Bowling Alleys, Premium Formats, More Films: Which Fixes Can Save Movie Theaters?

Forty-five days. That was the line in the sand Cinema United CEO Michael O’Leary drew at last year’s CinemaCon. All movies need a 45-day exclusive theatrical window, because small and mid-budget movies that hit streaming sooner are getting squeezed.

It was a big statement, and the CinemaCon audience, filled with theatrical exhibitors, loved it. But the studio distributors who took the stage later? They’d tell you: that’s not the whole picture.

CinemaCon kicks off next week and, now one year removed from that 45-day proclamation, there will be many more ideas of how movie theaters can continue to recover to 2019 levels, when the box office hit $11.4 billion. Yet the vibe will no doubt be positive. Exhibitors and distributors alike are sure to observe that the box office is in the best place it’s been in five years. They’ll note that 2026 is roughly 26 percent ahead of 2025 at this same point, and that a murderer’s row of a summer could finally help get the domestic box office above $9 billion for the year. They’ll celebrate the arrival of players like Amazon MGM, the shift in windowing policy from Universal, and the dedication to original stories from Warner Bros.

But they’ll also acknowledge the work still to be done and the existential changes impacting entertainment as a whole.

Cinema United just announced it has launched a coalition of top filmmakers who will focus on further theatrical recovery, including Jerry Bruckheimer as chair, Emma Thomas as vice chair, and others like Ryan Coogler, Celine Song, Brad Bird, and Jason Reitman lending their lobbying weight to theaters. And there should be more news to come about the $2.2 billion in theater improvements committed to last year.

Yet, both exhibitors and studio distributors have other ideas of their own, and they don’t always align. Ahead of CinemaCon, IndieWire assessed the pros and cons of six major talking points sure to be themes on the Caesar’s Palace Colosseum stage. Not one is the silver bullet all movie theaters need.

Idea #1: Studios Need to Make More Movies

It sounds so simple, and for years it’s been the number one talking point among theater owners: we need more movies.

In 2025, there were 112 theatrical wide releases domestically, according to Comscore, down from a peak of 127 in 2016. In 2024, there were just 94. You can start to understand why the box office has been down by a few billion dollars the last few years.

So exhibitors want quantity, but also variety. More blockbusters yes, but also family movies, horror, comedies, movies for date night, faith-based films, and absent all that, repertory titles, concert films, even opera live streams.

“There’s momentum in movie-going. You see trailers, you see something you want to see, but it needs to be something that can be acted on in some timely fashion,” said Greg Marcus, CEO of Midwest theater chain Marcus Theaters.

Even anecdotally, this one feels obvious. Sometimes, it just feels like there’s nothing good out. If you do leave the house one week to see a new movie, but there’s nothing else to watch next week, you won’t go back regularly. Marcus adds that what drives hits and bombs boils down to “basic math.”

“If you make 10 movies, two are going to work amazing, two are going to be a disaster, and everything else will fall in the middle,” Marcus said. “So if you only make 10, you’re only going to have two great movies over time. If you make 20, you have four great. So it’s really just a numbers game. It’s not any more complicated than that.”

One studio distributor we spoke with has heard this take before. Exhibitors can’t “wave a magic wand” and put top of the line equipment in every theater, he says, and neither can studios jump from 10 movies a year to 20 (we’ll see if Paramount can really execute 30 a year).

Vikki Neil, head of Marketing, U.S. for Regal Cineworld Group, said the exhibition industry was built on a simpler model in which more movies used to mean more marketing and more attendance. That has changed.

“I just don’t think the supply alone is enough to reliably drive that demand, especially post-COVID,” Neil said. “Even when you have these strong films that are released, attendance can be a little more volatile. We have to move to something that’s a more demand-driven model. From a marketing standpoint, we need to make sure that movies and theaters, especially when we have so many of them, that that’s considered a destination in and of itself, that the experience is compelling enough to draw people in, not just a reaction to a very specific title.”

Regal Cinema in Los AngelesGetty

Idea #2: The Modern Movie Theater Needs to Transform

People used to arrive at movie theaters early. Now Regal wants to get them to hang around after the movie. Neil said Regal has rethought the footprint of many of its locations, bar and lounge offerings have been revamped, and renovations have been made at 50 theaters with 300 locations adding arcades.

“What do you offer a family? What do you offer young people? How you start to think about that
being more of an experience, but also have it be habit-forming, is absolutely crucial,” she said.

On a more mid-size scale, San Antonio-based Santikos Entertainment is aggressively going beyond just the movie theater experience and is working to add full-scale family entertainment centers to their locations. Their auditoriums are still No. 1, but many locations now have arcades, bowling alleys, laser tag, VR installations, and more.

Rob Lehman, Santikos president and COO, says it’s a way of turning a family’s two-hour night out into four hours. It’s also a huge boon during slow periods at the box office. It’s expensive, he said, but worth it.

“How do I keep the customers there for half an hour or hour more after they’ve seen a movie? They come in, they had such a good time there, and when that next movie comes out, let’s go see it there and then afterwards, we can go bowl,” Lehman said.

Good luck putting a bowling alley in most nationwide chains like AMC, but the mid-scale players like Harkins, B&B, and others are considering it or family entertainment options like it. For the small guys, a full scale arcade is also a no-go, but even those venues are trying to find ways to make their theaters into local hot spots.

“Movie theaters as they were 20 years ago don’t work in a majority of markets,” says Brandt Gully, who operates The Springs Cinema & Tap House in Sandy Springs, Georgia near Atlanta. “You have to do something to continue to make this a relevant experience. What worked two years ago, you can’t just implement and coast. You have to keep spending the money, investing in the marketing, keep trying new things. A big part of that involves the other stuff beyond just what Hollywood gives you. You can’t just survive on the movies that are just intended to sell popcorn and candy.”

Inside a darkened movie theaterGetty Images/EyeEm

Idea #3: The Theatrical Experience Needs to Improve

For every one exhibitor you’ve heard say they need more movies, there’s a distributor who will tell you the movie theater experience needs to suck less.

One distributor lamented some of the usual suspects, and said it’s not just an LA or New York problem either: bad sound, washed out visuals, sticky floors, a messy bathroom, bad customer service, 30 minutes of ads and trailers, uncomfortable seating.

For the people who don’t go to the movies frequently, “you may not get them back in their lifetime” if the experience is bad, the distributor said. But exhibitors will also tell you, it’s very expensive to keep a theater even running, and it isn’t easy.

“That’s on us. It’s just harder than it used to be to maintain the presentation,” Gully said. “I don’t have the ability to easily go in and measure how much light output is on my screen. I can eyeball it and say, ‘Man, this kind of looks dark.’ I’m making excuses, but it is harder for exhibitors than it used to be. You had the same projector for 40 years back then, and now you just have technology changes.”

Exhibitors have turned to premium large format upgrades, and distributors want more of it, but “deployed smartly” to keep it scarce and make it an event, as one explained. But there’s barriers there too, especially for the little guys.

Gully says The Springs spent $350,000 to upgrade to a PLF in one auditorium, but “it’s a really hard sell” to get that money back. He claims studios have threatened to not offer him a movie at all if it does not play on that PLF screen. So while he’d like to add another PLF, one in which an outside party may dictate what plays on it, he can’t risk losing control of another of his eight screens.

“It’s really expensive, and I hear that’s what the distributors want us to do more of, but they’re certainly not helping,” Gully said. “We’re just not on the same team with them quite often, and I think a PLF is a great example. I don’t get to choose what I put in there. Makes zero sense to me. I spent the money, I know my audience better than a studio head does, I know my audience at my place better than anyone, and if I tell you this movie is going to sell more tickets than that movie in that screen, I’m pretty accurate, but I don’t get to make that decision.”

Jason Blum speaks onstage during CinemaCon 2025 in ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ gearGetty Images for CinemaCon

Idea #4: Exhibitors and Distributors Need to Collaborate More

Gully does want to be on the same team as his distributor partners, and he believes that for certain films, he just doesn’t have the information he needs to get the most out of the movies he shows.

For instance, he knows how to market “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” but before he saw “Project Hail Mary,” he didn’t realize it’s family-friendly and with genuine four-quadrant appeal. Had he seen it earlier or been more prepared by the studio, he might’ve planned more time for family promotions, movie-themed cocktails, and the like.

“I’m super hands-on, I’m involved in all of it, but it’s hard. It’s hard to know what to market. It’s hard to know what demographic upcoming films are,” he said.

Gully recommends more collaboration with studio marketing teams, periodic calls for Cinema United members about the latest upcoming titles rather than only the once-a-year CinemaCon showcase, or a playbook of ideas for how individual theaters can succeed rather than going into a weekend blind. Gully said some exhibitors still treat their marketing as nothing more than printing movie times in the local paper. But even for those folks, a little extra support could go a long way.

“There’s plenty of exhibitors that just tend to do things the way they did them last year and the year before that. They don’t change very easily, so they might need more hand holding,” he said. “If you gave them suggestions, they would follow that to the T. It can only help.”

The studio distributor we spoke with said countless times on panels, exhibitors have made the same plea to him. He gives his contact details to anyone that says they don’t have enough marketing information and to reach out if ever one of his sales people refuses to sell one of his films to them. He claims he receives “not one email” from those concerned parties.

That said, the distributor acknowledged that some of the other rival studios can hold the little guys to “crazy standards,” whether it’s mandating inclusion on PLFs or requiring movies to stay in theaters for multiple weekends. A separate studio distributor argued the best way for exhibitors to really raise awareness of what plays on their screens is to become hyper-local. It’s incumbent on the studio to do the marketing, but it’s the exhibitor’s job to know when their local audience is excited and have the apparatus to reach them.

“Memberships and loyalty programs, there’s room to grow in these spaces and have more of a relationship with the audience around you,” the distributor said. “It’s a big thing for circuits to coalesce around.”

‘Crime 101’Amazon MGM Studios

Idea #5: Movie Ticket Pricing Needs to Evolve

On stage at last year’s CinemaCon, former Paramount distribution chief Chris Aronson made the case that if discount Tuesdays are working so well for movie theaters, why not introduce more discount days on Mondays or Wednesdays? Surely most theaters aren’t packed those days of the week?

It makes sense, and with some major chains tinkering with “dynamic pricing” models, exhibitors and distributors alike are thinking things need to evolve. Why charge the same for an opening weekend blockbuster as an indie film hanging on in its third weekend?

But there are both exhibitors and distributors who remain skeptical. The distributors feel too much surge pricing will lead to audiences voting with their wallets. On the exhibitor side, Gully would argue it’s not theater owners who are preventing this from happening, but the studios who don’t also want to sacrifice revenue.

“What would be the harm to sometimes at least adding another discount day? I think it’s pretty clearly we’re told we can’t,” Gully said. It gets back to his larger point about collaboration, but the distributor counters that studios can’t choose winners and losers among all their exhibitor partners about whom gets their rental fees adjusted or whom they cut a check to.

Santikos has had success with Final Cut, a $5 promotion for movies in their last weekend before hitting streaming. These tickets are available only in-person, not through third party ticket apps that would add fees. So for movies like “Crime 101,” Santikos can squeeze extra juice out of movies that have flopped elsewhere.

But Lehman’s ability to run such promotions would be easier if not for one of the last major challenges in modern movies: those damn windows.

Tom Cruise, Michael O’Leary, President & CEO, Cinema United, and Christopher McQuarrie attend CinemaCon 2025Getty Images for CinemaCon

Idea #6: Windows Need to Be Longer, to both PVOD and SVOD

When movies used to stay exclusively in theaters for 90 days, many of those movies did so in cheap, second-run theaters. Those theaters all closed during COVID, and the extra money they brought in went with them.

“Everyone talks about 2019. I hate talking about 2019 anymore,” Lehman said. “And I’ve been shouting at the top of the mount when I talk to people. We’re never going to get back to 2019 numbers.”

Most exhibitors would like to see a 45-day window, as O’Leary previously called for. For Lehman at Santikos, a 45-day window would allow him the luxury of more easily executing on those Final Cut promos. For other exhibitors, they know the movie they’re showing trailers for won’t just be yanked for streaming later.

“In an ironic twist of fate, we used to be told the window needed to be short because people won’t wait,” Marcus said. “It turns out, they will wait.”

Marcus suggests it’s not Week 3 that’s impacted by a movie arriving on PVOD early, but Week 1, and people are just as willing to rent something via PVOD in Week 6 as they are Week 3.

“Windows are designed to maximize revenue, and the definition of windows is selling the same thing to the same person over and over again,” Marcus said. “If you went to In-n-Out Burger yesterday, you might not go again tomorrow, but in a couple of weeks, you could be good to go again.”

Studios are starting to see the wisdom in returning to longer windows, like Universal, which announced it was reverting to 45-day windows to PVOD. But there’s a difference too between the window to PVOD versus to SVOD. While Disney has some of the longest theatrical windows in the industry, their movies almost consistently go to SVOD on Disney+ after 90 days while other studios wait as much as 120 days.

Distributors are also skeptical about how much the PVOD window truly impacts opening weekend. “I’m not saying that PVOD is zero percent, I’m saying I can’t see it,” one distributor said in response to Marcus, and he’d argue there’s evidence that having a film available digitally helps raise all boats.

Their message is that for any movie, there’s no one-size fits all approach, just as there’s no one right idea that will save movie theaters of all shapes and sizes.

“We have to find more ways to help the industry as a whole,” Gully said. “People who are doing well are doing really well and will continue to. But there are plenty of folks who are struggling, and they need all the help they can get with marketing, innovation, and enhancing the experience. If we can’t get everybody moving in the same direction, it hurts us all.”