Movie Theaters
Industry Profile Report
Dive Deep into the industry with a 25+ page industry report (pdf format) including the following chapters
Industry Overview Current Conditions, Industry Structure, How Firms Operate, Industry Trends, Credit Underwriting & Risks, and Industry Forecast.
Call Preparation Call Prep Questions, Industry Terms, and Weblinks.
Financial Insights Working Capital, Capital Financing, Business Valuation, and Financial Benchmarks.
Industry Profile Excerpts
Industry Overview
The 1,750 movie theater firms in the US provide entertainment venues that exhibit motion pictures or videos. They operate about 41,000 movie screens at over 5,800 cinema sites. Major sources of revenue include ticket sales, concessions, and merchandise resale. Some theaters specialize in a particular genre, such as foreign, art house, and documentary films.
Dependence on Movie Production Industry
Movie theaters depend on the production houses and distributors to develop appealing motion pictures and support releases with marketing and advertising.
Conversion to Digital
The film industry’s conversion from celluloid to digital projection technology involved considerable costs, and created significant financial obstacles for small, independent theaters.
Industry size & Structure
The average movie theater employs 30 people and generates $3.4 million dollars.
- There are over 4,100 cinema sites in the US that employ 122,000 workers.
- There are about 41,000 movie screens in the US - about 1.3% of these are outdoor screens.
- The industry is concentrated; the top 50 firms account for about 80% of industry sales.
- Large companies include Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment, and Cinemark Holdings.
Industry Forecast
Movie Theaters Industry Growth
Recent Developments
Mar 7, 2025 - Survey Reveals Consumer Issues With Movie Theater Experience
- Just 13% of people surveyed by Octane Seating go to the movies a few times per month and 4% go weekly. Respondents said that they want movie costs to be lower: About 72% said they’d go to movie theaters more often if it wasn’t so expensive. Some 59% of respondents said movie theaters need to be cleaner and 57% of moviegoers are sneaking in their own snacks because of frustrations with concession stand prices.
- US box office sales were $8.7 billion in 2024, down more than 3.3% from 2023 and 23.5% from 2019 (when revenues reached $11.3 billion), according to Comscore. Admissions, expected to hit approximately 800 million in 2024, also decreased from pre-COVID heights of roughly 1.3 billion. It’s the first post-pandemic year that overall revenue didn’t increase year over year. Industry analysts attribute the downturn to the lighter release schedule that resulted from 2023’s actors and writers strikes, according to entertainment industry publication Variety.
- The unique architecture of movie theaters may help them avoid closure during lean times, according to The Wall Street Journal. Movie theaters are built with a sloped concrete floor for stadium seating to provide a clear view of the movie for all viewers. They also have no windows, which makes it difficult to convert them to another purpose. Retail landlords may not be able to use movie theaters for anything else unless they demolish them, so they often agree to rent reductions rather than leaving the spaces vacant when theater chains go into bankruptcy or leases are up for renewal.
- Movie theater industry employment remained significantly below pre-pandemic levels during 2024, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Personal consumption expenditures, an indicator of expenditures on entertainment, increased moderately during the first 11 months of 2024, according to the US Bureau of Bureau of Economic Analysis. Movie theaters sales are forecast to increase at a 7.12% compounded annual rate from 2024 to 2028, faster than the growth of the overall economy, according to Inforum and the Interindustry Economic Research Fund, Inc.
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