Has Gen Z Saved—Or Just Changed—Movies?
· The Atlantic
Sometime after Jack Black hollered “chicken jockey” in 2025’s A Minecraft Movie, and before The Odyssey drove the masses mad with aspect-ratio anxiety, Hollywood finally felt seen—and saved—by Gen Z. Over the past year, trade publications and mainstream outlets alike celebrated the news: Zoomers were coming of age and coming to the rescue of American cinema. Their theater attendance purportedly outstripped that of their elders; their tastes in video-game franchises and low-budget horror undeniably carried the day.
These cheery headlines largely traced back to a single report by Fandango conducted in January. In a survey of 7,000 adults in the United States, the Gen Z responses were eye-popping: 87 percent had watched at least one film in theaters in the previous 12 months; the average Zoomer had seen seven movies in that period. Compare this with Gen X at 70 percent and 6.1 movies, respectively. (It should be noted, though, that Fandango’s survey pool drew disproportionately from movie enthusiasts: 5,091 of the respondents had gone out to see at least one film in the previous year.)
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It might seem predictable that Gen Z now drives the box office. The youngest Zoomers are entering high school (and thus making their first independent purchases), and the eldest are rounding out their 20s (and thus reaching for the next rungs on the career ladder). Many of them are in the season of life when discretionary income rises to meet peak discretionary time. But the seemingly outsize fanfare around these numbers makes more sense in light of the turmoil of the past few years. After the upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic, followed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes that snarled the production pipeline, many industry observers feared that Zoomers were a lost demographic. This cohort of young adults, historically a core part of Hollywood’s customer base, had come of age at a moment when there were fewer new things to watch and more reasons—such as streaming—to stay inside.
[Read: The fear of missing The Odyssey]
Theatrical films “don’t have a future if you can’t capture the younger audiences of today, who are going to be the older audiences of tomorrow,” Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst for Rentrak, a box-office-research firm, told me. Fandango’s study, which was released ahead of CinemaCon, the annual convention of theater owners, told the industry what it wanted to hear: that people would continue going to the movies.
But the big picture is murkier. “I think that there’s a lot to be optimistic about, but I would not put the return of theatrical back at the feet of Gen Z,” Kevin Goetz, the CEO and founder of Screen Engine, a research and analytics firm, told me. “I wouldn’t proclaim victory quite yet.” Although other surveys also observe strong youth turnout, the proportions are far less dramatic. Pew, for example, found in a survey last summer that 67 percent of people ages 18 to 29 had seen a movie in the theater in the past 12 months.
This year brought real evidence of cinema’s appeal to the youth: The runaway success of Backrooms and Obsession marked the coronation of YouTube auteurs as bankable directors and drew notably fresh-faced crowds. Even with such turnout, this year’s box office is unlikely to return to the heights it regularly reached in the past. More people are staying at home: In 2019, the share of the non-moviegoing population was 24 percent, according to Vista Group, which provides analytics and software for the film industry; in 2024, that number hit 30 percent. People who still go to the cinema do so less often: In 2025, theaters in the U.S. and Canada sold approximately two tickets per capita, less than half of what they sold in 2002.
Other surveys, from more disinterested sources than Fandango, indicate that although theater attendance has somewhat recovered from its pandemic lows, Gen Z sees fewer movies than past generations of youth. In fact, the drop-off is starkest among young people: In 2007, according to data provided to me by Gallup, 18-to-29-year-olds went out to see an average of nine films. In 2025, the same demographic saw 4.3 movies. As their moviegoing frequency has fallen, Gen Zers’ habits have started to converge with those of the general moviegoing population, Matthew Liebmann, Vista Group’s chief product, innovation, and marketing officer, told me. In other words: Kids today don’t behave that differently from older people.
The numbers point to a broader behavioral shift. Moviegoing used to be a matter of habit meeting spontaneity. Teens loitering at the mall, couples on a date, friends gathering for a night out—these groups reliably showed up at the multiplex and would pick a showtime once they were already in the door. Today, patrons generally plan their cinema visits in advance, and the question of what to see has collapsed into the question of whether to go at all.
Once moviegoing went from routine hangout to major outing, theaters had to adapt. Many have, over time, diversified their offerings. In a phone call, Bob Bagby, the CEO of B&B Theatres, rattled off a cruise line’s worth of activities now offered at his various locations, including mah-jongg, trivia, and bingo. Some locations have bocce and pickleball courts; other chains have added ropes courses and axe-throwing. “I’ve seen it,” Bagby told me, of the latter. “Our insurance people said No, no, don’t do that.”
[Read: The great Gen Z dividing line]
But even the core elements of the cinema experience have changed. If you’re going to get people to look up from the screen in their palm, you have to offer the biggest one possible. If seating is reserved, it needs to be sumptuous. (One theater-chain president told me that its recliners had heating and cooling settings.) If there’s going to be dining, you might consider rolling out a multicourse prix fixe menu—or at least an array of hot options.
If your lobby is being treated like a special destination, it should also look the part. “The Gen Z crowd wants to come in and be somewhere cool,” says Penn Ketchum, the managing partner of the theater chain Penn Cinema, describing the 24-tap self-serve beer wall he installed in one location as part of a $2 million renovation. “They don’t want to come through a dingy, dusty, aged lobby. They want to come in from the parking lot and be somewhere that’s worthy of being in the background of their picture.”
Over time, “people have been trained to spend more at the theater when they go,” Alicia Reese, a senior vice president of equity research for media and entertainment at the financial firm Wedbush Securities, told me. This is a boon for theaters, because concessions have much higher margins than the films themselves. Moviegoing now comes with an air of occasion. In an era of screen abundance, Hollywood has tried to differentiate the theatrical release by creating an artificial sense of scarcity and transience. The industry has borrowed the tactics of touring artists and fashion drops, promoting limited premium-format screenings and slinging special-edition popcorn buckets. But encouraging audiences to associate moviegoing with “all the trimmings and treats,” Liebmann said, also has drawbacks: It creates an “affordability misperception,” which may dampen their appetite for regular visits.
Gen Z may be filing into more auditoriums than expected these days. And even if they’re doing so less often than their predecessors, and even if their seats are bigger and squishier and spaced less densely than before, their presence certainly ensures some kind of future for the theatrical model. But when you consider the experience that’s been retooled around them, one that depends on so many things beyond sitting in a dark room together as a projector rattles, it’s hard to shake the sense that the pictures have gotten small.