Cinema industry statistics

Three figures describe the current state of theatrical exhibition reasonably well.

• US and Canada box office was $8.66bn in 2025, up about 1% on 2024. [1]
• European box office was €6.9bn in 2025 across 39 territories, down 1%, on 863.6 million admissions, down 5.3%. [2]
• 77% of Americans aged 12 to 74 saw at least one film in the year to August 2025, more than 200 million people. [4]

The pattern those three describe is the one operators already feel: revenue holding up while admissions slide, which means yield per admission is carrying the industry. That is a strategically uncomfortable position, because it depends on price rises the audience can eventually refuse.

Box office gross is the figure that gets reported, because it is the one that is collected reliably and quickly. It is also the figure least useful to an operator.

Gross moves with price as well as with attendance. A market can post a record year while selling fewer tickets than it did a decade earlier, which is roughly what has happened in the United States. Admissions are the number that tells you whether the habit is intact; gross tells you what you managed to charge the people who still came.

Europe reports both, which is why the European figures below are more informative than the American ones even though the market is smaller. When you build your own reporting, keep the two apart and track yield per admission as a third line. If gross is up and admissions are down, you are harvesting rather than growing, and it is worth knowing which one you are doing.

Cinema United's 2025 update reports several things that are more actionable than a box office total, because they describe behaviour rather than revenue. [4]

• Habitual moviegoers — people seeing six or more films a year — grew 8%.
• Gen Z averaged 6.1 visits a year, up from 4.9, a 25% increase over twelve months. 41% of Gen Z attended six or more times, against 31% in 2022.
• Loyalty subscriptions in North America rose 15% between 2024 and 2025.
• $1.5bn was invested in North American theatre upgrades over the year.

Read together, these say the audience is concentrating rather than disappearing: fewer occasional visits, more from people who have made cinema a habit. That is precisely the audience a membership or loyalty programme is designed to capture, and it explains the subscription growth better than any marketing campaign does.

It also sets the strategic priority for an individual site. If the growth is in frequency among people who already come, the highest-value thing you can know is who they are — which is an argument about identity and audience data rather than about advertising.

This is the most frequently searched cinema statistic and the one most often quoted wrongly, so it is worth being explicit about why no single figure appears here.

Published US averages currently range from roughly $11.50 to roughly $16 depending on the source, and both can be defended. The difference comes from what is being averaged: a national average across all screens and all showtimes is a very different quantity from an average of standard evening adult admissions, which is different again from a circuit's own reported average, which is different again from a survey of advertised prices. Premium formats, matinee pricing, loyalty rates and regional spread all move it.

Averaging those together would produce a number that measures nothing. If you need a ticket price figure for a business case, the only one worth using is your own yield per admission, net of tax and booking fees, which you already have. For market comparison, use a single named source consistently across years rather than the lowest or highest number you can find.

Gower Street Analytics, quoted by UNIC, estimates global box office of around $35bn for 2026, with EMEA reaching about $10.05bn, a 7% increase on 2025. [5]

That is a forecast made by a firm that does this well, and it is still a forecast. Theatrical revenue is unusually dependent on a small number of titles and on release dates that move, so annual projections in this industry carry wider error bars than in most sectors. Use it to frame a conversation, not to underwrite a budget.

Using these figures

Quote them, chart them, put them in a deck or a board paper. No permission needed and no attribution required, though a link back to this page is appreciated and lets a reader check the working.

If a figure here looks wrong to you, it might be: sources in this industry revise, and some of them disagree with each other by more than you would expect. Tell us what you are seeing and we will correct the page and say that we did.