Six years after the pandemic shuttered cinemas, the industry still hasn't resolved which release model is for which film. The structural reasons it stays unresolved.
The pandemic-era debate about whether theatrical cinema would survive has, six years later, settled into a structural standoff. Theatrical did not die. Streaming did not win outright. Both models continue to operate, awkwardly, alongside each other, with neither willing to fully commit to displacing the other and neither able to.
This essay tries to lay out where things actually stand as of 2026, and what the next decade is likely to produce.
The 2019 North American box office was $11.4 billion. The 2024 box office was $8.7 billion. The decline is real and persistent — roughly a quarter of the pre-pandemic theatrical audience has not returned. The trend has been uneven: 2023 was significantly better than 2022 (driven by Barbenheimer and the Marvel back catalogue); 2024 was slightly worse than 2023; 2025 has been roughly flat.
The audience that did not return is disproportionately the audience for the adult drama. Marvel, Pixar, and major franchise releases retained roughly 80-90% of their pre-pandemic audience. The mid-budget adult drama — the form discussed in our essay on why the mid-budget film died — has retained only about 40%. The customer base for an Oppenheimer or a Killers of the Flower Moon is now a third smaller than it was in 2019.
The streaming platforms — Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Max, Disney+, Hulu, Peacock, Paramount+ — have produced significant film output across the decade. Some of it has been excellent: The Power of the Dog, Marriage Story, The Irishman, Roma, CODA, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers. Most of it has been forgettable. The platforms' Original Film outputs are, broadly, less curated than the studio film outputs that preceded them — the algorithms supporting them favour quantity over quality, and the auto-renew subscription model does not punish individual film failures.
The platforms have also, increasingly, abandoned the theatrical-window pretense. Netflix's standard release pattern is now: minimal theatrical run for awards eligibility, then immediate streaming. Apple has been more theatrically committed (Killers of the Flower Moon, Napoleon both had real theatrical windows). Amazon has moved between models on a film-by-film basis. The unified 'streaming release model' does not exist; each platform makes case-by-case decisions.
The theatrical experience itself has differentiated more sharply across the decade. Premium large-format presentations (IMAX, Dolby Cinema, ScreenX, 4DX) now represent roughly 6% of US screens but 22% of the box-office gross. Films designed for large-format presentation — Top Gun: Maverick, Oppenheimer, Dune: Part Two — have outperformed at premium-format screens by 3-5x the per-screen revenue of standard-format screens.
This has produced an unexpected structural argument: theatrical may survive specifically as an event-format business. The standard multiplex of 2019, with eight screens of mid-budget releases, is no longer financially viable. The large-format flagship cinema, with two or three premium screens carrying $200m+ tentpole releases, is. The middle of the theatrical market is collapsing.
Three predictions, made on a five-year horizon:
First: theatrical will continue to bifurcate. The premium-format event film will be the only category that reliably draws audiences. Mid-budget adult drama will continue migrating to streaming with diminishing theatrical-window pretence. Specialty distributors (A24, Searchlight, Neon, Focus, Mubi) will continue serving the art-house category with smaller theatrical windows.
Second: the streaming platforms will continue consolidating. The expensive subscriber-acquisition wars of 2019-22 are over; the platforms are now operating under shareholder pressure for profitability. Expect further mergers, library reductions, and Original Film output cuts. The platform that bets most-heavily on premium theatrical-quality work (probably Apple, possibly Amazon) is likely to emerge as the prestige destination.
Third: international cinema will continue gaining ground at the prestige level. The Academy of 2030 will probably honour at least one more non-English-language Best Picture winner; the streaming-distribution infrastructure makes this almost inevitable. See our essay on foreign films winning Best Picture for the structural reasons.
The practical implication for viewers is that the films you'd want to see are now distributed across an increasingly fragmented set of platforms. The 'go to the cinema' decision has been replaced by a multi-step calculation about which platform a particular film is on, whether it's worth subscribing for, whether it's worth a theatrical ticket, and whether the optimal viewing experience matters enough to justify the cost.
The industrial response to that fragmentation is, in turn, what's shaping which films get made. Films designed for premium theatrical (Nolan, Villeneuve, James Cameron) continue to find financing. Films designed for streaming (most of the prestige adult drama category) continue to find financing on streaming terms. Films that fall between the two — the genuinely mid-budget theatrical adult drama — continue to be the form most-at-risk.
The structural question, eight years out from the start of the pandemic shift, remains whether the theatrical experience can be saved as a routine rather than just an event. The current data does not suggest it can.