CinemaCon’s Quiet Wars: Fewer Movies, Bigger Screens — and TikTok in Charge
Behind the optimism in Vegas lies a more fragile theatrical reality
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…