This year, the Mediterrane Film Festival returned to Malta for its fourth edition. While it requires a village to make a successful festival, the MFF is very much the vision of the dynamic Johann Grech, Malta Film Commissioner since 2018. This year, as before, the festival finished with the Golden Bee Awards, held at Malta Film Studios on 28 June 2026. Hosted for the first time by British comedian Jack Whitehall, the spectacular show played out on Malta’s famed water tanks, featuring a 100-meter-long stage with a stunning 60-meter-wide projection screen made of water. 

Several days earlier, Celluloid Junkie sat down with Grech, who was bursting with excitement about the festival and the upcoming show. “It is a message to the world… that our country, [despite] being so small, it never stops us of dreaming big. And the show with the water tank is going to be a bold statement.” ‘Bold’, it certainly was. As Leona Lewis, Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja and Eurovision favourite Destiny entertained the VIP guests, winners included John Cleese, who was presented with the Icon award, and Andy Harries, producer of “The Crown,” who received a lifetime achievement award. Steven Soderbergh’s “The Christophers” won Best Feature Film and Best Screenwriting, for Ed Solomon.

“The festival [has] kept on growing,” says Grech. “We kept on investing, and it kept on growing, and it’s leading us to results.” Each year, he notes, there has been an expansion, with the festival throwing its doors ever wider. “The third year, last year, we opened it for the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean, and this year we opened it for all global nations. So America, Australia, Canada, Europe, the Mediterranean. Malta was always strategic in our history. We were always strategic. And we want this festival to be as strategic as Malta itself to get business here to participate on the global stage, to build up this brand and keep on competing.”

Certainly the inclusion of films like the Australian-made survival tale “Beast of War” in the festival line-up has given the selection a more international sheen. But the MFF has a distinct purpose beyond simply serving up great cinema for the public. “I think it’s the best marketing tool, as the Film Commission, we ever created for the film industry,” says Grech. “Not just for debate or networking… but also for potential co-production. It’s a business tool, a strategic tool to get more business to Malta, putting Malta on the global map. We are inviting producers, directors, studio executives, filmmakers, press to feel it in a tangible way, our product.”

The hugely ambitious Grech has been scheming to make Malta an attractive destination for filmmakers for the best part of a decade now. “We have been always successful in getting [filmmakers here to shoot their] stories, but the industry was seasonal. When I became commissioner, I wasn’t happy about the status quo. Are you happy with 200 people working only for a very short period of time? No. And today we have over 1800 people working in film, mostly the majority working all year round, from one production to another.”

Since the launch of a 40% cash rebate scheme in 2018, one of the most competitive in Europe, the industry has generated EUR €1.5 billion (USD $1.71 billion) in gross value added for the Maltese economy. An independent study, written by the chief officer for economics at the Central Bank of Malta, revealed that since the rebate was initiated, the tax revenues generated by film activity have far exceeded the cost of the rebates. Among other things, the study discovered that the net fiscal benefit to the Malta government amounted to EUR €94 million (USD $107.1 million) between 2018 and 2025. After the period between 2005 to 2017, it marks a four-fold increase, from around EUR €3 million (USD $3.42) to EUR $12 million (USD $1.367) annually. 

“For every one euro that we invest with, the industry generates four back,” Grech explained. “We support the financing of our country, and so we are not a burden on the taxpayer. Actually, in 2023, the film industry was one-sixth of the economic growth in Malta.” Grech pays tribute to the Maltese government, who has backed his vision. “I wouldn’t have done it without the support of government. I lobbied the government to increase rebate, the government did. And when we created this festival, I had the support of government.” 

Location, Location, :ocation
Since Grech took over, Malta has welcomed such huge Hollywood productions as “Jurassic World: Dominion” and “Jurassic World: Rebirth”, and Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” and “Gladiator II,” which returned Scott to the same locations where he shot 2000’s “Gladiator.” More recently, Jason Statham has shot the forthcoming features “Mutiny” and “Viva La Madness” on the island and is currently in Malta for his third project in swift succession, filming the meta-comedy “Jason Statham Stole My Bike.” “We are having repetition of business,” said Grech, who has been smart in cultivating relations with directors and A-listers. 

Last year, as the MFF celebrated a hundred years of filmmaking in Malta, the Golden Bee Awards honored “Gladiator” star Russell Crowe with the Icon award. The actor spoke warmly of his experiences in Malta, and it’s not hard to imagine him returning one day for another shoot. “He’s an ambassador of Malta. He’s a great ambassador and we want to work on more projects with Russell Crowe… We want to keep on strengthening our relationship with him, and with all others who want to keep on putting Malta on the map.” 

Quite how Hollywood views the MFF remains to be seen. Just as the 2025 festival unfolded, the Netflix production “Enola Holmes 3,” a Maltese-set story starring Millie Bobby Brown, was shooting there. Given “Enola Holmes 3” bowed on Netflix on 1 July, just three days after the festival closed, it was a surprise it did not play at the MFF. “They’re very specific on dates, and we were not able to shift the dates, and they were not able to shift the dates,” offered Grech, who is all too aware of the difficulties of luring major studio and streaming premieres to Malta.

While the festival has some innovations, like the Mare Nostrum strand which highlights features and documentaries that explore sustainability and the environment, the curated line-up is chiefly playing films that have already premiered elsewhere. “We are still an infant as a project and we will not compete with other festivals,” said Grech. “We created something of our own, something global that everyone can share and be part of. We are not here to compete with other festivals, but we are here to consolidate our position, Malta’s position, on the global map.”

Where it scores is its film-friendly setting. Alongside this year’s film screenings, panels, and masterclasses (including with director Renny Harlin and actress Famke Janssen), the MFF offered tours around Malta Film Studios and the island itself, allowing directors, producers, location managers and others to scout potential projects and realise what Malta has to offer. “We are giving tours, specific tours, on land and sea, to see the art and the possibilities of Malta,” said Grech. 

Among this year’s guests, British filmmaker Stephen Poliakoff – who participated in the panel “The Character Is Plot,” alongside “John Wick” creator Derek Kolstad – was using his time in Malta to location scout for his forthcoming eight-part political thriller “The Order,” an adaptation of Maltese author Peter Portelli’s novel. All set in the months leading up to the famed Great Siege of Malta in 1565, the series is being produced by Helen Flint, who has already brought the 2026 TV series “Pompei: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston” to Malta. 

Grech also hopes that Mel Gibson, who visited Malta a couple of years back, realises his long-gestating historical epic, another Great Siege-set story. “It will be huge!” he promised of a project that has morphed from feature film to limited TV series over the years. And, understandably, he’s desperate to see more Maltese stories brought to screen, including World War II-set tales. “Malta, being a British colony, was the most bombed country globally during the Second World War,” Grech stated. “We never surrendered. It’s a huge story, too.”

The day before we met, Grech also announced a EUR €2 million (USD $2.28) fund to train and up-skill crew members, thereby putting further financing into training local crew. “I have more ideas,” he added. “Change is a process, not an ending. And we will take even bolder measures to ensure that we are consolidating and making sure that this model of creating a world class film industry is well created and well sustained.”

How does Grech see the MFF evolving? Will it always be a glitzy showcase for what Malta has to offer? Or can it become a major date in the already overcrowded festival calendar? “We want to grow further. We want to be among other festivals, globally. We want to have a legacy, not just for us, but for the next generations,” he explained. Grech’s desire to use the MFF as a flagship for all that Malta has to offer only looks like it’s going to get more fervent. “It’s never enough!” he said. “‘Enough’ is not in our dictionary.”

Part of his master plan comes with overseeing a purpose-built super-soundstage at Malta Film Studios, designed to provide film productions with both land and sea environments. “It’s going to be a first, globally,” Grech proclaimed. With the permits in place and government approvals granted, it’s another step forward in the evolution of Malta as a major destination for movie productions. “This is about building, creating a sustainable world-class film industry,” he added. “We have the vision, we have the drive, we have the commitment, and we’re going to make it happen.”

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The news that Christopher Nolan’s upcoming epic “The Odyssey” would not hold “word of mouth” screenings for influencers was further fuel for the fire of a discussion that has raged in recent years. Is this marketing tactic – where commonly these more favourable, less critical reactions from influencers break on social media before the formal review embargo lifts – actually increasing awareness of these films, or is it devaluing the work of critics, whose more considered takes only get airtime after the breathless first wave of reactions.

The first reactions to “The Odyssey” flooded online after the global premiere took place in London on Monday, July 6. While there were some influencers and content creators in the mix – those who’d been invited to the premiere and/or seen advance screenings ahead of junket interviews – there were notably more mainstream critics and writers sharing first-look reactions, including Variety’s Jazz Tangcay, who called the film “a triumphant, spectacular epic” and the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw (“a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion”). When the film hits cinemas next week, the discourse around the necessity of influencer screenings will surely continue.

It’s a subject that was a central talking point at the 2026 European Film Market (EFM, 12-18 February), which took place earlier this year. Across various panels, conversations about social media marketing were notably less about “going viral” as a goal in itself, and more about whether online attention can be translated into something the industry can bank on, such as ticket sales, streaming subscriptions and durable audience habits. Across panels that ranged from TikTok’s #FilmTok showcase to a broader marketing strategy session on attention scarcity, one tension kept resurfacing: platforms can generate extraordinary cultural heat, but the path from community to cash remains uneven, difficult to measure and – too often – oversold.

That split was clearest on 13 February, when the EFM hosted “From Community to Box Office: How Fandom on TikTok Drives Impact,” an afternoon event framed around the platform’s growing role in shaping film discovery and consumption. TikTok’s Stephen Naughton positioned the platform as an entertainment destination rather than a traditional social network — “You don’t check TikTok; you watch TikTok,” he said — arguing that this mindset matters because users arrive primed to be entertained, not merely updated. He added that the company’s research suggests three-quarters of TikTok’s audience come to the app specifically to find new entertainment, and described the platform as a “24-7 virtual stage” where studios, creators and fans can meet on equal footing.

Naughton’s pitch leaned heavily on the idea that fandom on TikTok is participatory by nature: users do not just watch trailers but remix, analyse and reframe content, helping titles travel across borders in ways that can’t be replicated through classic top-down advertising. He sought to reinforce that narrative with headline figures: in 2025, an average of 6.5 million posts per day related to film and TV appeared on the platform; and, crucially, TikTok has been working with market-research company Media Control to track correlations between virality and theatrical performance. The topline result, according to Naughton: “15 of the 20 most successful theatrical releases in 2025 across Europe were TikTok viral hits,” defined as titles generating over one million related posts.

From Content to Connection
It was a confident argument — but it also underscored the central problem with social media “impact” claims: correlation and causation are easy to blur, especially when the biggest releases are already structurally advantaged through awareness, spend and broad availability. If a title is already set up to dominate the theatrical conversation, it will almost inevitably dominate the TikTok conversation too. The more interesting question is what happens beneath the top tier: can fandom meaningfully lift mid-budget and independent films into wider visibility, and can that lift be reliably engineered rather than hoped for?

TikTok’s preferred answer is “yes — if you treat creators as partners rather than megaphones.” Naughton argued that creator-led content can achieve up to 91% more engagement than traditional advertising assets, and pointed to the company’s work with Constantin Film, where collaborations across more than 15 releases generated over one billion video views. He also highlighted TikTok Spotlight, an aggregation tool that collects official and user-generated content into a central hub, suggesting that structuring fan activity — rather than merely observing it — can help campaigns sustain momentum.

Still, even within TikTok’s own framing, the emphasis was less on replacing conventional marketing than on rethinking what marketing is: less campaign-as-broadcast, more campaign-as-community management. Search behavior became part of that story. Naughton noted that one in five users searches for content within 30 seconds of opening the app, with film-related queries growing by more than 100% year-over-year — an indicator, he suggested, that audiences increasingly treat TikTok as a discovery engine for both theatrical and streaming titles, with real implications for how release campaigns are timed and structured.

Community Spirit
The panel discussion that followed broadened the conversation beyond theatricals into streamer-first dynamics, using Prime Video’s “Maxton Hall” as a case study of a #BookTok phenomenon turned screen hit. Moderated by journalist and presenter Aylin Kazi, the panel brought together Prime Video EU Head of Social Jacky Meire, TikTok creator Melo Nsuka and actress Runa Greiner. If Naughton’s presentation was an attempt to “prove” impact with numbers, the discussion that followed focused on what impact looks like in practice: community engagement as an “extra layer” of storytelling, where fans dissect scenes, debate character arcs and generate an ongoing sense of participation.

The subtext here matters for anyone marketing both theatrical and streaming titles: viewing is no longer a closed experience. Audiences often move straight from watching to TikTok, effectively recreating a shared, communal space around content — sometimes approximating the social energy of theatrical attendance, but with platform-native behaviors, such as commenting, streaming and (doom)scrolling. The talk also returned repeatedly to the idea of creators as trust brokers: recommendations from familiar voices often carry more weight than classic advertising, while behind-the-scenes access and transparency are presented as essential tools for maintaining momentum.

Yet the Maxton Hall example also highlighted a structural asymmetry: streamer launches are already “built” for rapid online conversation, with audiences able to watch immediately once curiosity is triggered. Theatrical releases, by contrast, require friction-heavy conversion: checking listings, choosing a showtime, travelling, paying. Social media can generate intent; cinemas still require action.

That friction came roaring back into focus on 19 February, at another EFM panel titled “Marketing That Works: Turning Change Into a New Advantage,” which approached the same broad subject from a more skeptical, conversion-first angle. Moderated by AC Coppens, the session featured Marina Kosten, USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future; Adriana Trautman, marketing strategist with experience at Paramount and Prime Video; and Oliver Fegan, co-founder and CEO of usheru, a marketing technology company supporting distributors across 30 countries. Where the TikTok session argued that fandom can drive measurable impact, this panel repeatedly asked: measurable how, and at what rate?

Under the Influence
Kosten framed the current environment as a brutal attention economy — “Content is everywhere, and attention is increasingly a zero-sum game,” she said — arguing that marketers often have mere seconds to communicate not just what a film is, but where and when to see it. “If people remember the where and the when, they are much more likely to convert,” she added, stressing that basic clarity is frequently overlooked even as campaigns chase novelty.

Trautman offered a blunt corrective to influencer-era wishful thinking: “Just because you cast an influencer, it does not mean their audience will convert,” she said — and rightly so. In other words, social reach is not the same as audience action — especially when the “influencer” relationship to the title is thin, transactional or obviously paid. In a market that sometimes treats social as a magic shortcut, her point landed as a necessary deflation.

Fegan then provided the kind of statistic that complicates almost any platform-led narrative of conversion: TikTok-driven traffic, he said, converted at just 0.1% when moving from platform to ticket purchase. That figure doesn’t mean TikTok is “ineffective” — it may still be powerful at awareness, discovery and cultural signaling — but it does force a tougher reading of what social media is doing at each stage of the funnel. If the jump from scroll to sale is that small, then campaigns live or die on what happens next: retargeting, repetition, and a cross-platform system that keeps nudging the interested-but-not-yet-committed audience until the friction is overcome.

In that sense, the most actionable ideas in the “Marketing That Works” session were not about chasing virality, but about engineering follow-through. Fegan stressed retargeting as essential — those who show interest but don’t purchase must be approached multiple times, often via automated but personalized messaging. The panel also turned to first-party data, arguing that direct relationships with audiences — through tools like usheru, cinema websites, email lists and smaller communities (including Discord) — are increasingly valuable in a landscape where platform metrics can be opaque and platform algorithms can shift overnight.

The panel’s European-vs-US contrast also sharpened the conversation. In the US, mass marketing remains dominant, supported by budgets that are simply out of reach for most European distributors. Fegan noted, “In Europe, distributors might spend EUR €3,000 (USD $3,425 to market a film in France,” and argued that such constraints force European campaigns to be smarter: niche targeting, community-building and direct audience relationships rather than scale-led saturation.

There was also a recurring emphasis on habit-building. Trautman and Kosten both argued that younger audiences will still go to cinemas, but often for events that feel communal — fandom experiences that resemble concerts or social gatherings. Trautman put it plainly: “They aren’t going for cinema itself; they’re going for connection with peers and shared fandoms.” In that framing, the real competition is not other films but other forms of connection — and the strategic goal becomes making theatrical attendance feel like participation rather than consumption.

Under the Influence
So what were the key takeaways from EFM 2026 overall, on social media marketing for films? Conversations and analysis were more measured than the usual hype cycles, but some contradictions persist.

On one side, TikTok’s case is persuasive in cultural terms: it is undeniably a major arena where audiences discover, discuss and reshape film and TV narratives, and where communities can form quickly around titles, talent and moments. Naughton’s insistence that fandom is “participatory, personal and perpetual” captures something real about contemporary audience behavior, especially when conversation can outlive opening weekend.

This is a point that was emphasised by more recent FilmTok research, released in April 2026. It bears noting that the research was conducted by TikTok and Cinema United, with support from Comscore. The findings proudly claim that TikTok conversation can lead to box office staying power, beyond the opening weekend buzz. Looking at four varied (albeit high-profile) examples — “The Housemaid”, “Sinners”, “Wicked: For Good”, and “Zootopia 2” — the report studies the correlation between increased TikTok activity tied a title, and strong box office holds. Of course, correlation isn’t causation, and buzzy box office hits could be seen to be driving the conversation on social media, rather than interpreting the relationship to be working in the opposite direction, but there were also positive findings relating to increases in #FilmTok and #MovieTok posts (up 55% year on year), and TikTok surveys indicating that 47% of users polled said they’d discovered new films via the platform, and 36% said they’d purchased a ticket as a result. Is short-form social media video the new watercooler?

“This report reinforces what we know to be true: that moviegoing is a cultural experience that resonates deeply with audiences,” said Michael O’Leary, President and CEO of Cinema United. “The data shows that when films connect with communities on TikTok, people come to theatres. That is good for our members, good for Main Streets around the world, and good for the movie industry.” It’s also worth noting that — even if it can’t be said for certain that TikTok is driving users to theaters — TikTok data could be another valuable tool for exhibitors making programming decisions, by indicating which film are still dominating cultural conversations.

On the other side, the more sobering data points from the “Marketing That Works” panel underline that conversion remains the industry’s weak link — and that social media is not a substitute for fundamentals. Availability, clear messaging (“where and when”), repeat exposure, and infrastructure for retargeting and direct audience contact still do much of the heavy lifting.

That’s why some of the most interesting EFM conversations were the ones that implicitly challenged the idea of social media as a silo. Even panels not explicitly “about” social platforms — such as Europa Distribution’s session on co-operation across the film value chain — kept circling back to a marketing reality: audience work cannot be detached from production, sales, exhibition and long-term release planning. The strongest campaigns increasingly start early, build shared objectives across partners and keep communication tight — because, as Spanish distributor Eduardo Escudero put it, “In our market, we only get one shot.” In a world of compressed windows and overstretched attention, that single shot at getting audiences in seats early on in the theatrical run has to be aligned across every link in the chain.

The biggest question, then, is not whether fandom can move audiences — clearly, sometimes it can — but whether the industry is building repeatable systems around that ability. The “Minecraft initiative” type of thinking — meeting audiences inside the spaces where they already play, create and socialise — can sound visionary, and it may well work for certain IP-driven titles and youth-skewing brands. But EFM’s more grounded voices would likely insist on two tests before celebrating any such initiative: show the conversion path, and show the cost per conversion compared to alternatives. Without that, innovation risks becoming experimentation.

Finally, there is the issue of credibility. Social marketing thrives on authenticity; film marketing often defaults to polish. The gap between those two aesthetics is where a lot of campaigns fail. The EFM panels repeatedly hinted at the same underlying principle: the most effective social strategies treat audiences as collaborators rather than targets — and treat creators not as add-ons, but as culturally fluent partners who can translate a film into platform-native language. A film like “The Odyssey,” with the built in appeal of Christopher Nolan – a rare crossover filmmaker as beloved by critics and cinephiles as mainstream audiences – might be big enough to be able to skip influencer screenings. But like many Nolan success stories, it could yet prove to be an exception rather than a rule.

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That was the central argument emerging from the Cannes Docs panel “Micro Cinemas and Macro Impact: Independent Exhibition as a Social and Communal Practice,” held on 16 May at The Viewpoint, Lérins, and curated by DAE – Documentary Association of Europe. Moderated by Jeremy Chua, producer at Potocol and executive director of the Singapore International Film Festival, the session brought together Ruun Nuur, documentary programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival and co-founder of No Evil Eye Cinema; Kira Simon-Kennedy, film producer and volunteer member of Paris’ La Clef collective; and Can Sungu, artistic director of Berlin’s SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA.

Chua opened the discussion by asking how such spaces address audiences underserved by conventional distribution, in a context where the Marché du Film itself embodies a traditional structure of buying and selling films.

For Simon-Kennedy, the answer lies in programming films that audiences are unlikely to encounter elsewhere. Speaking from the perspective of La Clef, a collective-run Paris cinema, she said the group’s work was driven by frustration with what is typically shown. “One of the guiding editorial lines, if there is one in a giant collective, is movies that aren’t shown elsewhere,” she explained. The aim was not to repeat “the same dead white guys,” but to look around the world for films that open up other histories and political memories.

Simon-Kennedy linked this directly to France’s colonial legacy and to gaps in cultural education. She cited the importance of showing films connected to independence movements, noting that works such as “The Battle of Algiers” had long histories of censorship or limited visibility in France. In that sense, programming becomes a way of “rectifying what’s not taught,” and of pushing back against what she called a “failed canon.”

Sungu argued that independent exhibition spaces can also offer distributors and producers a more meaningful route to audiences than some conventional festival strategies. While acknowledging the continued importance of premieres, he said that a small festival screening in a city may not always reach the communities a film is actually speaking to. By contrast, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA can sometimes screen a film three or four times, bringing it into contact with communities that are ready to engage with it.

“We are putting a lot of effort into finding the right communities, to bring the right film with the communities that they are really interested in,” he said. For Sungu, the value lies not only in attendance figures, but in the “discourse space” that opens around a screening, where audiences talk, argue, reflect and even dislike a film together. “I think this belongs to the cinema and this happens also in this physical space of cinema,” he added.

Nuur described how No Evil Eye Cinema’s own model emerged almost accidentally. When the collective first toured its programme “Sequence 01: Diasporic Reckoning”, it brought a new film and filmmaker to each town. “What we didn’t know at the time is we were creating a distribution model for this programme of short films that we would take all over the place,” she recalled.

Because No Evil Eye Cinema did not initially have access to sales agents or distributors, it used the networks it did have. Nuur, whose background is in film criticism, said the organisation made a point of inviting critics, editors, writers and festival programmers to screenings so that emerging filmmakers could receive coverage and visibility. The programme mixed first-time filmmakers with more established names, and this created a responsibility to support all of them beyond the single screening event.

Futureproofing Engagement
Looking ahead, Nuur said the collective is interested in working with a streaming platform that could host grouped programmes and pay filmmakers, expanding access beyond physical venues. She also described plans for masterclasses involving contemporary film workers, from cinematographers and directors to archivists and preservationists, as a way to connect audiences more deeply with artistic practice.

Sungu also pointed to SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA’s “Cinema of Harmony” project, launched in 2022, which brings together alternative cinema practices around the world, with a focus on the Global South while also involving European partners. The initiative shares films between micro cinemas, supports subtitling and allows works to circulate across different cities and linguistic contexts. He suggested that these models may eventually create new synergies with distributors.

The conversation became more urgent when an audience member raised the lack of cinemas in low-income neighbourhoods and communities of colour, particularly in New York. Simon-Kennedy responded by connecting cultural access to wider systems of inequality. “There’s an enormous lack of access,” she underscored. “There’s an overconcentration of resources, but not just cultural – like medical, educational – in the wealthiest, whitest neighbourhoods because of racism and segregation.”

Nuur made a similar comparison, saying the lack of cinemas in Black, brown and low-income neighbourhoods resembled the existence of food deserts. “Film, art, cultural centres are a source of nourishment in a way like food is,” she said. He pointed to grassroots initiatives such as Alfreda Cinema in New York and Cinespeak in Philadelphia as examples of organisations bringing films directly to communities rather than expecting audiences to travel to institutional spaces.

For Sungu, the key was trust. He expressed scepticism about top-down outreach policies aimed at BIPOC communities, arguing that meaningful audience-building can only work through organic relationships. “I don’t believe in these kind of outreach policies that some institutions are doing,” he said. “This can only function if the organic relation is basically functioning.”

The speakers also discussed practical tools: La Clef’s printed flyers distributed in local markets, No Evil Eye Cinema’s press outreach and partnerships with institutions connected to filmmakers, and SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA’s use of Q&As, conversations and even WhatsApp groups where communities organise outside mainstream social media platforms.

Across the session, micro cinemas emerged not as marginal alternatives, but as living infrastructures: spaces where distribution, access, criticism, community and care can be rebuilt from the ground up.

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The headline numbers read as stability rather than rebound. Cinemas across the trade body’s 39 territories generated EUR €6.875 billion (USD $7.84 billion) at the box office in 2025, down 1.2% from 2024, while admissions fell harder, down 4.4% to 873.2 million tickets. Part of that gap is a pricing story: the implied average spend per admission across Europe rose from about EUR €7.62 (USD 8.69) in 2024 to roughly EUR €7.88 (USD $8.98) in 2025, an increase of just over 3%. The topline held up in part because tickets cost more, not because more of them were sold — a pattern that recurs market by market, not just in the continent-wide total.

“Although 2025 did not present as significant a step on the road to recovery… as many hoped,” wrote Phil Clapp, chief executive of the UK Cinema Association and UNIC’s outgoing president, in the report’s opening section, “there were still many positive signals” for the sector. That caveat matters: the 2023 Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes continued to ripple through the 2025 release calendar, contributing to an uneven schedule of U.S. titles, while several countries lacked the breakout domestic hits that lifted attendance the year before. Europe did not move as one market in 2025 — it rarely does, but this year made the differences unusually visible.

A Patchwork of National Results
Box office grew year over year in 17 markets, including Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Ukraine; France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Belgium, among others, declined.

The UK was the cleanest growth story among major Western markets: box office reached GBP £990.5 million (USD $1.36 billion), up 1.2%. “A Minecraft Movie” was the year’s top-grossing title at GBP £52.3 million (USD $69.4 million), while “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” was both the UK’s top local release, at GBP £43.3 million (USD $57.5), and — across Europe — the single most-watched European film of 2025, with 11.8 million admissions.

France and Spain show the other side of the price-cushion pattern. French admissions fell 13.9% to 156.2 million, though the comparison is complicated by the fact that 2024 had been lifted by the extraordinary, one-off success of “Un p’tit truc en plus,” which alone drew 11 million admissions. This year’s top French film, “God Save the Tuche,” sold 3 million tickets — the only local title to crack the annual top 10, but no match for the prior year’s outlier.

Spain’s admissions fell 8.5%, to 65 million, while box office fell a shallower 5%, to EUR €453 million (USD $516 million)— a similar per-ticket cushion at the country level. Revenue was up 3% in the first half before falling 16% in the second, while Spanish films held a steady 19% share, roughly flat against 2024 and a sign the problem was thin overall supply rather than a weak local slate.

Where Local Cinema Did the Heavy Lifting — and Where It Wasn’t Enough Alone
Germany delivered the cleanest example of domestic strength translating into real growth: box office rose 6.4% to EUR €924 million (USD $1.05 billion) and admissions rose 2.1%, with local films capturing 27.4% of admissions, up eight percentage points, led by Michael Herbig’s “Manitou’s Canoe,” which drew more than 5 million admissions and EUR €50.9 million (USD $58 million).

Denmark posted the strongest attendance growth in Scandinavia, up 4.5% to 10.25 million admissions, on a record 37% domestic market share against 23.3% in 2024; “Checkered Ninja 3” and “The Last Viking” led a slate of local releases that nearly doubled, from 19 titles to 39.

Italy is the more complicated case, and the one that best captures the report’s central tension. Local productions claimed 32.7% of box-office revenue, the highest share since 2016, on the strength of Checco Zalone’s “Buen Camino,” which opened on Christmas Day, took EUR €36 million (USD $41 million) in its first week, and went on, with a strong holdover into 2026, to become the highest-grossing release in Italian box office history, surpassing 2009’s “Avatar.” Yet Italy’s overall box office barely moved, up just 0.5%, and admissions actually slipped slightly, because Hollywood’s share of Italian revenue fell 25% year over year. Local content did not lift the market so much as keep it from sinking under that pullback — arguably the clearest evidence in the report for UNIC’s case that exhibition needs both halves of the slate.

Across the EU, European films held a 31.4% market share — down from 33.3% in 2024, though still above the 26.1% recorded in 2019. A record 42 European titles ranked among the top five highest-grossers in their national markets, up from 39 in 2024 and 26 in 2023: evidence of a broader, more evenly distributed slate, even as the aggregate share dipped.

Hollywood Still Anchors the Slate
The report does not pretend Hollywood is any less essential to the recovery story. The year’s most widely viewed titles across UNIC territories included Disney’s “Zootopia 2,” “Avatar: Fire and Ash” and “Lilo & Stitch”; Warner Bros.’ “A Minecraft Movie”; Universal’s “Jurassic World: Rebirth” and “Wicked: For Good”; Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning”; and Sony’s “28 Years Later.”

Those titles supplied the tentpole infrastructure local hits need to flourish — Italy’s case shows what happens when that infrastructure weakens. UNIC’s report argues that cinema-going cannot be sustained on tentpoles alone, nor can local production carry every market on its own; it takes a steady, year-round mix of both to keep admissions from sliding further.

Windows, Mergers and the Fight Over Supply
That argument is why theatrical exclusivity sits at the center of UNIC’s policy section, linked directly to admissions recovery, reduced piracy risk and exhibitors’ ability to keep investing in auditoriums and premium formats. The timing is not incidental: UNIC devotes substantial space to opposing the proposed Paramount Skydance–Warner Bros. Discovery transaction, citing Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 20th Century Fox as precedent, where the combined studio’s theatrical output fell more than 30% despite assurances made at the time.

UNIC wants the European Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to make any release-volume and windowing commitments legally binding rather than voluntary — a fight that will shape exhibitor supply conversations well beyond this CineEurope. With fewer studios controlling more must-see content, the risk is not only a further shift in bargaining power away from cinemas, but a narrower and less diverse release pipeline overall.

Momentum Builds Into 2026
The report closes on a more optimistic note than 2025’s figures alone suggest. December 2025 generated $3.5 billion at the worldwide box office, the strongest December since 2019 and up 10% year over year, momentum that carried into the first quarter of 2026, with more than 15 European territories posting double-digit growth. Gower Street Analytics has revised its 2026 outlook accordingly, raising its international projection, excluding China, by $50 million to $18.45 billion, citing stronger performance in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

That optimism and the merger fight are two sides of the same argument. UNIC’s pipeline case — a deeper, steadier slate, with windows protected regardless of how the Paramount-Warner deal shakes out — is what is supposed to turn 2026’s early momentum into something durable rather than another year propped up by pricier tickets.

The challenge is making that less of a patchwork and more of a pattern. Whether that happens may depend less on audiences than on what regulators in Brussels and London decide to do next.

The post UNIC Reports European Box Office Held Near €6.9 Billion in 2025, But Admissions Tell a More Complicated Story appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

When Andrew Cripps, Head of Global Theatrical Distribution at The Walt Disney Company, arrived at the International Cinema Technology Association’s seminar in Barcelona on Sunday — one day before CineEurope officially opened — the audience was expecting clarity.

Two months after Disney unveiled Infinity Vision at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, exhibitors, technology partners and distributors were still trying to decipher exactly what the program was, who qualified and what it meant for their screens. Was it a new premium large format? A certification scheme? A Disney-owned quality mark? A marketing umbrella for exhibitor-branded PLF auditoriums?

Cripps is a well-liked executive, genuinely respected across the industry, and his willingness to engage on the topic was appreciated. But if the goal was to leave the room with a shared understanding of Infinity Vision, the session fell somewhat short — less because Cripps was evasive than because the program itself still appears to be evolving. What became clear is that Infinity Vision remains a work in progress, one with an obvious commercial rationale and a number of practical details yet to be fully defined.

What Infinity Vision Actually Is
Cripps framed the origins of Infinity Vision in straightforward commercial terms. The program emerged from a recognition that Disney’s marketing machine simply cannot effectively promote every premium large format screen in the world — of which, by his count, there are a staggering number.

“There are 75 exhibitor-owned PLF brands in North America, and there are over 320 exhibitor-owned PLF brands around the world,” Cripps said. “It’s very difficult — impossible — for us to effectively market all of those brands.”

The brands Disney can market globally are the ones with recognized consumer-facing names: IMAX, Dolby Cinema and ScreenX among them. Everything else — however technically impressive — lacks the shorthand that drives ticket buyers to seek out a specific auditorium.

Infinity Vision, in theory, is designed to solve that problem by creating a single umbrella brand Disney can actively promote: a signal to consumers that a screen meets a quality threshold worth paying for.

“What we want to make sure,” Cripps said, “is that customers understand — we want to set some standards, we want to make sure that we can try to drive customers to the best experience possible, with a shorthand marketing communication.”

That makes Infinity Vision less a new cinema technology than a studio-led attempt to identify, package and market high-quality non-IMAX premium auditoriums at scale.

The “Doomsday” Context Nobody Is Pretending Doesn’t Exist
Cripps also acknowledged the obvious subtext directly.

“We have a movie, it’s no secret, at the end of the year, ‘Avengers: Doomsday,’ that does not have IMAX,” he said.

With “Dune: Part Three” widely expected to command the IMAX footprint on the same 18 December 2026 release date, Disney needs an alternative premium tier to market for one of the biggest films on its upcoming slate. Infinity Vision is designed to be that alternative.

Cripps was candid that the timing provided a useful launch platform, while also pushing back against the idea that the program is purely reactive. “It felt like something — like I said, we talked about it for a while. How do we more effectively market the premium large formats that are out there? This feels like a really good launch pad for that.”

The rollout sequence confirms the stakes. A reissue of “Avengers: Endgame” in Infinity Vision will serve as a test run in September, followed by “Avengers: Doomsday” as the true commercial launch in December.

More Than a Badge, But Not Quite a Format
The most concrete element of Infinity Vision may be the one that distinguishes it most clearly from a simple logo program: Infinity Vision screens will receive a different DCP than standard auditoriums.

“The DCP will be a different DCP,” Cripps said. “We’re going to have different content for the Infinity Vision screens, whether it’s a button… a special piece of hopefully a filmmaker introduction at the beginning… different aspect ratio. There’s different things that we’re working on for Infinity Vision, and every movie I think will be different.”

That matters. If Infinity Vision were only a label applied to exhibitor-owned PLF auditoriums, exhibitors might reasonably ask what Disney is adding beyond a marketing badge. Cripps’ answer appears to be: global marketing support, potentially earlier ticketing and some form of differentiated theatrical content — with the specifics varying title by title.

What remains less clear is how meaningful those differences will be at the consumer level. Whether the alternate DCPs contain material unavailable in other theatrical versions, and whether any exclusive content is specific to Infinity Vision screens or simply part of a broader theatrical window, was not entirely resolved in the session. When an audience member asked Cripps to define what a “button” actually is, he explained it as an Easter egg or additional piece of content — “probably for another movie, or linking the movie to another movie coming.” He confirmed such material would be “exclusively to theaters,” though it remained unclear whether that exclusivity extends to Infinity Vision screens specifically or to theatrical exhibition generally.

Qualification vs. Certification
One of the more pointed audience questions cut to the heart of what has left exhibitors confused since CinemaCon: is Infinity Vision a qualification program — where an exhibitor ticks the boxes and is included — or a certification program, where Disney or an outside party verifies the quality of the auditorium?

Cripps’ answer was honest, and probably the most illuminating thing he said all session.

“It’s voluntary,” he said. “We don’t have a team of people that we can send out and check. We want to work collaboratively with exhibition. So, we said these are generally the standards we’re working to — work with us. Send us the screens that qualify, and then let’s talk about how we can more effectively market those screens.”

At least for now, Infinity Vision is closer to a voluntary, Disney-reviewed qualification process than a formal third-party certification scheme. Exhibitors submit screens. Disney evaluates them. There are no inspectors, no THX-style audit process, and no precise public technical checklist — only standards Disney describes as still being refined in collaboration with exhibitors.

Cripps indicated Disney would issue further details before its Wednesday presentation at CineEurope, including target screen counts. Until then, exhibitors are left with the broad contours of the program rather than firm specifications.

When Premium Does Not Fit One Global Standard
The limits of that flexibility came into focus when a questioner raised a very concrete version of the ambiguity. Some French exhibitors, he noted, have invested significantly in premium screens — in some cases with 4K laser projection — but those screens may be only 12 meters wide, potentially falling short of whatever screen-size threshold Infinity Vision requires.

Cripps’ response was notable for its pragmatism, and for the question it left hanging.

“I think if it’s the premium screen for that region, then I think we should be talking about trying to elevate that experience,” he said. “I think too often we come up with these standards that — one size doesn’t always fit all.”

That is a reasonable instinct. It recognizes the reality that a premium screen in a smaller regional market may not look like a flagship PLF auditorium in London, Paris or Shanghai. But if one size does not fit all, the obvious follow-up is: what exactly is the standard? At this stage, the answer appears to be that Disney is still working that out. Cripps said thousands of screens had already been submitted for evaluation, but the criteria remain opaque enough that some exhibitors left the room still unsure whether their auditoriums were in or out.

That uncertainty cuts both ways. Too rigid, and Infinity Vision risks excluding worthwhile premium screens in smaller markets. Too flexible, and it risks becoming a marketing term without enough technical meaning behind it.

Who Owns the Brand — and Who Else Might Use It?
Those standards questions connect directly to the ownership question, because a brand is only as meaningful as the consistency of what it represents. Disney has registered the Infinity Vision trademark in nearly every major market, with Cripps noting exceptions in India and Japan where prior registrations existed.

Cripps framed that as a starting point rather than a territorial claim. “The intention was not to create something that Disney were going to own and control,” he said. “The first two movies coming out will be Disney movies. We’ve actually presented to other studios and tried to encourage them to come along… but I think people are waiting to see how it rolls out.”

That is a familiar dynamic in this industry. Everyone likes the idea of a shared solution. Everyone also wants someone else to take the risk of going first. Disney is going first — and whether Infinity Vision ultimately becomes a broader industry standard or remains a Disney-branded marketing vehicle may depend as much on what “Avengers: Doomsday” does at the box office in December as it does on the elegance of the qualification framework.

What Can Play on an Infinity Vision Screen?
One source of confusion among attendees was whether a screen that qualifies for Infinity Vision would somehow be restricted in what it could play. The answer, based on Cripps’ remarks and the nature of the program, is no.

Infinity Vision is not a proprietary projection system. It does not prevent an auditorium from playing non-Disney titles. A screen that qualifies for “Avengers: Doomsday” could still play “Dune: Part Three,” or any other title, subject to normal booking decisions.

But unless another studio adopts the label, that film would not be playing “in Infinity Vision.” It would be playing in that exhibitor’s premium auditorium — whether branded as a circuit PLF, Dolby Cinema, ScreenX, 4DX or something else. That distinction may be obvious to studio distribution executives. It was not obvious to everyone in the room.

Pricing Is the Exhibitor’s Call
Cripps also clarified that Disney is not imposing a ticket surcharge on Infinity Vision presentations.

“Distributors don’t set ticket prices, you do,” he told exhibitors. “There’s no premium that Disney’s charging. Exhibitors are free to charge whatever they want.”

That does not mean exhibitors will not charge more. Premium branding exists in part because moviegoers have shown they will pay for better experiences — and Cripps made that case elsewhere in the conversation, arguing that when premium tickets go on sale, “the first tickets that sell out are the premium expensive tickets.” Infinity Vision is designed to help exhibitors sell those seats, not discount them.

What We Still Don’t Know
Cripps made a genuine and good-faith effort to explain Infinity Vision to an audience that wanted and needed an explanation. The program’s commercial logic is clear, and the core proposition — a Disney-led (for now) umbrella brand that helps consumers identify premium non-IMAX auditoriums — has real value for an exhibition sector whose PLF investments have long outpaced the industry’s ability to communicate them to ticket buyers.

What remains unclear are the practical mechanics: minimum screen specifications, the degree of territory-by-territory flexibility, what happens to strong regional premium screens that fall short of global thresholds, and whether a voluntary, exhibitor-submitted process can sustain enough consistency for the brand to mean something at scale.

Those answers may come from Disney’s Wednesday presentation at CineEurope, from the September “Avengers: Endgame” reissue, or from “Avengers: Doomsday” itself in December. For now, Infinity Vision is a program with a compelling premise and a strong commercial rationale — and a lot of fine print still being written.

Update — June 24, 2026: One day after this article was published, Disney provided additional public details about Infinity Vision during its CineEurope presentation in Barcelona, with Jeffrey Forman, Senior Vice President, International Film Distribution at The Walt Disney Studios, referring to Infinity Vision as a “certification program.”

According to Disney, auditoriums seeking Infinity Vision branding must meet several technical standards, including a screen at least 45 feet wide, immersive audio such as Dolby Atmos or 7.1, and brightness levels of either 14 footlamberts for 2D or 6 footlamberts for 3D presentations. Disney has also launched an Infinity Vision ticketing landing page at InfinityVisionTickets.com.

The additional details clarify some of the questions raised during Andrew Cripps’ ICTA appearance, particularly around minimum technical specifications. They also confirm that Disney is positioning Infinity Vision more formally as a certification program, even as its initial public explanation emphasized a voluntary, collaborative process with exhibitors. Disney reportedly received more than 7,500 applications from global exhibitor screens seeking certification and is now reviewing those auditoriums.

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The annual report, labeled by Marché du Film executive director Guillaume Esmiol as “the bible of the Marché du Film,” was introduced in a session that featured Martin Kanzler, deputy head of department for market information at the Observatory; Nicolas Edmery and Elisa Joliveau-Breney, film analysts at the Observatory;  and Naohiro Kaji, director of the Culture and Creative Industries Division at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The panel discussion combined global market data, a closer look at Europe, and a special focus on Japan, this year’s country of honor.

A Global Stage
Kanzler said the 2026 edition marked a change in scope. Rather than concentrating mainly on Europe and the country of honor, the Observatory had for the first time added up its country-by-country data to provide broader global estimates by region. Film analyst Edmery clarified that “world” in this context refers to 82 markets, covering about six billion inhabitants and accounting for almost the entire global box office. The Observatory’s figures therefore remain provisional and based on differing national methodologies, but they offer one of the clearest snapshots of the theatrical sector’s direction of travel.

According to the study, 4.98 billion cinema tickets were sold worldwide in 2025, up 3% on 2024 but still roughly 28% below the 2017-2019 pre-pandemic average. Global gross box office rose by 5% to EUR 29.56 billion, remaining around 20% below pre-pandemic levels. The recovery was concentrated in a handful of large markets: the 10 biggest territories accounted for 77% of worldwide admissions and 76% of global box office.

Asia accounted for 54% of global admissions in 2025 and 38% of global box office, making it the largest region by attendance and revenue. The region’s growth was driven primarily by China and Japan, while Europe and Latin America recorded declines. China sold 1.238 billion tickets, up 23% year on year, while Japan reached 188.8 million admissions, a 31% rise on 2024 and its highest level since 2019.

By contrast, Europe fell by 5.4%, from 841 million admissions in 2024 to 795 million in 2025, while gross box office declined by 3% to EUR 6.51 billion (USD $7.59bn). North America was broadly stable in attendance terms, with the US and Canada reaching 780 million admissions, up 2%, though box office dipped slightly to EUR €7.85 billion (USD $9.15bn).

Hollywood’s Waning Influence
Edmery noted that the weakness of US films in Europe was one of the key factors behind the continent’s decline. US titles sold an estimated 48 million fewer tickets in Europe than in 2024, while European films also lost ground because of the absence of major French local hits. Admissions for national films in France dropped by 30 million, even as national films in other European markets collectively grew by around four million admissions.

Despite this, US films remained dominant in most markets. Globally, North American films accounted for an estimated 52% of admissions in 2025, down from 63% in 2019. Asian films, meanwhile, increased their share from 27% in 2019 to 36% in 2025, underlining a clear shift in the composition of global demand.

The symbolic case was China’s “Ne Zha 2”, which became the first non-US studio film to top the global chart, generating an estimated EUR €1.77 billion (USD $2.06bn) worldwide. Four Asian films ranked among the global top 20, including Japan’s “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle – Part 1”, which grossed EUR €690 million (USD $804.25m) globally.

Japan was presented as a particularly striking case. Unlike Europe, where US films still represented around 62% of admissions, Japan’s market was overwhelmingly driven by domestic titles. Japanese films captured a 76% market share, while US films accounted for just 20%, well below their pre-pandemic average of 39%.

Asked why Japan had managed to exceed its pre-pandemic audience level, Kaji, representing Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, pointed first to the competitiveness of local films. “The answer is simply attractive films,” he said, citing “Demon Slayer” and “Kokuho” as examples. He stressed that Japan had achieved this without quotas or major regulatory intervention. “It is a free market,” he said. “People can select over-the-top, Netflix or something like that, but they can also select the movie.”

The three biggest films in Japan in 2025 were all local: “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle”with 27 million admissions, “Kokuho”with 13 million, and “Detective Conan: One-Eyed Flashback” with 10 million. While animation remained the most powerful driver of admissions, Edmery emphasized that live-action Japanese films also performed strongly, with titles such as the aforementioned“Kokuho”plus “Exit 8” showing the breadth of the local market.

Japanese Film Goes Global
The international growth of Japanese titles was another major theme. Kaji argued that around 2020 marked a turning point for the Japanese content industry, as overseas revenues began to outweigh domestic ones in certain segments. “Beforehand, overseas sales were some kind of pocket money, a bonus,” he said. “After 2020, the Japanese film industry started to think this is usual business.”

That change, he suggested, altered investment behavior. If international revenue is no longer seen as a bonus but as a normal part of the business model, larger production budgets become easier to justify. “That is why the quality is rising, and global people find Japanese film,” he said.

The production data also underlined Japan’s scale. The country produced 694 national feature films in 2025, the highest number on record and the second-largest production volume worldwide after India, which released 768 films. By comparison, Europe produced an estimated 2,522 films across all markets, while global theatrical feature production stood at approximately 7,707 films.

Elisa Joliveau-Breney, film analyst at the Observatory, contrasted Japan’s production ecosystem with Europe’s. Europe accounted for 35% of global production volume but only around 10% of global admissions. Asia accounted for 40% of global production and 36% of admissions.

The structural differences are significant. Animation represented only 3% of European production on average, compared with 13% in Japan. Co-productions accounted for 23% of European films, but only around 3% of Japanese releases. Adaptation also plays a much larger role in Japan: according to Joliveau-Breney, nearly all of the Japanese films in the country’s 2025 top 20 were adapted from existing intellectual property, with “First Kiss” being the only exception.

Kaji said adaptation sits at the center of Japan’s content strategy, which is increasingly organized around what the government calls “IP360.” The idea is to develop intellectual property across film, manga, anime, games and music rather than treating cinema as an isolated sector. “Japanese manga, anime and games are very, very charming,” he said. “The film industry can also use these advantages.”

How Financing Options Vary By Country
Financing models offered perhaps the sharpest contrast between Europe and Japan. Joliveau-Breney noted that European films remain highly dependent on public support. Most European films have budgets below EUR €10 million (USD $11.66m), with the average budget standing at about EUR €2.2 million (USD $2.56m). The main financing sources are direct public funding, production incentives, broadcaster investment, producer investment and pre-sales. When direct public backing and incentives are combined, public support covers almost half of the average European film budget; when public broadcasters are included, the public share rises further.

Kaji said this was “very surprising” from a Japanese perspective. “The norm in Japan is private investment,” he said. The Japanese production committee system, he explained, is a private risk-sharing structure in which multiple operating companies invest and take on specific roles. “The production committee is a risk-sharing system,” he said, adding that it works well for medium-sized investment but becomes more complex for large-scale films and international operations.

That system, however, is also evolving. Kaji said blockbuster projects increasingly involve fewer committee members, allowing a smaller number of companies to take larger risks. Whereas committees might once have involved ten or more companies, some now involve only three, while the anime studio MAPPA took on “Chainsaw Man” with a much more concentrated investment structure.

Government policy is also changing. Japan has traditionally favored low levels of regulation and limited direct intervention, in contrast with Europe’s dense system of funds, incentives, quotas, investment obligations and public broadcasters. Kaji said this reflects a long-standing belief that cultural diversity in Japan can be achieved through private-sector activity rather than state intervention.

But export is now giving the government a clearer rationale for action. “For the goal abroad, because of maybe the island country and the barrier of the language, it is difficult for Japanese people to go overseas and reach the global market,” Kaji said. He added that there is growing public and political support for helping Japanese manga, anime, film and games reach international audiences.

Japan’s content-industry support has therefore expanded. Kaji said government support for the content sector had doubled compared with the previous year, while the budget within his ministry had tripled. He linked this to the policy direction of Prime Minister Takaichi’s cabinet, which has identified the content industry as one of Japan’s growth sectors and a means of earning foreign currency.

Cultural Objectives, Global Ambitions
Next, Kanzler placed Japan’s approach in a broader policy context, first outlining the traditional logic behind European film policy. “Most European film policies are traditionally primarily driven by cultural objectives,” he said. “So producing films in national languages, telling local stories, connecting with local audiences. And at the same time, and of course this is closely linked, safeguarding the national film industries, which often are very small national markets.”

He then described three broad European models. “One type puts the producer and the industry at the center, and pursues both, on the one hand, cultural diversity goals and, on the other hand, an emphasis on the strength and the competitiveness of the local production industry,” he said. “That model, in different variations, is the most prominent one across continental Europe.” By contrast, “the UK pursues a very different approach,” with “a clear economic focus” on “GDP growth, job employment and industrial competitiveness as a whole.” At the other end of the spectrum, he added, the Nordic countries often follow what they call a “citizen focus,” where funding cares about “cultural identity and the role of film” and also contributes to “social inclusion and social cohesion.”

These rationales are matched by three main tools: investment obligations requiring broadcasters and streamers to invest in local audiovisual production; production incentives such as cash rebates and tax shelters; and direct public funding, both selective and automatic. “Direct public funding generally is seen as the tool of choice to support cultural diversity and artistic quality,” Kanzler said.

Yet European policy is also moving. Kanzler pointed to the growth of automatic funding and production incentives, suggesting a gradual shift from purely cultural rationales toward more economic goals. Investment obligations are also starting to have measurable effects. French CNC data, he noted, show streamer investment in French film production rising from virtually nothing before the pandemic to a meaningful share of financing in recent years.

What This Means For Exhibitors
For exhibitors, the implications of the FOCUS data are clear but not simple. The global screen base remains resilient, with more than 220,000 theatrical screens operating worldwide in 2025, compared with around 200,000 before the pandemic. The number of screens grew in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, remained stable in Europe and Latin America, and declined by 14% in North America.

But admissions have not recovered at the same pace. The market is more concentrated, more dependent on local breakouts in several key territories, and less automatically driven by US studio product than before the pandemic. Asia’s growth, Japan’s domestic strength and the rise of IP-led export strategies all point to a theatrical market whose center of gravity is becoming more plural.

As Kaji put it, Japan’s policy shift is no longer about supporting culture alone, but about treating content as “an industry of future national growth”. For the global cinema business, that may be the larger lesson of the latest FOCUS research: recovery is happening, but it is being led by markets and models that do not necessarily look like the old Hollywood-centered order.

The post Global Cinema Attendance Inches Up, But the Recovery Belongs to Asia, Says the Latest FOCUS Report appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

Titled “Retention, Reach, Revenue: Growing Cinema Audiences,” the conference’s primary focus was on how to further strengthen the post-COVID recovery of the UK theatrical sector, and while neither the speakers nor the attendees were naive to the ongoing challenges, there was pragmatic optimism in a look ahead that embraced new technology while also going back to basics on the value – in every sense of the word – of the cinematic experience.

The Numbers Game
The conference began with some reasons to be cheerful, with an opening panel from Lucy Jones of Rentrak (formerly Comscore Movies). Statistically speaking, 2025 recorded a 1% increase in annual box office revenue after a plateau the previous two years. This was helped by an increase in saturation releases, which rose to a record 224 last year. That volume presents its own challenges, particularly for exhibitors and programmers, but as Jones put it, “It’s a nice challenge to have, but if you are running a cinema, particularly with fewer screens, it is a real challenge to keep those films on screen to really fulfil their potential.”

Even though numbers haven’t returned to 2019 levels, three consecutive years with UK box office takings in excess of GBP £1 billion (USD $1.34 billion) is extremely reassuring. “We’re back in the billion club that we used to see before the pandemic,” said Jones. 

More reassuring still, takings for 2026 are following a similar pattern to 2025 when tracked weekly, albeit with a slight increase in almost all weeks. But the headline news was that this year is on course to deliver GBP £1.19 billion (USD $1.6 billion) at the UK box office, which would be a leap of 10% year on year, and only 14% shy of the 2019 yardstick.

Another takeaway was the correlation charted between a film’s gross and audiences’ ‘excellent’ approval rating according to Postrak data. There’s a general trend that the films that are most highly rated go on to have the biggest takings, and in 2025 those titles included “A Minecraft Movie,” “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy,” “Wicked: For Good” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” There were outliers that potentially left money on the table (including “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another”), and the chart showing children’s approval ratings versus box office gave the dispiriting indication that there’s no correlation between a film’s quality and its performance (which may feel all too familiar for parents of young children).

In Jones’ closing remarks she suggested wringing every last drop from those crowdpleasing quality releases, and also finding ways to innovate with more tailored, targeted marketing to “connect the right film with the right person at the right time.” If this panel started the conference on an optimistic note, it also signalled some back to basics truths about cinemagoing that bear repeating. Of course, the films need to be good, but it goes beyond that.

Community Centered
Even good movies will only carry a cinema so far, according to multiple panels at the conference that stressed cinema’s value as community hub. This was a key theme in the “Audience Development – Lessons from the Coalface” panel, which was moderated by Clapp and featured UK operators working outside the multiplex model.

Sarah Hulls from the Magic Lantern Cinema in Tywyn, Wales – a one-screen venue that recently celebrated its 125th year of showing films – spoke about the need to adapt their offering, not least because the town has a small and predominantly elderly population. “We’ve become a cultural hub rather than just a cinema,” Hulls said of the expanded offering. Among the community work Hulls described were dementia-friendly screenings and a Welsh-language season, as well as hosting the Spotlight Awards for local businesses and a high-school prom. They even open on Christmas Day to provide food and company for those who are seeking it.

Ben Hammond, of the Ashford Cinema in Kent, described a similar set-up. “That’s the kind of ethos we’re trying to build… We want to be a community and a place where the community can come and relax and hang out, regardless of what they’re here to do. They can talk, they can socialize, they can interact,” he explained. “We’ve got lots of access groups that come and just play board games because we’ve got the space to do it.” While some of the “eventizing” that Hammond spoke of was cinema-themed – including retro screenings featuring live talent Q&As – others were unrelated, such as an international magic convention. “The cinema still ran five screens from morning to night [alongside the convention],” said Hammond. “The cinema operations didn’t change, but we ran a day and a half’s worth of international magic with magicians coming from all over the world. It was completely sold out and a real premium event.”

Even more remote is Mareel, a venue on the Scottish archipelago Shetland, which is 110 miles from mainland Scotland. “Mareel itself is built as an arts center,” said Graeme Howell. “So we’ve got a 340 capacity performance space, education facilities, recording studios, cafes, retail space, cinema screens, and we tick away trying to deliver as much as we can for everyone in Shetland.” Mareel also serves a civic role, acting as a banking hub and a place where residents can top up their electricity meters. “It’s a really diverse mix of the community that makes use of the facilities.”

A separate panel highlighting one cinema in particular – The Station Cinema in Richmond, North Yorkshire – offered a case study in growing audiences by engaging communities not as an afterthought, but as a core strategy. The Station Cinema’s General Manager, Dan Westgarth explained that previous attempts to offer neurodiverse screenings in a quiet schedule gap fell flat. But after speaking to advocacy groups directly, they were able to discover what an appropriate screening actually looks like for their neurodiverse patrons. A similar approach was taken with school groups, the local Ukrainian population, and other underserved groups. Though Westgarth is keen to stress that such a community building is a “long-term relationship, not a one-off transaction,” plugging away with consistency has its rewards. Over the long term, it has built an engaged customer base that now expects and anticipates eventized screenings. And in the shorter term, that commitment to customers can go viral, as The Station Cinema experienced with their dog-friendly screenings, which gained a huge amount of attention on social media and made the national news. Taking an audience first approach and harnessing the power of social media were themes that were reiterated across the conference.

Accessibility All Areas
One of the most illuminating talks of the UKCA 2026 line-up was the panel discussion “Welcoming Deaf Audiences,” led by Paramount Pictures Paul Lofting. Taking part were deaf advocate Tianah Hodding and representatives from Vue, Odeon and Movie House Cinemas. Lofting highlighted the work Paramount has done over the past few years, since they “started to have a look at whether we could knock down some of those barriers and see what we could move or change. And we focused on three areas. They were training, the quality of captioning, and actual programming of captioned shows.” Lofting said that since October 2024, “most Paramount movies have previews one or two days ahead of their Friday opening exclusively in caption format, so we could give deaf cinema-goers the opportunity to be among the first people to experience new releases.”

Lofting presented a pre-emptive riposte to the claim that too many captioned screenings would be off-putting to those patrons who don’t have accessibility needs. For the release of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” in May 2025, Paramount worked with Cineworld, Vue and Showcase in the UK on a rollout that gave particular attention to captioned screenings. “We agreed with them to play a minimum daily captioned show of the movie over the first nine days of the film’s release in every single cinema that they operate – whether that was twenty screens, ten screens, four screens.” The approach also included ensuring that there were captioned shows during evenings and weekends, which led to “just under 2,000” captioned screenings of that film in its first nine days of release, Lofting said. From all of those screenings, the chains received zero complaints. “We’ve proven it, so now let’s move on,” said Lofting.

Communications consultant and actor Hodding, who is deaf, brought her own first-hand experience to the panel. “I’m very obsessed with film and filmmaking, and I go to the cinema whenever I get the chance,” she said. “I’m currently campaigning to get more friendly access for [Deaf audiences], there’s eighteen million Deaf people in the UK, and we’re constantly growing. And there’s a lot of us who need to be able to go to the cinema whenever we want on our terms, not yours. On a Tuesday at 9am doesn’t work for Deaf people who work 9-5. It’s also quite important to normalize access from the get-go.”

Hodding also explained how restricted access to captioned performances also could impact friends, family and particularly children of Deaf people who would be looking to attend the cinema with the hearing impaired family member. “Imagine you’re looking at a schedule or a program and it says, ‘Oh, you can watch a movie at 10am with sound.’ Anyone imagine that? So not only do we lose out, but also our friends and family lose out as well, just to give you a bit of an understanding.”

Also being showcased at the conference were tech solutions for accessibility from Auracast and WatchWord. Auracast is an assistive listening device that can receive real-time hearing assistance via Bluetooth, and WatchWord supplies smart glasses that can display closed captions (provided by the Digital Cinema Package (DCP)) to the wearer. WatchWord comes with a control that can personalise the placement of the text, as well as colour and size making them a flexible solution (audience members requiring captions can attend any screening and access captions from the DCP, rather than having to wait for a dedicated screening).

The overall takeaway from the session was that accessibility should be a forethought rather than an afterthought, and a lack of preparedness can impact more than just those with accessibility needs, as it can ripple out to affect their families and friends, making cinema a less enticing prospect for a much wider group than might initially be counted.

Know Your Enemy
Another theme to emerge time and again at this year’s conference was using digital tools – such as social media and AI – to enhance your reach and increase your potential footfall, rather than just treating it as the enemy, a competitor to the cinema experience.

In the “From Scroll to Screen: Winning the Fight for Attention” panel, David Cameron, the head of marketing for Vue UK and Ireland, discussed what it meant now that Gen Z audiences were typically spending up to five hours per day on social media. “It’s so important we are engaging and connecting with those audiences, and creating great value because they are spending so much time there,” he said of the chain’s social media strategy. But he also spoke of the value of the comments sections of their social media channels for providing genuine customer feedback.

Carla Boyd, director of digital marketing, international at Cineworld, said that the company sees that online space as “almost like our digital foyer… It’s where the decisions get made on: ‘What films do we want to watch? What merch do we want to buy?’” Boyd also spoke about the digital word of mouth that films such as “The Sheep Detectives” and “Project Hail Mary” have benefitted from. 

On the same panel, the British Film Institute’s (BFI) research manager Paul McEvoy highlighted some illuminating findings from the organization’s Audience Screen Engagement Tracker. “We found in the research that these habituated social media users are not abandoning other content,” McEvoy explained, addressing the perception that so-called ‘doomscrollers’ are never putting their phones down. “They’re actually heavier users of other content. Daily users of short-form [online video] are thirty percent more likely to go to the cinema. They’re nearly forty percent more likely to stream.” Perhaps the most surprising statistic to emerge from the BFI’s research is that only 14% of Gen Z participants said they wanted phone use to be allowed in cinemas. “They really see the value in cinema being a digital oasis [free from phones],” he added. “We also saw that the main reason they go to the cinema is as a social outing.”

A panel on AI (“Reaching Cinema Audiences Across AI Search and Discovery Tools”) suggested how businesses could leverage audiences’ increasing reliance on AI in much the same way search engine optimization looks for gains via browser discovery. A case study on The Living Room Cinema in Chipping Norton explained how marketing company Mojo Works researched the ideal customer profile, planned against real world scenarios and queries (such as “family activities in the Cotswolds this weekend”), and getting the cinema’s website more digestible for the AI tools that are going to be ‘reading’ it. 

“How do we make sure that information is machine readable?” asked Oskars Killo, founding partner of Mojo Works. “That’s a very important thing to take away. There will be different structures and tech related items that need to happen for that.” Among the quick wins are “working with the POS provider and the website team to to set up the backend elements like schemas and JSON [JavaScript Object Notation].” Having a detailed, well-structured FAQ section is also seen as a big help.

Claire Beswick, founder and CEO of The Living Room Cinema stressed the importance of the information being aligned with customers’ day-to-day experience of the brand. “You can’t be just spending all of your time putting together information for the machines to read which actually then gives you an answer which is not consistent with your brand,” she said. Ensuring that your business details are consistent across third-party platforms like search engines and maps was also described as crucial. Valentin Degen, CEO and co-founder of International Showtimes, explained the importance of “surfacing more rich data to the AI so that the user can make more informed decisions.”

If there was the whiff of a sales pitch about the presentation, a compelling case was made for businesses to shore up against these upheavals in consumer behaviour, and provided a less doomy narrative than is often spun about how AI will impact the cinema industry.

State of Play
Perhaps the most illuminating and lively discussion of the conference was the annual Executive Roundtable, featuring key voices from distribution and exhibition. Due to the free-flowing nature of the conversation, attendees were requested to report the headlines without specific attribution, but across the board there was plenty to be positive about. With a group assembled from distributors and exhibitors of various sizes, the panel consistently said they were “optimistic” about the current health of the sector.

The mood was buoyed by the current relative overperformance of films that didn’t fall into the conventional blockbuster template. “It’s not being driven by one particular film,” said one studio representative. “I think we’re actually seeing a genuine shift in audience behavior.” There was a caution expressed about a lack of “spikes” with truly overperforming blockbusters of the pre-pandemic likes of Star Wars and Marvel pictures, but the overall consensus was that the industry was in a stronger place for not placing all hopes on a very select group of bankable tentpole releases, and instead having a more varied slate that was attracting more diverse crowds.

Rebuilding cinema as a habitual experience was also a key theme of the discussion. In part that’s down to the aforementioned varied slate, and the increasing emphasis that exhibitors are putting on premium experiences, from screens and projection to seating and beyond. But alongside this, more than one participant made the point of cinemas needing to reclaim the narrative that it is an expensive pastime. “What else can you go and do for a couple of hours that’s gonna cost around GBP £10?” asked one exhibition representative, while another studio exec pointed out that the price of a beer and cinema ticket have never been closer. Although discussion did turn to the fact that cinema is perceived as expensive, even if the evidence suggests that’s not the case relative to other options for a night out. “I think we have to do a little more work on positioning that in the right [way],” said one participant. “And it doesn’t mean about cheapening [ticket prices]. It’s about just creating the perception of value for money and how we do that.”

If there was a point of tension in the discussion, it was around release windows, and whether it was right for streamers like Netflix to put films into cinemas for just two weeks before they were available at home. The case was made that the audience should come first, and if they really want to see a title such as “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man” on the big screen, then cinemas need to meet that need. But there was pushback from participants who felt that a longer window was essential across the board, in order to set audience expectations. But if that was a pinch point, the overall tenor of the conversation was optimistic and upbeat.

In conjunction with some of the remaining panels that played out over the two-day session – including talks from organisations working to engage Gen Z audiences with cinema, suppliers looking at ways to improve and eventize the audience experience from the foyer to the auditorium, and even the social media strategies to build advanced buzz and sustain post-release engagement, the generally positive mood seemed to be about embracing the momentum of a recovering box office through best practices rather than an existential-crisis-induced reinvention. If the 2026 figures hold as expected, maybe the mood will be even more ebullient next year.

The post UKCA 2026 Conference: Box Office Optimism, Engaging Gen Z, and Leveraging the Power of Community appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

Regal’s newly renovated Sherman Oaks Galleria theatre served as the setting on June 15 for Deadline x Regal’s “Future of Storytelling for the Big Screen” panel, a wide-ranging conversation that began with box office optimism and quickly moved into the unresolved business questions still shaping theatrical exhibition: supply, windows, consolidation and the premium-format arms race.

The theatre itself was, by any measure, a statement. Sixteen screens, four of them premium-format: two PLF auditoriums, an IMAX and a 4DX. That configuration, which would have been exceptional even a few years ago, felt like the implicit argument running under the entire conversation. A domestic box office at USD $4.1 billion — the best pace since 2019 — and a summer pushing toward USD $1.6 billion provided the tailwind. The panel provided the texture.

Adam Fogelson, chairman of Lionsgate Motion Picture Group; Andrew Cripps, head of theatrical distribution at Disney Studios; Blair Rich, chief marketing and commercial officer at Legendary Entertainment; and filmmaker Michael Tiddes, whose recent “Scary Movie” opened to USD $105.5 million globally for Paramount and Miramax, joined Regal Cinemas CEO Eduardo Acuna for the discussion. The panel was moderated by Anthony D’Alessandro, Editorial Director and Box Office Editor of Deadline.

Three subjects generated the most heat: the looming Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, the persistent confusion around theatrical windows, and a shared conviction that exhibition is undersupplied with premium large-format screens at exactly the moment audiences have decided they want them. But before the panel reached those issues, the executives first tried to explain why the mood in the room had changed so sharply from the industry’s recent doom-and-gloom years.

Younger Audiences Are Back, But Not on Old Terms
Acuna framed the recovery as the result of the industry doing more of what it is supposed to do, and doing it better. “What gives us confidence is that every single person here is doing their job better than they ever have,” he said. For exhibitors, that means cleaner theatres, better service, better presentation and more intentional marketing. For studios, it means films that audiences can recognize as theatrical events, whether they come from familiar IP, original ideas or communities that have not always been well understood by Hollywood.

Rich pointed to the current diversity of releases as one reason the market has regained momentum. After COVID and the strike-related supply disruption, she said, audiences are finally seeing a mix of films that gives them a reason to return. “For the first time in such a long time, truly something for every audience” is in theatres, Rich said, adding that audiences have responded to originality, thoughtful sequels and what she called “IRL connected experiences.”

Fogelson said the more optimistic mood matters because it changes the decisions studios and exhibitors are willing to make. “I’ve been concerned for the last bunch of years that everyone has been making decisions as if it was the apocalypse,” he said. “I think that leads to bad decision making across the board, from studios, from exhibitors, from everybody.”

Much of that optimism is coming from younger moviegoers, including Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences that the industry spent years worrying it had lost. Rich said the campaign for “A Minecraft Movie” showed how much the marketing language has changed. “If you’re not prepared to learn that language and be fluent in that language and meet them where they are,” she said, “it doesn’t connect.”

Fogelson made a similar point about “Michael,” arguing that younger audiences did not need to be convinced that Michael Jackson had cultural currency so much as be given marketing materials they could share on their own terms. “If you over-share everything, if you look like you’re working hard,” he said, “you’re going to get flat out rejected.”

Tiddes said Paramount’s campaign for “Scary Movie” worked because it invited younger audiences into the joke rather than simply selling them a franchise. The film, he said, was positioned around the same irreverent, communal experience that made earlier R-rated comedies theatrical events. “A laugh alone gets a chuckle,” Tiddes said. “But that same laugh in a theatre could get a roar.”

Acuna argued that the return of young audiences also reflects a broader saturation with digital life. Regal, he said, had once tested texting-friendly screenings in response to fears that young audiences would only come back if allowed to use their phones during movies. Those auditoriums, he said, “failed massively.” The lesson was not that theatres needed to become more like phones, but that they needed to offer a real alternative to them. “When I’m here, I want you to take my phone away,” Acuna said, summarizing the audience response. “Just give me that moment with other people.”

The Paramount-WBD Merger Question Nobody Could Fully Answer
The panel’s most direct business discussion came near the end, when D’Alessandro raised the pending Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Acuna opened with the diplomatic but unmistakable caution of someone who has watched consolidation play out in other industries. “Wait and see,” he said.

And then he explained why waiting and seeing worries him. What exhibitors need, above all, is volume. Not only the biggest tentpoles — volume. The more a merged company concentrates development around IP franchises and reduces the number of mid-tier releases, the harder it becomes for Regal and its peers to fill 16 screens across a calendar year.

“Paramount has done terrific work,” Acuna said, citing the executives the studio has brought in and recent franchise activity. “On the other hand, we’re all concerned with consolidation, just in general. In any industry in the world, consolidation usually doesn’t bring the best to the industry.”

Fogelson offered the most analytically useful framing of the group. His argument was essentially a conditional: if the combined entity operates Paramount and Warner Bros. as two genuinely independent labels, maintaining both slates, not much changes for exhibition. If instead the merged company cherry-picks the highest-value IP from each and consolidates around tentpoles, then every successful original Warner Bros. title of the past two years — and Fogelson was specific that studios including Lionsgate had been bidding on those same projects — gets redistributed to the companies still willing to make them.

“I think someone’s going to step in,” Fogelson said. His read was that the ecosystem adapts, particularly now that the box office has demonstrably proven the commercial case for theatrical.

That optimism is grounded but not unconditional. What Fogelson was really arguing is that the current market recovery has created competitive incentives that did not exist two or three years ago. When the box office was struggling, the pressure was to move product to streaming. Now that it is not, the calculus has shifted — and a merged Paramount-WBD that pulls back on theatrical supply creates an opening, not just a void.

Rich, who works with both studios through Legendary’s co-financing structure — the “Dune” franchise with Warner Bros. and “Street Fighter” with Paramount — kept it direct. “The commitment needs to be to make sure that the product level stays high,” she said. Cripps, for his part, landed the close: the panel had started by noting that moviegoing is in a good place. “Hopefully nothing from the merger jeopardizes that.”

Windows: The Debate Has Shifted From Length to Confusion
The panel’s most revealing exchange on theatrical windows was not about whether they should be longer or shorter. It was about the fact that they have not meaningfully changed — and the box office has recovered anyway.

Fogelson flagged the obvious data point, because someone had to: all of the success happening right now is occurring within the existing window framework that studios and exhibitors have spent years arguing over. He was careful not to turn that observation into a fixed Lionsgate position, but he wanted the room to notice that the apocalypse scenario used to justify shrinking windows during the COVID era has not materialized.

“All the success is happening, and the window changes that everyone’s been talking about haven’t been implemented,” Fogelson said. “That does not mean I’m not in favor of them at all. It simply is noteworthy that nothing has yet changed with respect to windows, and people are flocking to movie theatres.”

He did, however, identify a genuine exception at the smaller end of the market. “Obsession,” one of this summer’s indie breakout hits, was raised as an example of the kind of smaller film whose early PVOD timing had been part of the industry conversation. Fogelson’s larger point was that a rigid window may solve one problem while creating another for films that rely on quicker downstream revenue.

“There’s a really good argument for why a 45-day window makes sense,” Fogelson said. “However…for smaller movies, are fewer smaller movies going to have a shot if they don’t work and they have to wait 45 days, because the economics for those movies become more challenging? I don’t know the answer.”

That nuance — that a 45-day window is increasingly treated as the industry norm at the studio level but may remain a financial constraint for smaller distributors — is exactly the kind of tension that tends to get flattened in broad policy debates, and Fogelson was careful not to flatten it.

Acuna came at the problem from a different angle, and for exhibitors, his data point was the more alarming one. A recent NRG study, he said, found that approximately 32% of moviegoers still believe new theatrical releases are available at home for free in under two weeks. That’s not a windows problem so much as an information problem — and a stubborn one. Even if studios and exhibitors agreed tomorrow on the perfect window structure, a third of the audience would still be acting on the wrong assumption.

“The big problem with windows has been just the confusion around what the window is,” Acuna said. “There are customers who still don’t know.”

He also called out a specific practice that muddles the picture further: some studios allow pre-purchases of films on Amazon Prime or iTunes while those films are still in their theatrical window. To a consumer, a pre-purchase availability signal can look a lot like an imminent release date.

“You may think that that movie is going to be available at home in a week,” Acuna said. “Some studios do that, some studios don’t do that.”

It’s an inconsistency no 45-day minimum guarantee can fix on its own — which is why Acuna keeps returning to volume rather than precision as the real fix. The goal, in his framing, isn’t to impose one rigid number across every film. It’s to protect the value of theatrical while ensuring studios still make enough money to keep producing films at all. “The only thing that’s more important than windows is the number of titles we have to show,” he said.

Premium Screens: Undersupplied, and Everyone Knows It
On premium large-format screens, the panel was nearly unanimous: there are not enough of them. The marketplace is currently making that shortage loudly visible.

The case study doing most of the work in this conversation was the year-end collision between “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Dune: Part Three.” Two mega-tentpoles, releasing within weeks of each other, neither with an exclusive IMAX run — a fact Cripps confirmed directly, and without apology.

“If we didn’t have confidence that both were going to work, one of us wouldn’t be there,” Cripps said. “It’s probably the best time for moviegoers of the calendar year. There are two and a half to three weeks of holidays, literally around the world. If people want to go see both of these movies, they have plenty of time to do so.”

On the IMAX question specifically, Cripps argued that the format’s absence from “Avengers: Doomsday” is a constraint Disney went in with eyes open, not a fatal liability. He pointed to “Barbie,” “Lilo and Stitch” and the last “Jurassic” film as major successes that did not rely on IMAX to prove their theatrical credentials.

“We love IMAX as a format. More importantly, we love IMAX as a brand,” Cripps said. “But there are plenty of examples of movies that have not had IMAX that have done really, really well.”

Acuna made the operational case from the exhibition side. The renovated Sherman Oaks Galleria now houses four premium-format auditoriums across 16 screens. “When we remodel this one, we put in four, which is not normal,” he said. “Customers are more discerning than ever. Customers want more quality than ever.”

Cripps made the same case from the distribution side, and the two arguments are really one argument seen from opposite ends of the supply chain: exhibitors are building premium capacity because the audience demands it, and studios want that capacity to exist because the marketing payoff of a first weekend seen in the best possible format compounds. “When you open a movie that we’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars making, and then marketing, I think you want those first consumers to see it in the best way possible,” he said. “We’ve got to offer consumers something different from that experience they get at home.”

Rich added the access dimension. She described a “Dune: Part Two” superfan near Buffalo who drove toward the Canadian border to see the film in IMAX — not once, but 14 times. He was, she noted, an extreme case. But the behavior he represents — audiences actively seeking out premium presentation and going to significant logistical lengths to find it — is a market signal the industry has not yet fully met.

“You don’t want your fans to feel left out of an experience,” Rich said.

Acuna offered the corrective that often gets lost in the premium-format conversation: a standard auditorium still beats a living room by a significant margin. The risk is that the industry’s increasingly format-centric marketing inadvertently trains audiences to believe the standard presentation is not worth the trip.

“Something I worry about the narrative that happens is if you don’t go see a movie in the biggest format, it’s not worth it,” Acuna said. “As important as these big screens are, being there with other people, experiencing things in a huge screen that doesn’t necessarily have to be an RPX or an IMAX — it’s actually pretty special too.”

That tension — between premium as aspiration and theatrical as baseline value proposition — is one the industry has not fully resolved. The Regal Sherman Oaks renovation, with its four premium auditoriums and 12 screens that are not PLF or IMAX but are still very much not the sofa, is one exhibitor’s attempt at threading that needle.

Whether the industry builds more of them, and whether the content pipeline emerging from a post-merger landscape gives those screens enough to show, is the conversation that will outlast any single panel.

The post The Box Office Is Back. At a Renovated Regal Theatre, the Industry Asks What Comes Next appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

After several years in which theatrical windows seemed to be shrinking by the quarter, the North American market may finally be settling into something that looks less like experimentation and more like strategy.

New research from Omdia suggests that studios are not returning wholesale to the old pre-pandemic windowing model. Instead, they are increasingly protecting theatrical exclusivity for the films most likely to benefit from it. In 2025, the average first transactional video-on-demand window rose slightly to a provisional 39 days, while the top 10 North American films averaged 51 days before reaching first transactional video-on-demand (TVOD), up from 45 days in 2024.

The message is not that the industry has solved the windows debate. It is that the debate has changed. Studios are still using flexible, title-by-title strategies, but the aggressive compression of theatrical exclusivity that followed the pandemic appears to be giving way to a more stable pattern — especially for the biggest releases.

Omdia’s findings were presented by Charlotte Jones, Senior Principal Analyst at Omdia, during the June 10 edition of the CJ Cinema Summit. The data came from the firm’s report, “US Movies: Theatrical, TVOD, SVOD, and Other Windowing Strategies 2025,” which tracks theatrical, transactional, subscription and other release windows across the North American market.

“What we found is that the average window did increase slightly,” Jones said during the Summit. “Generally, we are seeing a resurgence in some of the longer windows for some of those outlier titles.”

A Modest Shift, Concentrated at the Top
Omdia uses “first TVOD” to refer to the first transactional window, encompassing both premium rental and digital purchase availability. That measure has become one of the most closely watched indicators in the windows debate because it is often the first point at which a theatrically released film becomes available in the home.

In 2025, the average first TVOD window for wide releases tracked by Omdia rose to 39 days, up from 36 days in 2024. The average window to subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) release was a provisional 95 days, down slightly from 98 in 2024, based on known dates at the time the report was published in April.

Omdia noted that those figures could move as additional release dates become available, particularly on the SVOD side. Still, the provisional data points to a market in which studios are managing windows by platform and by title rather than reverting to one fixed model.

The shift was clearer among the highest-grossing films. Based on known dates at publication, seven of the top 10 North American titles in 2025 had more than 100 days between theatrical release and SVOD debut, up from six in 2024. All of the top 10 titles waited at least 30 days before first TVOD availability, a notable contrast with 2024, when Universal’s “Twisters” reached transactional platforms after 21 days.

Disney’s Benchmark, and the Outliers Pulling the Average Up
Disney stood out as the most consistent major studio in preserving a longer transactional window. Omdia found that Disney averaged 61.6 days from theatrical release to first TVOD in 2025, effectively matching its 61-day average in 2024. The studio also had the longest first TVOD window for a major studio title, with “Avatar: Fire and Ash” reaching transactional platforms after 102 days.

“Disney does have the longest in terms of that transactional window,” Jones said, pointing to the studio’s “consistency there over 60 days for many of those key titles.”

That consistency is significant because it places Disney’s approach closer to the kind of 60-day-plus model exhibitors have been advocating, even as the rest of the market continues to vary by studio and by title. Omdia’s data showed that 22 studio releases debuted on first TVOD after 45 days or more in 2025, up from 18 in 2024. But of the 17 studio titles that opened in 2025 to more than USD $50 million in North America, less than half had a 45-day window.

That finding may be one of the more revealing points in the study. Bigger opening weekends do not automatically guarantee longer theatrical exclusivity. Studio strategy still matters. So does the nature of the title, its performance trajectory, the distributor’s downstream priorities and the perceived value of keeping a film in cinemas longer.

“I would say that on average, when you have titles that perform at the higher end, in terms of the top three, top five, top 10, even top 20, they do tend to have on average longer windowing duration than the market average,” Jones said. “But you can see within that top 10 quite a lot of differences in studio approach and studio strategy.”

The Sentiment Shift, From the Top
The early 2026 data points toward further stabilization. According to Omdia, the top five films year-to-date for which data was available, all had theatrical-to-first TVOD windows of 45 days or more. Even traditionally shorter-window studios are tracking in that direction: Jones noted during the Summit that Amazon MGM’s “Project Hail Mary” ran roughly 53 days before TVOD, above that studio’s historical norm.

For exhibitors, that may be the most encouraging signal in the report. The industry is not necessarily returning to one fixed window for all films, but 45 days appears to be re-emerging as a meaningful floor for major releases, with stronger performers often allowed to run longer.

“It’s certainly very clear that the sentiment is now shifting towards backing longer windows,” Jones said.

That sentiment has been increasingly visible across the industry. Omdia’s presentation cited recent comments from Universal, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Steven Spielberg and Cinema United, all emphasizing the value of theatrical exclusivity. Paramount’s David Ellison has pledged a minimum 45-day theatrical window for releases, while Cinema United president and CEO Michael O’Leary has called for broad adoption of at least 45 days and, ideally, more.

Amazon MGM’s contribution to the same presentation struck a different note. Distribution chief Kevin Wilson framed the issue less in terms of a target number of days and more in terms of avoiding a scenario where a title is pulled from “a significant number of theaters after three weekends” and left to sit on a digital shelf for whatever is left of its window.

“I think there’s a middle ground that’s going to work for both studio and exhibitor,” Wilson said — a reminder that the consensus on longer windows is real, but the underlying math still varies by distributor.

The Cinema-Goer Premium
Still, the new windows landscape is not simply about holding films back from the home for a few extra weeks. Omdia’s consumer research suggests that cinema-goers are among the entertainment economy’s most valuable consumers precisely because they are active across so many other platforms.

In the U.S., Omdia found that cinema-goers over-index compared with non-cinema-goers across pay TV, SVOD, hybrid SVOD, FAST, social video, gaming and YouTube. Among surveyed U.S. cinema-goers, 95% used SVOD services, 95% used social video, 82% played video games and 91% used YouTube. They were also more than twice as likely as non-cinema-goers to subscribe to a traditional pay TV service.

“Cinema-goers are highly active across all of these windows,” Jones said. “Across all of these windows, we’re seeing the cinema-goer outperform the non-cinema-goer, which I think is a very interesting takeaway when we’re discussing the whole ecosystem.”

That complicates the familiar framing of theatrical and streaming as purely competing behaviors. Omdia’s data suggests that people who go to the cinema are not rejecting at-home entertainment. They are among its heaviest users. The issue for studios and exhibitors is therefore less about choosing between theatrical and downstream platforms, and more about sequencing those platforms in a way that preserves value.

“The cinema-goers are very valuable consumers across the value chain,” Jones said.

Windows as Value Preservation
That does not eliminate the tension around windows. A film can still be playing theatrically when it becomes available on TVOD, and exhibitors continue to argue that too-short windows train audiences to wait. But the Omdia study suggests the market has moved away from the most aggressive post-pandemic compression of theatrical exclusivity, particularly for bigger releases.

Jones noted that Omdia has not recently conducted a dedicated study on the impact of PVOD availability on individual box office runs, but said the subscription window likely carries the greater risk of cannibalization. In most cases, that window remains significantly longer than the transactional window, generally arriving closer to or beyond the three-month mark for major titles.

The current model is therefore neither a full restoration of the old windows system nor the free-for-all some feared during the pandemic. It is more flexible, more tactical and more dependent on performance. But it is also increasingly built around a recognition that theatrical exclusivity creates value that can carry into every later window.

For exhibitors, the significance of the Omdia data is not simply that windows are lengthening. It is that the strongest moviegoing audiences are also among the most active consumers across streaming, social video, gaming and other entertainment platforms. That makes theatrical exclusivity less of a defensive measure than a value-preservation strategy.

In other words, the window is no longer just about keeping a film off streaming for a few extra weeks. It is about giving theatrical enough room to create the awareness, word of mouth and cultural weight that every downstream window still depends on.

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That system is no longer the only path – as filmmakers, distributors, festivals, and technology companies increasingly embrace a direct-to-audience pipeline. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the panel “The Evolution of Distribution: How a Direct-To-Audience Pipeline Will Energize Independent Film” set out to explore this model, one that allows creators to build communities, market films, sell tickets, and distribute content directly to viewers long before a traditional distributor enters the picture.

Held on 16 May, at Village Innovation as part of the Marché du Film (Cannes Film Market), the panel was hosted by Iddo Patt, co-founder and CEO of Eventive, a company that provides ticketing, streaming, and audience management tools for festivals, cinemas, and filmmakers. Working with festivals for the past decade – 6,000 festival editions across 50 countries – Patt reported that over 16 million tickets have been issued through the Eventive platform. “So we’ve developed a lot of ideas, a lot of data, around how people are interacting with movies today,” he said.

Joining him on stage was a diverse slate of guests from different parts of the independent film spectrum: John Nein, senior programmer and director of strategy at the Sundance Film Festival; producer and sales agent Sarah Mosses, CEO and founder of the UK-based Together Films; Daniel Berger, president of Oscilloscope Laboratories, a US-based distribution and media company; and Sharon ‘Rocky’ Roggio, founder and creative director of 1946 Studios, and also the director of the documentary “1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted a Culture.”

The Tension Between Old and New Models
As Berger noted, there is still a great deal of “antiquated thinking” in the exhibition and distribution sector. Not least, who works in the exhibition realm. “A lot of theatre programmers… It’s the same old white men that have been programming those same theatres for decades,” he said. “You talk about reaching a younger audience… These are not the people to do that, they don’t understand it.”

Mosses added that defining success in terms of gaining traditional distribution was also an outdated way of thinking. “The second an audience member has watched it, you’re in a form of distribution,” she argued, “and your success should start from that metric, rather than ‘Did I get a formal offer from a traditional partner? Did I get the streaming deal? Did I get the broadcast offer?’ They’re all different forms of consumption.”

The rise of virtual communities as an in-built audience for a film is another exciting development, remarked Nein. Take those who have built a YouTube following, like Danny and Michael Philippou, whose feature debut “Talk To Me” was launched at Sundance in 2022 and went on to gross $92 million worldwide, or more recent hits like “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” made respectively by Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, who also started cultivating fans for their work online.

“There is something exciting about virtual communities,” continued Nein. “To me, it has to do with this idea of how do you expand the audience? How do you bring people who don’t normally go to a film festival or go to a theatre that’s playing an independent film? Are they coming to a new place for them? And we often talk about that in terms of young audiences. People who might become interested in independent feature work by virtue of some other means, right? And I think that that’s what I see being different today, as opposed to twenty years ago.”

“1946” as a Direct-to-Audience Case Study
As Patt noted, with traditional distribution channels now turning upside down, “It makes a lot of sense for filmmakers to build an audience in a community before a film even plays at a festival.” Roggio’s success is the perfect case study in exploring the direct-to-audience pipeline. Released in 2022, “1946…” explored how the word ‘homosexual’ first appeared in the Bible during the 1946 translation of the Revised Standard Version, arguing this was a mistranslation of Greek texts – a mistake that inadvertently fuelled decades of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

The controversial content immediately attracted viewers. “Before the movie even came out, we had hundreds of people telling us how much our movie was dumb, stupid, wrong,” Roggio recounted. With “pastors losing their minds” in Sunday morning sermons, on radio shows and podcasts, “1946…” was on everyone’s lips. “That was already a big win for us,” he said. An even bigger win came when an Australian TikTok user posted the film’s trailer, and it went viral – gaining 2 million views. When the film premiered at the 2022 Doc NYC festival, it won the Audience Award, the first of 25 awards.

The question remained: what next? “We wanted distribution,” said Roggio. “And if you sell too many tickets at a festival, are you going to get distribution? But I had an audience waiting to see this film, so I really wanted them to see the film. We ended up selling over 5,000 digital tickets at Doc NYC. We’re still the most viewed film in their festival history at the virtual end. They ended up opening an additional screening for us in person, which was huge, and we took a risk doing that, but it paid off.”

Despite employing publicists 42West, who helped ensure visibility, the reaction was disappointing from traditional distributors. “They said, ‘Love the film, can’t help you,’” said Roggio. As she previously explained at a Berlinale EFM talk, the film was considered risky – either “too gay or too Christian”. At this stage, Eventive stepped in. “Eventive contacted us,” said Roggio, “and said, ‘Listen, you obviously have an audience for this, so why don’t you do self-distribution?’”

Released in theatres in the US in December 2023 – to ensure qualifying for BAFTA and Oscars – Roggio also launched a virtual release, via Eventive, to help pay for the costs of entering the awards season. Turning the traditional distribution paradigm upside down was exactly the right strategy. In six months, “1946…” made $118,000 net profit from 500 watch parties – simultaneous virtual watch-along events – across 25 countries.

Crucially, Eventive also provided data: who watched the movie, how many times they watched the movie and for how long – and viewer’s email addresses. The production now has 15,000 subscribers on the film’s Mailchimp account. “I am excited, because we haven’t even hit our potential,” added Roggio. “I think maybe 100,000 people have seen the movie over watch parties, maybe 200,000. We need millions of people to see this movie, so we have a lot of work to do.”

The Three Rs: Reach, Revenue, and Reaction
During the panel, Sarah Mosses, founder and CEO of Together Films, suggested that filmmakers must begin every project by defining their primary intention. According to Mosses, most distribution goals fall into three categories:

• Reach
• Revenue
• Reaction

Some filmmakers prioritise prestige and awards recognition, which due to the expense of mounting an awards campaign will have an impact upon revenue. Others prioritize financial return. Others want to maximize social impact and audience engagement.

“Each film really is going to have a combination of all three, and you should have a combination,” said Mosses. “I advocate for everybody trying to make some form of money, that should be there. It should be the compounding of it, but you have to understand which of those things you’re aiming for to define your own success metrics within that process.”

A More Practical Way to Think About Audiences
Mosses also proposed a framework called CAST to help filmmakers think more strategically about audience segmentation.

• Commercial audiences
• Affected audiences
• Supportive audiences
• Tactical audiences

Commercial audiences are viewers most likely to buy tickets in traditional theatrical settings. Affected audiences are communities directly connected to the film’s subject matter or lived experience. Supportive audiences include advocacy groups, nonprofits, educational organizations, religious institutions, and community organizations that may organize screenings because they care about the issue. Tactical audiences are smaller groups — politicians, policymakers, corporate leaders, or influencers — whose engagement could create broader institutional change.

“We need to really think differently about how we categorize our audiences, so that we can plan distribution efforts that match who needs to see this,” Mosses added. “Because if we only solidly focus on a primary audience for theatrical, we might miss so many different windows that come around that.”

The Future
Mosses concluded by noting that further transparency is needed, including box office reports for each film playing at a festival. “That’s a level of success. How many people showed up to the festival? What was my total box office gross?” She also called for a more uniform way of looking at data in the industry.

Daniel Berger concurred: “You look at box office in Europe, and they tell you how many admissions there have been, how many people saw it. You look at box office in the US, they tell you how many dollars it made.” Given the vast array of ticket prices, it’s impossible to calculate admissions via the current US model. “I don’t know how many people see our films. I’ll never know, there’s no way to know.”

Overall, the panellists agreed that the direct-to-audience pipeline does not eliminate the need for festivals, distributors, or theatres. Festivals remain essential spaces for discovery, legitimacy, and communal viewing experiences, while distributors still provide expertise, relationships, marketing infrastructure, and access to broader markets.

Yet wider thinking is required. As Patt noted, “Ninety per cent of the films that are playing festivals overall are not getting formal or traditional distribution, even though they’ve been curated in a meaningful way. They’ve been selected for important reasons, they’re seen by a lot of people… and that’s part of what is driving this need for direct-to-audience opportunities that can then turn into theatrical.”

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