The trick is in the math
The film industry has always ranked its box office results by raw dollar totals, without adjusting older years for inflation. As the Times piece points out, that approach is the simplest way to compare years — and, not coincidentally, the most flattering one for an industry eager to announce a record. Domestic theaters (the U.S. and Canada) collected an estimated $4.76 billion in ticket revenue this past summer, according to the tracking firm Rentrak, which the industry touted as a 9 percent increase over the $4.35 billion collected in the pre-pandemic summer of 2019.
Run that same 2019 number through an inflation calculator, however, and it grows to roughly $5.7 billion in today’s dollars — which means this year’s celebrated summer actually finished about 17 percent below 2019, not above it. Wade Holden, a senior research analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, told the Times that adjusting for inflation “makes the comeback more complicated.”
Fewer people are actually going
The deeper problem isn’t really about dollars at all — it’s about people. Higher ticket prices have been quietly papering over a steep decline in how many tickets are actually being sold. From January 1 through August 16 of this year, domestic theaters sold an estimated 568.4 million tickets, down 30 percent from the same stretch in 2019, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. The Times frames that gap starkly: roughly 248 million admissions that, in a fully recovered industry, simply aren’t happening.
Zooming out to full calendar years tells the same story with even more force. U.S. and Canadian theaters sold about 1.3 billion tickets in 2018 and 1.23 billion in 2019, according to figures from the National Association of Theatre Owners and Comscore. Then came 2020, when admissions collapsed to roughly 230 million as theaters shut down for months at a time. The rebound since then has been real but incomplete: admissions climbed back to around 444 million in 2021 and 702 million in 2022, then leveled off near 830 million in 2023, according to Variety’s reporting on Comscore data. Rather than continuing to climb, attendance actually slipped in both 2024 (about 823 million tickets) and 2025 (about 771 million, per industry estimates). That leaves 2025 admissions at roughly 63 percent of where they stood in 2019 — a recovery that stalled well short of the finish line.
Revenue has followed a similar, if less dramatic, arc. Domestic box office receipts hit an all-time high of $11.9 billion in 2018, followed by an estimated $11.3 billion in 2019. The pandemic crash brought that down to about $2 billion in 2020, before a climb back through $3.1 billion in 2021, $6.1 billion in 2022, and $9 billion in 2023, per Box Office Mojo and Variety. By 2024 and 2025, revenue had essentially plateaued around $8.7 billion — still roughly 23 percent below the 2019 nominal total, and considerably further behind once inflation is factored in.
Why this summer still mattered
None of this is to say the summer of 2026 wasn’t a genuine bright spot. Franchise tentpoles like “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” “The Odyssey,” “Toy Story 5” and “Michael” drove real crowds into theaters, and Hollywood also benefited from a restored release calendar after years of disruption from the pandemic and the 2023 actors’ and writers’ strikes. More than 40 movies opened on at least 2,000 screens this summer, according to Rentrak — up from 34 last year and roughly matching the 42 such releases in 2019. The season also produced an unusually strong slate of original, non-franchise hits: five movies not based on existing properties each cleared $100 million domestically, together pulling in about $1.4 billion, the strongest showing for original films in five years even after adjusting for inflation.
Premium formats played an outsized role in inflating the dollar totals as well. IMAX alone generated $207 million in domestic sales from “The Odyssey” — about 35 percent of that film’s total gross — despite accounting for just 11 percent of the screens showing it. With average adult IMAX tickets running around $20, compared with roughly $12.75 for a standard screening, a relatively small number of premium seats can meaningfully boost revenue without a corresponding jump in actual attendance.
Not every franchise bet paid off, either. “Minions & Monsters” collected $183 million, down 56 percent from its 2022 predecessor after adjusting for inflation, and the latest “Star Wars” release, “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” took in $178 million — well below even the underperforming “Solo: A Star Wars Story” from 2018.
The bigger picture
Taken together, the numbers point to an industry that has stabilized rather than truly rebounded. Dollar totals look encouraging mostly because ticket prices keep rising, not because more people are going to the movies. As the Times piece notes, theater operators and studios argue that fewer admissions don’t necessarily mean a weaker business, pointing to growing demand for premium formats as evidence that moviegoing is evolving rather than shrinking. That may be true. But by the most direct measure of a healthy movie business — how many people are actually walking into a theater — Hollywood still has real ground left to make up.
Sources: Brooks Barnes and Christine Zhang, “Hollywood’s Box Office Boom Comes With 248 Million Missing Tickets,” The New York Times, Sept. 6, 2026; additional data from Comscore, Variety, Box Office Mojo, Statista, and S&P Global Market Intelligence.