

But that’s still just 20 percent of the business.

The other 80 percent — long lead time, planned out years in advance — pays exceptionally high dividends for a studio with a library and catalog like Warner Bros.

“We’re sitting here on Dec. 17, which means yesterday was Dec. 16, and we delivered all of our spring/summer 2027 creative guides,” WBD global head of consumer products Robert Oberschelp says. He notes that he and his team are already in “lockstep” with DC Studios head and Man of Tomorrow director James Gunn on the creative behind the summer 2027 Superman sequel.

A significant focus of that foundation for WBD is seasonal. For Harry Potter, it means hitting different “beats” throughout the year, which includes “Butterbeer Season” in the spring, “Back to Hogwarts” at the end of summer and “Dark Arts” during Halloween (though Oberschelp has pushed horror — from IT to Beetlejuice — from just a Halloween play to year-round). And as the owners of Elf, which was distributed by Warner Bros. subsidiary New Line Cinema in 2003, the Christmas season is particularly fruitful, with this go-around prompting “December the TwELFth” (get it?) to become a retail event in addition to the film’s theatrical re-release.

Best-sellers: Not surprisingly, Harry Potter is the top-tier franchise that drives the business. The DC Comics universe and classic animation (Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry) also serve as core pillars. “Those really are kind of the evergreen ones,” Oberschelp says.

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Universal: The Parks Upper Hand

Universal has one big advantage when it comes to consumer products: its parks (the newest of which, Epic Universe in Orlando, debuted this year and marks the first one opened in the U.S. in over 20 years).

“It’s a highly lucrative business inside the park because we’re a vertical business,” Vince Klaseus, president of products and experiences at Universal, says. While Universal maintains a robust licensing business like other studios, its parks merchandise operates vertically, meaning Universal handles every part of the process internally — and sells to a “captured audience,” as Klaseus puts it.

The two sides of the business — licensing and parks — maintain a symbiotic relationship, with insights from the parks informing broader retail strategies. In contrast, developments from the licensing market are brought back to the parks. “It does flow back and forth very nicely,” Klaseus says.

Best-sellers: As the Jurassic World franchise undergoes a Rebirth, so too has Universal’s product line around the franchise, bolstered by the new entry over the summer. For a younger crowd, “Gabby's Dollhouse has really been a fantastic preschool play for us,” Klaseus says, with the film this year sparking “a huge jump internationally.”

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Paramount: ‘Brand Deposits’

For Mattel and Marvel alum Josh Silverman, who joined Paramount in October as president of global products and experiences, the core philosophy around the business is to create “brand deposits” — products that deepen fans’ emotional connection to the franchise and add value to the IP — rather than “brand withdrawals” that merely extract revenue.

“We want to be really careful and really thoughtful about the things that we put into the world,” Silverman says.

His hope for a brand that can regain stealth-merchandising relevance: MTV. “I’m really intrigued by MTV,” he says. “Before I joined, they’ve done some really cool things with logos and callbacks, but the MTV portfolio is incredibly cool. Having grown up with it, maybe it’s my connection to something, but I think there’s something there.”

Best-sellers: “Big is contextual,” Silverman points out, but the biggest money-makers for Paramount come from its evergreen kids properties: Paw Patrol, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, SpongeBob SquarePants and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Elsewhere, Star Trek drums up interest among young and old fans alike, while classics like The Godfather and Top Gun stay relevant.

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Now From Letterboxd: Physical Media Returns

A how-to guide to maximize your collection

While it may seem like every movie is available thanks to streaming, the landscape that has emerged is essentially one where titles tend to bounce between services, so you can never be 100 percent confident the movie you want to see is on a streamer you use. There’s also the option of digital rentals, but the more obscure the movie, the harder it is to procure.

Thankfully, the physical media market has stepped up to fill the gap with boutique labels like Second Sight, Severin and Vinegar Syndrome joining larger players such as Criterion, Shout and Arrow. At Letterboxd, at least, we feel there’s never been a better time to be a collector of films that never received their due upon theatrical release or even on VHS and DVD.

But what should you do once you have all these discs in your home? You’ve shelved them, but perhaps made the mistake of re-buying something you already own (this is how one might end up having two copies of The Hudsucker Proxy — just saying from experience!). It’s not the worst problem to have, but some organization is in order. That’s where Letterboxd is stepping up to help you keep track of your collection. Pro and Patron members can utilize the “own” or “owned” tags on their movies (and lists), and then when you search for a film, it will add your physical version to the streaming options provided by JustWatch. Those categories can be broken down even further, if you like, from owned to subcategories like Blu-ray or 4K, as Letterboxd’s Head of Editorial, Mitchell Beaupre, did with their collection. You can also shout out your local video rental stores by tagging your rentals like I do whenever I rent from Atlanta’s Videodrome. Ella Kemp recently ran down many more ways you can use Letterboxd to better keep track of the movies you own and amplify your physical media habits.

Once you’ve got your collection set on Letterboxd, always keep an eye out for the latest editions of Katie Rife’s monthly Shelf Life feature, which will point out notable movies arriving on disc. Digital rentals can also be a great way to discover movies, like in Letterboxd’s new Video Store, but once you find a film you love, make sure you add it to your collection. — Matt Goldberg for Letterboxd

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I write Crowd Pleaser, a newsletter from Ankler and Letterboxd that covers audience and moviegoing trends. I scooped how Paul Thomas Anderson landed in Fortnite, and drove across 20 states to 58 U.S. theaters. Email me at matthew@theankler.com

Oof. Two weeks of Tron: Ares.

That’s the mandate Disney handed theaters across the country this fall — even the one- and two-screen venues that can’t afford to spend half a month showing a movie their audiences already rejected. For multiplexes, a two-week holdover on a flop is an annoyance. For small-town theaters, it’s an existential threat.

“If the industry just let us have multiple movies, we’d be far better,” says Mike Peters, executive director of the 107-year-old Fox Theatre in Walsenburg, Colo. Instead, owners like Peters are forced into impossible bets: commit their entire screen to a dud for 14 days or lose access to future studio releases altogether.

And that’s before you factor in the looming $82.7 billion Netflix–Warner Bros. mega-deal (aka World War Warner Bros.) — a seismic shift that theater owners fear could accelerate a collapse already underway. “Theatres will close, communities will suffer, jobs will be lost,” Cinema United warned in its blistering statement opposing the merger.

Owners don’t need the reminder. They’ve been living inside the industry’s fecklessness for years. As I learned during my two-week, 58-theater road trip from rural Colorado to northern Arkansas to backcountry West Virginia, many of these mom-and-pop venues aren’t kept awake by Netflix’s latest move so much as by a more immediate, slow-moving force: the studio “holdovers” system that dictates exactly how long a theater must play each film — whether the audiences show up or not.

Says Peters, echoing a version of a sentiment I heard over and over: “It doesn’t feel like the industry wants us to be successful.”

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Holdovers Hell for Small Theaters

The logic behind holdovers is simple, at least on paper: guarantee adequate exposure for new releases and prevent theaters from dumping underperformers too quickly. But for small-town exhibitors operating one or two screens, the logic breaks the moment a movie bombs (with concessions, naturally, about as lively as a broken popcorn machine).

“Generally, it’s two weekends,” says Will, manager of The Ritz Theatre in Hinton, W. Va. “Sometimes three.” Universal required Wicked: For Good to play for three weeks — a condition Will and others were happy to meet, until they realized the dates overlapped with the studio’s other late-fall tentpole, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. By the time the holdover lifted, one- and two-screen theaters (which also had Disney’s Zootopia 2 on the docket) had missed the No. 1 movie in the country.

At nearly every non-chain theater, staff discuss impending, ongoing or desired renovations they say would significantly boost business. Reclining seats (which reduce your capacity by roughly half), new projectors, improved flooring — all are in a holding pattern pending theaters’ ability to secure the funds and product to warrant them.

“When you don’t have people coming, it’s a little hard to put money into it,” Veronica, a manager at Brenden Theatres in Kingman, Ariz., says. “It’s kind of hard to validate doing any of the upgrades and all these fancy things if nobody’s going to come out for it.”

Friction with studios — which extends to single-day rentals, percentage of the take and mandatory advance guarantees — accounts for much of the trouble. They attest that studios don’t quite grasp the effects of their restrictions.

“It doesn’t really seem fair,” says Kim, co-owner of the two-screen Shelby Theatres in Conshocton, Ohio. “Why not let us play Wicked for two weeks and then bring in Five Nights at Freddy’s?” His booker told him the studio “might let you out early.” They didn’t.

Even four- or five-screen venues aren’t immune. Brenden Theatres and Athens Movie Palace in Tennessee both lost out on bigger films because their screens were locked by titles the community had already seen — or, in the case of Disney’s Tron: Ares, rejected outright.

Says Kavitha, director of operations at Athens Movie Palace, “It’s these archaic methods from the ’70s. There’s no push and pull. It’s just push. You sign it, or you don’t.”

Her hope for what can change — someone who can foster dialogue between distributors and exhibitors, and perhaps even has some magic up their sleeve.

“It’s probably because I just watched Wicked, but I see The Wizard of Oz,” Kavitha posits. “You need somebody who’s like, Okay, let’s have an industry-wide discussion and figure out how to make this make sense.”

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Disney’s ‘Movie Mafia’

Owners and managers complain about all the studios, but they have a particular axe to grind with Disney, which one manager only semi-affectionately calls the “movie mafia.”

In addition to strict week counts, the company’s typical quote of box office grosses comes in at 65 percent, with theaters at 35 percent. “Disney, they will never give more than they think they have to,” a small chain manager in Arkansas tells me. (Disney did not respond to a request for comment.)

Disney, however, is not the only studio operating in that ballpark. Across the country, theater owners bemoaned the fact that major studios routinely take 60 to 65 percent of a film’s box office. This is not a new phenomenon and has been ongoing for decades. The only thing that’s changed is that initially, if theaters waited two weeks and then screened a film, they only had to pay 35 percent. Now, the owners say they’re still paying the 60 to 65 percent, even two weeks later.

For indie films desperate for screens, a 50-50 split is more likely, with the percentages often dipping so exhibitors earn over half of the take. Ann Sanders, manager at the Liberty Theatre in Pagosa Springs, Colo., tells me she screened Roadside Attraction’s bomb Kiss of the Spider Woman because, “Well, 45 percent is better than 67 percent.” But for the big draws, studios know they have the leverage and aren’t shy about exerting it, which is why every theater relies on concessions to pay the bills and — increasingly — repertory screenings and special events.

Theater owners negotiate either a flat rate or a lower percentage with studios when trying to play films from their back catalogs. In the case of one theater that wanted to screen Spaceballs, it was either spend $250 or give Amazon MGM a 35 percent cut of the take. Disney is the strictest company in this space, and generally does not allow one-time showings of their films.

Fox Theatre’s Mike Peters started doing rep screenings without consulting the studios after another theater owner told him they’d been able to skirt by undetected. Mike lasted six months before a showing of Hocus Pocus in his 3,035-person town led to a phone call from Disney’s lawyers.

Of course, studios have every right to charge for rep screenings — such are the rewards of having a deep archive. But as tensions with studios persist and theaters struggle to scrape by, it all adds up to an adversarial relationship that pits distributor against exhibitor.

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New Elephant in the Room

Then there’s the Netflix of it all.

If 35 percent is a tough pill to swallow, how about no release and whatever Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos meant when he suggested “over time, the windows will evolve to be much more consumer-friendly, to be able to meet the audience where they are quicker”?

Theater owners have been through it with both Netflix and Warner Bros. over the last several years, and while the potential joining of the companies feels nebulous and far-off — or maybe won’t even happen if Paramount has its say — the inclination, based on recent history, is to lean toward pessimism. (Don’t forget that Warner Bros. kick-started the tightening of the theatrical window during Covid with “Project Popcorn,” an initiative that brought its studio’s films to HBO Max at the same time they were released in theaters. It was not exactly a fan favorite amongst the exhibitor crowd.)

“I’m always going to try to be optimistic about it, but I’ve also been in the business long enough where there have been similar struggles, as long as streaming has been around,” Ryan, manager of Golden Ticket Cinemas in Harrison, Ark., says. “Netflix, I assume, doesn’t care that much about theater exhibition, but I hope they would see that there’s a potential for them to make more money and more profit.” (Entertainment Strategy Guy recently made this argument persuasively.)

As Ryan alludes, there’s a real hope among some in the exhibitor class that this merger will actually bring the behemoth streamer onto the theatrical playing field once and for all.

In other words, theaters can weather Netflix. What they’re not sure they can weather is the business model he’s about to inherit.

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Now From Letterboxd: The Best Movies About Going to the Movies

Cinematic words straight from its members

At Letterboxd, we love going to the movies, and it’s a particularly meta experience when we’re watching a movie where characters go to the movies, too.

Letterboxd members voted on the best scenes in movie theaters, and it’s easy to see the power of films reflected in the stories we’re watching.

Look at the climax of 2009’s Inglourious Basterds from Quentin Tarantino, where the theater becomes a place of not only vengeance, but borderline supernatural rebirth. “Shosanna Dreyfus laughing while a theater full of Nazis are screaming in agonizing pain is by far the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,” says #1 gizmo fan.

The supernatural element in motion pictures is central to 1985’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, as characters leave the movie screen and enter the real world. “Oh, how I wish to have my favorite fictional characters come out of the screen for me,” laments Sabrina, while Darren adds that it’s “a wonderful love letter to cinema that makes you realize why you love movies.”

Of course, sometimes going to the movies isn’t all fun and games, especially when you’re dealing with someone who likes toying with his victims. The opening of 1997’s Scream 2 is brutal as characters watch Stab, the movie-within-a-movie that uses the events of the first Scream just for an extra layer of meta-flavor. As Olivia notes, “I love the image of Ghostface watching a Ghostface movie in theaters.”

While scenes with movie theaters can be funhouse mirrors, they also show how theaters can function as temples, complete with their own codes of conduct and rituals. “This film made me remember how finding a passion in cinema is one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me,” Muriel writes of 1988’s Cinema Paradiso. On the other end of the transformative spectrum, you have 1981’s An American Werewolf in London: “The urge to just turn into a werewolf in a porn theater… good for him,” observes Ricky.

Movies are magic, and they can transport us so far away that even when they show us the room we’re sitting in, we can only see boundless possibilities. As Holli wisely says of 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain, “Do you ever watch a film that makes you want to shout from a rooftop, ‘I love movies so much!!!!’ and then scream and then break into a choreographed musical number? Because this film did that for me.” — Matt Goldberg for Letterboxd

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I write Crowd Pleaser, a newsletter from Ankler and Letterboxd that covers audience and moviegoing trends. I drove across 20 states to 58 U.S. theaters and wrote about the viral trends behind A Minecraft Movie’s success. Email me at matthew@theankler.com

I’ve written before about Gen Z’s renewed hunger for IRL experiences. Last Thursday, I got a front-row reminder of how real that is. At our first-ever Crowd Pleaser Live event — a screening of Sony’s Crunchyroll juggernaut Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Infinity Castle at The West Hollywood Edition — the mood was upbeat. The movie is already a phenom, with more than $733 million at the global box office and a 4.0 on Letterboxd; director Haruo Sotozaki told us theaters in Japan literally ran out of popcorn and juice during the film’s run.

After the screening, my colleague Elaine Low led a rapid-fire Q&A with Sotozaki and director of photography Yuichi Terao, who broke down everything from integrating 2D animation with 3D CG to how they’re hoping to pull in new viewers. And, of course, Elaine asked about the release date for the second installment of the trilogy. “We’re all wondering the answer to that question,” Sotozaki said. “Ourselves included.” (Catch the whole Q&A at AnklerEnjoy.)

It was a perfect example of how fandom lives now — communal, voracious. And it also revealed the much bigger shift happening across Hollywood and entertainment, where the walls between mediums are dissolving.

Anime flows into film and TV, and — in the case of today’s column — movies are flowing straight into games.

In July, Warner Bros. announced an unusual marketing move: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another was “coming to Fortnite.” A political, adult-skewing awards contender starring Leonardo DiCaprio would be debuting a crossover inside a platform best known for teenagers and Travis Scott concerts?

The internet’s reaction summed it up:

“PTA x Fortnite — we truly live in mysterious times.”
“WHAT!? WHY!?”
“Who asked for this?”

The answer, it turns out, involved Paul Thomas Anderson himself.

And that decision — plus how it got made — is the clearest sign yet of a new era: Films are no longer just watched. They’re also being played.

A study this year found 83 percent of Gen Alpha and 78 percent of Gen Z play video games at least an hour a week, making Fortnite and Roblox two of the largest storytelling hubs on the planet (whether studios like it or not).

Today, I’ve got the full story behind the One Battle x Fortnite crossover — straight from the guy who built it — and also have details about the studios’ mad rush to merge genres and how Disney’s Epic Games investment is starting to pay off.

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PTA & Warner Bros. Wanted It. This Guy Made It Happen

The activation’s architect, Nic Hill, told me he might not have expected Warner Bros. to create a Fortnite mini-game around a political, adult-oriented epic about former left-wing revolutionaries fighting back against a white supremacist cabal. But Anderson had seen another Fortnite activation around Warner Bros.’ Sinners and approached the studio — which had also created a tie-in event for Weapons.

Instead of an integration, where the film would appear inside Fortnite as a skin, emote (a personalized player gesture) or limited event, Anderson specifically wanted to create an extension — meaning its own experience or world that operates as a sort of mini-game within the platform and doesn’t involve Epic Games (Fortnite’s parent company). The goal was to extend the story, build out the world and translate the sets from the screen into a gaming experience consistent with One Battle.

The action-packed, gunslinging escape survival game looks and feels almost exactly like the film: digitally rendered versions of DiCaprio’s character, Bob Ferguson, and other stars; the lore of the French 75, Bob’s revolutionary group; Jonny Greenwood’s off-kilter score; the river of hills in Borrego Springs, Calif., from the climax. There are even a handful of references to Anderson’s earlier films, for hardcore cinephiles. It was all contained in a 20-minute interactive quest that debuted 10 days before One Battle’s September release.

Telling me how this all came to be is Hill, the man behind both the One Battle and Sinners games, who runs Sawhorse Productions, a creative agency and production company. On a rainy Monday afternoon, Hill and I are sitting in the L.A. backyard of the house next to Sawhorse’s office — a company-owned post-production bay. Across the Hollywood Freeway, about a five-minute drive away, is Universal Studios.

Hill is the first person I’ve met who wears the Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses for real in the wild, which fits for a guy whose business has been trying to stay ahead of the curve. After beginning his career as a documentary filmmaker, Hill transitioned into digital advertising, often for Silicon Valley startups, just as the tech bubble started to inflate in 2012 and 2013. He and Sawhorse worked with Condé Nast’s print publications, including Wired, GQ and Glamour, as those magazines transitioned more into digital content creation. Then, during Covid, Sawhorse began its gaming journey, which quickly became a successful avenue through Sawhorse’s entertainment vertical.

Hill has also helped bring Roblox campaigns to life for Universal’s Wicked and How to Train Your Dragon, as well as Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Hill isn’t the only one in the space. Gamefam, a metaverse-centric gaming company, brought Disney’s Moana 2 and A24’s 2023 horror hit Talk to Me to Fortnite, plus Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Garfield to Roblox. The latter two each scored 37 million and 31 million total visits, respectively. Overwolf — a gaming company that counts Marc Andreessen’s a16z, among its investors — created a backend that played Paramount’s A Quiet Place: Day One ads specifically during scary in-game moments in thriller games.

Whereas games used to be a way of extending the value of a film after it was released, now it’s the other way around. As The Anker’s Nicole LaPorte has covered, the hierarchy of the Hollywood press tour has shifted from junkets and Entertainment Weekly covers to Theo Von interviews and Hot Ones stunts. Amid a fractured, confusing media ecosystem, studios are increasingly seeking novel ways to reach Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences where they are — and gaming is a substantial part of that.

“Every brand needs to have a UGC (user-generated content), gaming, or a Roblox strategy, especially if they want to be relevant with Gen Z and Gen Alpha,” Ricardo Briceno, chief business officer at Gamefam, says.

No surprise, studios are starting to come to the table.

“Almost every high-budget Hollywood film has some sort of gaming activation today on some platform,” Hill says, “because it works.”

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Eat My (Interactive) Shorts

The two biggest gaming platforms are Roblox, a user-generated digital playground of sorts with over 150 million daily active users (40 percent of whom are 13 years and under), and Fortnite, a social hub centered on battle royales (with 30 million players daily, 60 percent of whom are in the 18-24 age demo). Those young audiences were likely the target demographic for a collaboration with Quentin Tarantino titled “The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge,” a cut sequence from Kill Bill: Vol. 1 starring Uma Thurman. (Tarantino’s martial arts epic, released in two parts in 2003 and 2004, returns to theaters as one single movie in December, the first time that cut has been released wide.)

Within these platforms, and across the entire gamer-sphere, there is less of an aversion to branded content than you’d think. According to a 2025 survey from Hub Entertainment Research, 44 percent of gamers have downloaded branded playable content, and 63 percent say playable content is more relevant than “regular” TV commercials or other advertising.

“It’s the holy grail of ads,” Hub principal Jon Giegengack says. “The way that people interact with games better leans into fandom and the way that people really like to connect with characters and story.”

Looking across the business, in 2023, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters expressed his desire to “incrementally scale” the games sector to have a “material impact on the business.” Warner Bros. has four franchises that each have generated more than $1 billion in gaming revenue: Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Mortal Kombat and the superheroes from DC Comics (Superman, Wonder Woman, etc.). In February 2024, Disney invested $1.5 billion in Epic Games, and the dividends from that investment are now being realized this month.

On Nov. 1, Fortnite and The Simpsons launched a month-long integration that turned the game’s traditional map into Springfield (the animated sitcom’s setting) and allowed players to play as characters from the show. To promote the collaboration, on Nov. 17, a swarm of Homer Simpsons (along with series creator Matt Groening, who danced in the middle of the Homers) descended on the Santa Monica Promenade and raided a donut shop.

In the 48 hours since the Simpsons integration drop, Fortnite’s servers were populated by the most users since the 2024 holidays, reaching 2.7 million concurrent players. Plus, the first of four Fortnite-oriented Simpsons shorts, which previews narrative and map elements, hit No. 1 on Disney+. The project is “a redefining of how audiences experience stories across formats,” Sean Shoptaw, executive vice president of Disney Games and Digital Entertainment, told The Hollywood Reporter.

If that isn’t the original Walt Disney flywheel — turning stories into ecosystems — in action, I don’t know what is. “The Simpsons is just the first,” Hub senior advisor Jason Platt Zolov says. “They’re going to be doing it with their whole portfolio.”

Meanwhile, earlier this month, Roblox opened up its License Manager and Licenses catalog to all eligible IP holders, allowing creators to build games with the permission of the rights holders. Translation: Any studio can list its IP as available on Roblox, and any creator can then apply to adapt the film or TV show for their own game within Roblox — all without Roblox’s intervention.

This is no slight shift. In July, Netflix and Lionsgate became founding partners in the game’s new licensing system. When Roblox users were granted the ability to create games based on Netflix’s Squid Game, a user-generated game called “Ink Game” emerged, which has been played over 2.7 billion times.

When Lionsgate was preparing to release The Hunger Games spinoff The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in 2023, the studio released the world of Panem — the post-apocalyptic nation where the story is set — into the platform. Lionsgate didn’t sell or include Academy uniforms, the clothing worn by students in Panem’s central city, the Capitol, but, much to its surprise, fans still chose to create their own.

It’s all part of a new operating procedure for studios: Let fans interact with the IP in ways never before possible and hope they grow attached.

“As we think about where fans are, giving people the ability to make their own imprint in the content is something we’re really excited about,” Jenefer Brown, Lionsgate’s head of global live, interaction and location-based entertainment, says. “If you look at the way that Gen Z and Gen Alpha like to interact with content, it’s very clear that there is a desire to be able to create and play in these spaces. Roblox is a perfect example of that.”

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How the Sausage Gets Made

While a rudimentary user-generated game can be created in half an hour, for a gaming production company like Gamefam, that process extends much longer — though maybe not as long as you might think.

A typical turnaround time for a Fortnite or Roblox campaign (a standalone game is far more intensive) is eight to 12 weeks, with a budget of $50,000 to $1 million, according to Sawhorse’s Hill. The studios provide briefs, requirements and a sense of what the marketing message should be, at which point the production company will approach the studio with a concept for what it’ll look like in practice.

If it’s a VFX-heavy film, production companies can turn its 3D models into interactive experiences. If not, which is most of the time, they’re starting from scratch, with a team of art directors and 3D artists designing elements of the world. The catch: You can only make the visuals so detailed before the game runs slower, crashes consistently and breaks.

“With this immersive, interactive art,” Hill says, “it’s always about how do you make it for the lowest cost possible from a tech art standpoint, but it looks so good that you’re like, ‘That looks fucking awesome.’”

Once they’re up and running, success is determined by measuring the number of users who played and “deliberate actions,” as Gamefam’s Briceno puts it, like engaging with aspects of the IP, unlocking items, talking to characters or completing quests. Depending on the studio’s demands, success might mean partnering with enough live streamers who invite their followers to watch as they play through a Garfield Roblox extension. In the case of Sawhorse’s How to Train Your Dragon, the game did well enough to warrant its design evolving from a promotional game to a consistent, monetizing game with live service updates.

The assumption across the board at these production companies is, naturally, that this branded video game space will continue to grow. Both Hill and Briceno compared it to the dawn of YouTube. Look at other major new releases, and you’ll find a tailored gaming component somewhere. There’s an Avatar game, already released, created by Ubisoft. Wicked: For Good had a Roblox extension — crafted by Hill’s Sawhorse team. Even A24’s The Smashing Machine has a retro arcade component.

“Gaming lost its status as a ‘nerd thing’ and just became a part of the culture,” says Shahin Zarrabi, who heads a multinational gaming lifestyle festival called DreamHack.

As Briceno notes, though, these activations are “still a small fraction of overall movie marketing.” The real growth has been in more and more films employing the practice. Out of the top 20 highest-grossing movies this year, 12 of them (and four of the top 10) activated on Roblox or Fortnite in 2025.

In the end, though, if it’s good enough for Anderson, it’s probably good enough for everyone else.

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Now From Letterboxd: Game On

Letterboxd members on the video games and properties Gen Z is nostalgic for

This year marked a turning point in Gen Z nostalgia, as movies based on their childhood faves are now box-office hits. Look no further than the success of Warner Bros. A Minecraft Movie, which took a game from 2011 and turned it into a feature that made almost $1 billion worldwide and easily cruised into Letterboxd’s One Million Watched Club. If comic book movies dominated millennials’ viewing habits, then games-based movies may be where Gen Z goes to see how old favorites are being adapted for the big screen.

For example, Universal’s 2023 movie Five Nights at Freddy’s was just as big a hit as its source video game was with streamers (gaining a large following on YouTube as audiences watched a hapless gamer navigate the horror of animatronic nightmare animals). Freddy’s joined Minecraft, with over one million Letterboxd members logging it on the platform. As member Danilo explains, “This movie is 100 percent pure, uncut fan service for the 2014 YouTube/Hot Topic generation, and honestly? It worked… It’s dumb, it’s fun, and the lore is thicc.” (Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 hits theaters Dec. 5.)

Part of this stems from how younger audiences better understand gaming imagery and language, and how they can appreciate how it’s woven into movies that “speak video games,” even if they’re not direct adaptations, like 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph. “Toronto is a PvP-enabled (player vs. player) zone,” observes Kai of Scott Pilgrim, which is set in the Canadian city. At the same time, Kutulhu spied a sly Easter egg in Wreck-It Ralph by noting, “Early in the film, we see (Street Fighter characters) Ryu and Ken say they are going to Tapper’s for a drink. Later, when Ralph is at Tapper’s, Ryu is by himself and looks despondent. What happened?”

The popularity of these movies is also evident in the Letterboxd Showdown, where members voted for their favorite game movies, and we can see how far these adaptations have come in roughly a decade. “Those absolute madmen, they actually did it,” Adam says of 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog. When it comes to 2019’s Pokémon Detective Pikachu, “This is our generation’s Blade Runner. I will not elaborate,” proclaims Cinéfila. Video game reboots are also getting love, too. Despite initially hitting screens in the ’90s, a new adaptation of Super Mario won over audiences in 2023. “Jack Black was born to play Bowser,” notes Luk3w3bb. (This could not be said of Dennis Hopper.)

Beyond gaming, Gen Z has also propelled anime into some of the biggest hits of 2025. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle is the highest-grossing international film in the U.S., and Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc is one of the highest-grossing Japanese films of all time. Both pictures came from anime series, but those fans were more than happy to follow the titles into cinemas. “Watching this in a full theater packed with fans feels like being at a home team football game; people screaming and cheering when a Hashira does something sick and audible booing whenever one of the demons does the same lmao!” Adam writes about Demon Slayer.

Whether it’s in gaming adaptations or seeing anime series land on the big screen, people want to take the entertainment they see at home and celebrate sharing it with their community. — Matt Goldberg for Letterboxd

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As the cliché goes, write what you know. At The Ankler, I’ve focused on my generation — Gen Z — whether it’s about the power of clip channels, Hollywood’s IRL experiences boom, or the AI wars at film schools. Starting today, I’m writing Crowd Pleaser — a new Letterboxd × Ankler project about the only greenlight that matters: the audience. For my debut column, I proposed a cross-country drive to America’s movie theaters. Far from the shiny temples of L.A.’s TCL Chinese Theatre or AMC Lincoln Square in New York (the final stop on my tour), I drove my rental Subaru Outback 4,050 miles to uncover the moviegoing struggles in what Hollywood often refers to as “the middle.” I met theater owners so starved for product they’re showing reruns of Monster House and Monty Python, and an owner who had to shut down his theater for the night after ZERO people came to watch A24’s The Smashing Machine. My journey took on greater urgency the more I drove as the box office — devoid of new movies — marked its worst month since the 1990s.

But movies matter. There are huge, hungry fans everywhere I visited, all of whom want MORE out of Hollywood: families who need a place to entertain the kids, slight-to-extreme cinephiles desperate to be entertained, retirees wistful for quality films. How desperate are they? Fans are coming to theaters even without new movies just to buy the popcorn to take home. My reporting is a plea to Hollywood to recognize the opportunity of an audience begging for more.

Follow my trip on Ankler’s Instagram (@theankler) and more exclusive details from the road on Ankler’s YouTube channel. And email me about going to the movies: matthew@theankler.com.

Now here is my story.

It’s a cool October Friday night in Pagosa Springs, Colo., a working-class town of roughly 1,800 that’s proudly home to the world’s deepest hot springs. I’m nearing the end of day three of my two-week cross-country voyage, and with an hour to kill, I post up at a small bar, where several locals drink beers while watching a playoff baseball game on the corner TV.

The town itself is a beauty, with tall Aspen trees overlooking the San Juan River on one side of the road and an old Western village — now transformed into a slightly more modern town, featuring Subway and Arby’s next to century-old local shops — on the other. There’s the Pagosa Hotel, which burned down, then was rebuilt in 1919; there’s Goodman’s, a fifth-generation family-owned department store that’s been in operation since 1899; and right next to it is the Liberty Theatre, a charming, old-school auditorium that has remained in business since 1919 and once housed a brothel in what are now the dark, gravelly bowels of the venue.

I’m in town as part of my quest to spend quality time at as many American movie theaters as I can, traveling by car from Los Angeles to New York to 20 states and 58 movie theaters. Guiding me through stop number 16 is Liberty manager Ann Sanders, a New Orleans native and soon-to-be great-grandmother who sports bright red hair and medium-sized glasses. Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, Ann sold her multi-million dollar wholesale and marketing company to a competitor. She subsequently moved West and eventually settled in Pagosa Springs, which she refers to as her “happy place.” In 2018, her best friend of nearly 50 years purchased the Liberty and entrusted Ann with managerial duties, which she spends her time on, including programming, advertising and overseeing the day-to-day operations of the 200-seat venue.

As a few customers begin to file in, Ann rushes to tend bar — a relatively new addition to the space. After Ann’s friend bought the theater, she began renovations, which took two years to complete. (There is no exact estimate on how much the renovations cost, but Ann points me to a hand-painted mural of the block behind the concession stand. Instead of “Liberty Theatre,” it reads “Money Pit.”) According to Liberty employees Teresa and Al, these renovations were sorely needed. As a memento, the bar area holds three of the old stiff wooden chairs, one of which has a small hole in the center, which is believed to be from a gunshot back in the 1920s.

The theater is now in quite an admirable condition. It still retains much of its old-school charm, with a sign reading “Movie Tickets 25¢” and a few framed black-and-white images of the theater lining the walls. However, the seats now have a little more plush to them. The floor used to be flat, such that you’d often be staring at the back of someone’s head — now it’s sloped. The ceiling is twice as high, no longer falling in, and has a sleek tin appearance.

The one thing that couldn’t be renovated out of the venue, though, were the ghosts. According to Ann’s psychic friend, they remain from the Prohibition-era bordello in the basement. While touring me through the premises, she briefly alludes to it: “We do have ghosts, by the way.” I laugh it off as a joke. But while talking with Teresa and Al as Ann tended bar, they bring it up just the same as she had: matter-of-factly, shrugging it off as a quirk of the building. I ask Teresa, who sometimes feels a little tinge on her skin when she goes downstairs, if she’s afraid of them. She shakes her head no. “They’re not evil spirits,” Teresa says. “They’re just quietly living their life like they normally do.”

That Friday night, there are likely more ghosts occupying the premises than moviegoers. As Ann and I sit in her dimly lit projection room, we overlook the eight people who have made it out for a showing of the Jennifer Lopez musical flop, Kiss of the Spider Woman. Meanwhile, Ann regales me with stories of small-town theater management. Many are funny. When A Minecraft Movie opened at the Liberty, she hung signs all around town that read, “Disruptive Behavior Will Be Prosecuted.”

“Will be prosecuted?” I ask.

“Absolutely,” Ann replies. “We’re friends with the sheriff.”

Some stories are sad. The first week of last year’s Joker: Folie à Deux was so bad (only three people came one night), she had to lay off her staff and work everything herself.

But a lot of what she says is the type of wistful, cynical rhetoric I would begin to hear across the country, at every independent theater, multiplex and chain; urban, suburban and rural; managers, employees and patrons alike.

“Streaming is making people want to sit at home,” Ann says. “Economics affect that. Right now, I think people are afraid of everything going on in the world and our country, and I think they’re holding on to their money. And that’s why I keep doing all these, instead of just movies, events.”

Ann is referring to her diverse slate of alternative programming, which ranges from a “Cocktails & Comedy” show once a month, to concerts, general venue rentals and what she calls her “pop culture movies.” She sold out a screening of 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, replete with goodie bags and coconut cups. She had her best night with the 1982 musical fantasy Pink Floyd — The Wall, and did well on a screening of 1994’s Pulp Fiction, where she gave out little bags with mock props from the film, including water guns, enamel pins, plastic syringes and small stopwatch keychains.

“I mean, I’m doing everything I can to make money — everything I can think of,” Ann says. She, like countless theater owners, is getting creative at a time when new Hollywood films just aren’t moving the needle.

I’m on the road, venturing into movie theaters during October, when domestic box office revenue totaled $425 million. That’s the worst October the industry has had since 1997 (excluding Covid), which is hard to wrap your head around, considering that’s not even accounting for inflation. Since 2019, U.S. movie ticket sales have been down a whopping 40 percent. You can blame the quality of the movies being released, the theaters for not providing an experience worthy of leaving the couch, or a mix of both and factor in the country’s current economic situation.

But regardless, in theaters across the country, many moviegoers who once came week in and week out are no longer there. Just their ghosts.

I ask Ann if she feels confident that the theater will last into the coming years and beyond.

She grows resolute.

“As far as I’m concerned, I am going to make it last.”

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A Struggle with Exclusivity

On day one of my trip, I spent much of my afternoon at Barstow Station Cinema Is D’Place, a six-screen theater about halfway between L.A. and Vegas that’s managed by the kind and talkative Michael, a goateed father of five who sports what looks like a gray mechanic’s uniform, paired with a bright orange Tennessee Vols hat and, naturally, a thick Tennessee accent to boot.

During October 2020, when the pandemic was in full swing, the theater averaged 15-20 people per day, regardless of the movies being shown. Now, the average weekend day is about 50 to 60, with decent movies pulling in more like 100-105. The occasional great film — like Lilo & Stitch or The Super Mario Bros. Movie — notches 300 people. To break even on a given day, Michael says the theater needs just 50 moviegoers on a weekday and, with more labor required, 75 on a weekend.

So, Barstow Station is doing alright; it’s still generating enough revenue to justify its continued operation. But Michael has one big complaint about why it’s still not what it should be.

“Beforehand, it was supposed to be a contract for 45 days or more. But when you release a movie the same day to the theater, you can literally buy one on Prime that night,” he says. “I mean, spend $100 at the theater or spend $20 at home: what are you going to do?”

For most consumers, it’s not a tricky question to answer. Tom and Kris, an early-60s couple at an AMC in Birmingham, Ala., “don’t go to movies hardly at all,” Tom says. They would come often when their kids were still young, but now, it’s a three-times-a-year occurrence.

Why?

“You can wait a month and watch it at home,” Kris says.

During Covid, then-WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar infamously debuted “Project Popcorn,” an initiative that brought his studio’s films to HBO Max at the same time they were released in theaters. What was supposed to be a temporary measure became a habit for Hollywood. Not long ago, films had a 74-day window during which they could not be rented or purchased at home after their theatrical release. Now, studios regularly put their movies on PVOD 45, 30 — even 17 days after their initial outing. So instead of 74 days, theater owners are left fighting for two weeks. Anything to remove the all-too-real feeling that you really don’t have to make it to a theater for any given release.

On day two, I make it out to Kingman, Ariz., a city with a population of 30,000 that has just one movie theater: Brenden Theatres Kingman 4. The story is the same.

“There aren’t too many good movies that people want to see as much, especially when most of them in the first place are already being bought on streaming services,” Will, the theater manager, says. “Whatever we do get, people could just wait a month, or even a few weeks, and just watch it at home.”

It all traces back to Covid, which, even aside from the window shrink, was the focal point of the industry’s decline. It’s hard to overemphasize just how much of a nuclear bomb Covid was to these theaters. Not only was it a year (and in some cases, more) of virtually no business, but it also caused consumers to lose the habit of actually going to the theater. Throughout my time on the road, it was the topic that came up most frequently with owners and managers, who would often bring it up unprompted. Each has their own story of making ends meet somehow, someway, or what the theater used to be like before Covid, compared to now.

Currently, Brenden Theatres Kingman welcomes roughly 70 people per day. But Veronica, another manager, remembers when there were lines around the block for Marvel or big animated releases, which drew in upwards of 1,000 on their best outings.

Considering that many people now have solid streaming setups at home, prices have concurrently increased and piracy remains a significant issue, it’s all a perfect Molotov cocktail hurled at American movie theater screens, even as interest in movies themselves remains high, with strong online communities flourishing on Letterboxd and Reddit — not to mention in real life at repertory screenings like Liberty Theatre’s Monty Python event.

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Discount Tuesdays

The first set of people I talk to in the South, on a balmy Tuesday morning in Tupelo, Miss., are Dianne and Claire, who come every discount day to their local Cinemark in Tupelo. Dianne is a kind Southern woman who appears to be in her mid-60s, and her daughter, Claire, is a woman in her 30s with Down syndrome. They come for what Dianne terms the “children’s shows,” and in particular, they enjoy Pixar films and any other kind of animated fare. “It’s got to be PG,” Dianne tells me.

So, what is this older woman and her daughter going to see there this afternoon? Tron: Ares, the PG-13 sci-fi action movie starring Jared Leto.

“I want there to be more family shows because the only thing we could find… this is the only PG-13 show,” she says, noting that they’ve already seen the only other kids’ film available, Gabby’s Dollhouse.

Gabby’s Dollhouse is technically rated G, as it’s a movie for an especially young cohort, so if we exclude that film, there have been precisely zero PG studio releases since Freakier Friday on Aug. 8, with the next one being Wicked: For Good on Nov. 21. That’s three and a half months without a down-the-middle family film, which is a level of negligence on the part of the studios that makes your head spin. (In 2019, there were six studio releases with a PG rating between the Freaker Friday and Wicked window.) In addition to the uniform consensus that Discount Tuesdays, when tickets are typically 50 percent off, are the hottest time of the week, every employee at virtually every type of theater will answer the question of “Who mainly comes here?” with the same answer: old people and families.

The necessary caveat is that when school’s out in the summertime, studios tend to release their family films. But as every company that releases movies contributes to a 10-car summer pileup, there’s a wide-open road during the fall that goes totally unexploited, leaving consumers like Dianne and Claire stuck watching cyberpunk sci-fi. All areas of theatrical production are down, owing to Covid, the strikes and general contraction, but kids’ movies have somehow become chief among them.

At UEC Theatres in Cambridge, Ohio, a woman named Misty sits with her husband and their 8- and 12-year-old daughters, waiting for the movie Good Fortune to start. The Aziz Ansari-directed comedy is not like watching Eddie Murphy Raw, but it is still an R-rated movie. Misty is pretty calm about it, but when I ask her if this would’ve been her preferred movie to watch with her kids, she says she “was kind of annoyed” upon seeing the available options.

For every Dianne and Misty, there are plenty more parents who saw what was playing and opted to do a movie night at home, where something like KPop Demon Hunters has spent months in Netflix’s top 10 and generated so many millions of views that the streaming service successfully reversed windowed it into theaters twice.

On day 10 of my trip, I’m sitting through the trailers of Sony’s Crunchyroll anime hit Demon Slayer… at a showing in a Charleston, W. Va. theater, when I meet Nick and Ivory, a young married couple with a young, energetic son. With the afternoon off, they’ve made it out to the theater — something they only do two or three times a year. Back when he was growing up in Boone County, Nick would come twice a week with his aunts, and he misses the feeling of a packed theater. Now Nick and Ivory’s son “loves it,” he says, and when the family comes, they try to book a row without any other people in it because of how he runs around during films. So, Nick just bought a subscription that gets them $10 off each month in the hopes of going to the theater more.

The thing that’s holding them back, like many families, is the absurd cost of a trip to the multiplex. “Popcorn and two drinks cost us almost $30. It really adds up fast,” he says. “And tickets, I don’t know how to keep up with the prices on them because today I bought them for $12.50 apiece, and other times I come, they’re $24.”

In keeping with the rest of the economy, movie ticket prices have risen in line with inflation. The average ticket price in Q4 of last year reached $11.64. For many theaters, price hikes were necessary after vendors began charging more for food and beverage supplies, and there were insufficient customers to offset the additional expenses. However, unlike eggs or rent, filmgoing is not considered an essential commodity (at least not by definition). As a result, fewer people show up, prices continue to rise to account for the decline, and we’re left with the current mess.

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Project Popcorn

Even if people aren’t going to the movies as much anymore, they’re still looking for the experience (and the snacks).

As ever, it’s not ticket sales that bring in bucks for theaters, but concessions. Within the industry, this is a well-known fact, and the numbers speak for themselves. In the three months between April and June of this year, AMC Theatres generated 55 percent of its revenue from admissions and 45 percent from food, beverages, and other commodities, including merchandise. In the same period, Cinemark generated just under half of its revenue from ticket sales, with the remainder coming from concessions and other sources. At independent and small chain theaters, this is much the same.

None of this is new, but what is new is how that concession money is coming in — and out — the door.

At the two-screen Fiesta Theatre in Cortez, Colo., popcorn sales have remained the same from pre- and post-Covid. But now, “We offer popcorn just without watching the movie, our big ’ol to-go bag, and that’s actually become super popular after Covid,” manager Jordan tells me. The theater averages 25-40 people a night this time of year. On the Friday before I got there, she said they sold 15 big ’ol to-go bags, which was the most they’d sold in a day.

When I ask her if she gets the impression that people are buying popcorn to watch movies at home, she notes that’s probably the case. “Just because life has gotten expensive, and we’ve had to raise prices, mainly with our concessions,” Jordan says, “to accommodate everything else going up.” Since she started, they’ve raised prices $3-$4, with tickets now costing $9.50-$12. It all factors into a calculus for consumers where it makes more sense to pay for some authentic movie theater popcorn, but not the movie theater itself.

Fiesta Theatre is just one of many venues employing this new to-go popcorn tactic. At Legacy Theatres in Bristol, Va. (where the chicken tenders and fries were the best concessions food I had on the entire trip), they sell “Party Popcorn” bags, which have “Available for Take Out Only” written directly on them.

The next evolution for theaters: DoorDash. AMC Theatres has been using the delivery service for a couple of months, while Cinemark began participating last year. If you look at the DoorDash app, you can find both movie chains offering pickup or delivery — no moviegoing required — on popcorn bags, Icees, flatbread pizzas and more. And at the actual locations themselves, right next to the concession stand, are signs that read, “DoorDash Pick Up Here.”

In a case of divine journalistic timing at one Pennsylvania AMC I visited, the three employees behind the concessions stand started scrambling upon receiving their first-ever giant DoorDash order. “Do we bag it?” one of the crew members wondered aloud. A woman named Brittany had placed a delivery order for two chicken tenders, two drinks, two pretzel bites and a couple more items.

At a northeast Cinemark, I asked one of the employees how often people order their delivery. “Every day. You’d be surprised,” he tells me. “Most of the time, they get popcorn. Sometimes they get nachos. Sometimes they get a hot dog.”

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Keeping Up the Fight

Since it opened, Lyric Cinema in Spearman, Texas, has been owned by two families: the Hales and the Ellsworths. In 1976, Alton and Peggy Ellsworth purchased the theater from the Hales and went on to operate it for another 24 years. Helping them with the day-to-day tasks was their son, Gary Ellsworth, who spent many nights sleeping in the big red chair of the theater’s office while his dad handled the books.

Come 2000, Alton had health issues and decided it was time for him to step away. “Well, I’m gonna close the theater,” Gary recalls his dad saying, “unless you want to become the owner.” Gary resisted until one day his two daughters offered to help him run it and asked him, “Don’t you remember how much fun you had growing up around here?”

That was enough for Gary, who, on March 16, 2001, fired the theater back up with a showing of Cast Away and a romantic drama starring Julia Stiles.

Twenty-four and a half years later, I’ve made my way to the Lyric in the hopes of meeting Gary. I’m lucky to have come on a Saturday night. On Fridays during football season, he provides play-by-play commentary for the Spearman High School team’s games, leaving theater operations to his daughter Jana and her husband. In addition to the theater, Gary, 76, is also a city judge, handling Class C misdemeanors, traffic violations and other minor offenses.

That Saturday night, we talked in front of the upstairs screen, which went vacant as Tron: Ares played to seven locals downstairs. Gary indulges me as I ask my litany of questions about the state of his theater. He tells me not a single person showed up for The Smashing Machine, A24’s failed mixed-martial arts drama with Dwayne Johnson, the week before, and why, after Covid hit, he just knew things wouldn’t be the same again.

But mostly, Gary wants to talk about the history of the Lyric. Every nook and cranny of this place has a story from the nearly 50 years his family has owned it. The most evocative: Up in the balcony, an unstable man once strapped an M80 firecracker to a pigeon he’d brought in. When the man set the pigeon loose, it thought the screen light was outdoors and flew straight into it, causing the pigeon to explode in the middle of the audience.

Gary grins from ear to ear, walking me around, letting me in on the history of each artifact. For instance, the Lyric popcorn machine has been there since Gary was a junior in high school and was the first one off the assembly line in 1966, as evidenced by its serial number (no. 66001). But 25 years after his father relinquished the venue, Gary is doing the same at the end of the year. He and his wife want to travel more, and after their third great-grandchild is born, it’s time to take a step back.

As he explains his rationale, he slows for a beat and looks up.

“I don’t know what dad and mom are doing up there in heaven or wherever, saying, ‘Maybe it’s about time,’ or, ‘Maybe you ought to stick it out a little longer.’ I don’t know.”

For the rest of the film industry — including theater owners and audiences of all ages — the decision is not whether to step away, but how to move forward. Whether to evolve and grow in areas like theater quality, investment, film output and new revenue streams, or whether to fold in on itself and allow dirty auditoriums, collapsing theatrical windows and IP fodder to continue the industry’s descent.

“But it’s getting over that hump of making that darn decision,” Gary says. “It just drives you nuts.”

So Hollywood: don’t read this as an obituary. Read it as a to-do list. The crowd is waiting; the doors are open. Now give them something worth leaving the couch for — and price it so they can come back next week.

Happy trails.

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Now From Letterboxd: On the Road Again

Letterboxd members reveal their favorite road trip movies

When Letterboxd members voted on their favorite road movies in a Showdown a few years ago, they didn’t take only one route. They saw the road movies that cast America in a new light, the way a cross-country journey can be personally transformative, or just admired the need for speed.

Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper’s seminal 1969 movie, takes viewers across a changing America. Still, as Letterboxd member Nea observes, the movie has you, “Setting out to see the nation you belong to.” Preet responded to the emotional honesty of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 favorite Y Tu Mamá También, noting, “What’s more teenage than being horny, angry, and emotionally wrecked?”

Sometimes it’s just the little, unexpected moments that stay with viewers, just as they’ll stay with the character. “I’m never gonna be able to hear ‘Tiny Dancer’ without thinking about the scene on the bus ever again,” writes Betty about Cameron Crowe’s 2000 classic, Almost Famous, “and I’m perfectly content with that.”

Or failing that, what viewers really need, to quote Eleanor Roosevelt (by way of 2006’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby), is “hot, nasty, badass speed.” That’s when you pop on one gigantic chase with George Miller’s Oscar-winning 2015 hit, Mad Max: Fury Road. “This is a great film to watch right before your driving test,” declares Alor (although it isn’t recommended to shout, “Witness me!” at your local DMV employee).

The road never ends, and audiences have loved riding along with this year’s One Battle After Another, an Oscar frontrunner for Paul Thomas Anderson and Letterboxd’s highest-rated movie of 2025 at the time of writing.

“Watching that car chase on the third-largest screen in the world made my stomach turn like I was on a fucking roller coaster,” says Ash about the film’s unforgettable climax. Or, as A sums it up, One Battle is “an absolute insane and wild ride from start to finish.” — Matt Goldberg for Letterboxd

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