Europeans are losing interest in going to the cinema, with the latest data from the International Union of Cinemas showing that attendances were down 4.4% last year.
Given the number of blockbuster films released last year, the decline in European cinema ticket sales is a bit of a surprise. With movies like Avatar 3: Fire and Ash, Mission: Impossible, Jurassic World Rebirth, F1, Captain America: Brave New World and Predator: Badlands all premiering, many had assumed that 2025 would be a big year for the big screen.
However, as Deadline reported, UNIC’s data shows that Europe’s box office revenue declined 1.2% to €6.9 billion in 2025 compared to the year before, with just 873.2 million tickets sold. The cinema industry still hasn’t recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, which made billions of people globally realise that streaming services are a thing. In 2025, box office revenue in Europe was down almost 20% from 2019, the last year before the pandemic, while ticket sales were down 35%.
Meanwhile, Screendaily revealed that cinemas in the U.S. and Canada showed some improvement, but it was rather marginal, with box office revenue climbing to $8.87 billion, up by 1.5% compared to 2024. North American cinemas did this by increasing their admission fees, for ticket sales actually declined 4.9% to 780 million. However, revenue last year was still down 7% from 2023 and 22% compared to 2019.
The data makes it clear that theatres worldwide are still struggling to regain their allure after being forced to shut their doors for an extended period during the 2020 COVID pandemic, even though lockdowns are now a full five years behind us. Perhaps more worrying for cinema operators is that early data suggests that neither Europe nor North America is likely to grow much in 2026, although there is still time for that to change.
The reality is that the COVID pandemic appears to have changed people’s viewing habits for good. Thanks to the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ with their enormous and constantly-changing libraries of movies and shows and improvements in the quality of consumer TVs, most people are quite content to sit and watch things in the comfort of their own living rooms. There, they can sit in their favourite armchair on their own terms, eat whatever snacks they like, drink and smoke, pause the movie to go to the toilet and so on – things that simply aren’t possible in a public cinema.
The COVID lockdowns ignited this trend, but streaming was already on the rise before people were forced to stay indoors for extended periods of time. In 2017, the home entertainment industry’s revenue was growing at twice the rate of the cinema industry, but it has since accelerated and is now growing at eight times as much, according to an April report by Flatpanels HD.
