By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, December 09, 2025
At the risk of sounding like an old man, I can recall
that, when I was a teenager in the early 1990s, the price of a movie ticket for
an evening show was seven dollars. Even when the minimum wage was $4.25 per
hour or $5.05 per hour — it increased in 1992 in New Jersey — I don’t remember
finding it hard to scrape together seven bucks when I wanted to see a movie.
When I was a young twentysomething in the late 1990s in
Washington, D.C., I remember a ticket costing eight or nine bucks. Apparently, the average price nationally for a ticket to
the movies back then was $4.69; adjusted for inflation, that price would be
$9.43 today.
Today, here in Authenticity Woods, Va., the nearest movie
theater is a nice one, with reclining seats, inclined rows, and much better
food options. I checked, and the current price for a ticket to an evening show
is $17, plus a fee of a bit more than $2 if I want to reserve tickets online.
That’s almost $20 a head, and that doesn’t include popcorn or soda.
I’ve seen the argument that, adjusted for inflation, movie ticket prices haven’t
increased that much, although it still increased from around eight bucks in the
early 1990s to about ten bucks in 2022. Even if these numbers are accurate —
and keep in mind, inflation took off like a rocket in 2022, and I’m not sure
the chart supplied by that link takes that into account — I don’t think
Hollywood fully recognizes how movie-ticket pricing influences moviegoers’
habits.
When a movie cost me eight or nine bucks, I watched a lot
of schlocky movies, sometimes on a weeknight after a bad day at work. Deep Rising
comes to mind. When a movie doesn’t cost that much, you’re willing to roll the
dice on a movie that might not be so great. Discussing this with my wife, she
reminded me of how often we would go to the movies in sweltering Washington,
D.C. summer heat, because sitting in powerful air conditioning for a few hours
was a nice bonus alongside the movie. And when I saw Memento
in 2000, I came home, told my soon-to-be-wife how amazing it was, convinced her
to go watch it with me, and I watched it a second time in one day.
But now, when going to a movie in the theater costs
nearly twenty bucks a head, I’m much less likely to go if I’m not sure I’m
going to like the movie. The higher the ticket price, the less likely I am to
take a gamble on a movie that might not be all that enjoyable.
Contrast that with staying home and watching a movie on
Netflix. There’s no drive or parking fees. There’s no ticket price. The movie
starts when I want it to start, and I can hit pause to get a snack or go for a
bathroom break. The only teenagers in the audience are the ones I created. I
don’t have to watch 20 minutes of ads or trailers for other movies. And if I
decide I don’t like the movie, I just hit stop and find something else. And all
I paid was my subscription fee.
Yes, many of today’s movie theaters are much nicer than
the days of non-stadium seating, sticky floors, and much more limited food
options. But if all those improved amenities mean a ticket costs closer to 20
bucks than ten bucks, fewer people are going to come through the doors. I am
reminded of my 2023 examination of Disney prices, laying out how going to
a Disney theme park is significantly more expensive now than it was in past
decades, even when you adjust for inflation. A business chooses to pursue a
higher-end clientele that is willing to pay higher prices, and then after a few
years, it wonders why its client base is so much smaller. Well, buddy, part of
the problem is you priced out a significant chunk of your potential customer
base!
But those are the problems with the theater experience
itself. There’s no getting around the facts of the problems of what’s being
projected onto the screen.
Chalk it up to wokeness, or competition from streaming
services, or a new class of studio managers, but Hollywood virtually abandoned
entire genres.
It’s not just your imagination; Hollywood makes significantly fewer comedies than it used to.
In an industry always looking to make a quick buck, this is spectacularly odd;
one of the great ironies is that comedies usually aren’t that expensive to
make. They usually don’t require lots of special effects, or filming in far-off
locations, or complicated stunts. (Can we all agree that Office
Space is one of the all-time greats? It cost $10 million to make in
1999, which is just under $20 million in today’s dollars.)
And yet, Hollywood virtually discarded making movies that
tried to make people laugh. It’s hard not to suspect that political correctness
and the risk of crossing the woke outrage mobs made comedies a much more
dangerous bet for studios.
The number of romantic comedies released by Hollywood each year dropped like
a stone. Perhaps certain swaths of Hollywood’s creative class don’t want to
tell stories that are “heteronormative.” Perhaps #MeToo made screenwriters,
directors, and actors squeamish about sex scenes or jokes about sex. Or perhaps
in a profession where everyone wants to think of themselves as feminist and
empowering women, a story where true love conquers all and the female
protagonist finds happiness in the loving arms of a man feels too
“patriarchal.”
(Have you noticed that Hallmark’s Christmas movies have a
dedicated fan base? They are definitely not my taste*, but
clearly there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of women who love
these kinds of stories, clichés and all. So why has no studio tried to release
a Hallmark-style Christmas movie in theaters? I bet quite a few women would
drag their husbands to the theater if they had the option.)
Part of the disappearance of comedies and romantic
comedies reflects the fact that Hollywood makes significantly fewer mid-range-budget films. You can still find small
independent films made for $15 million or less, and big-budget blockbusters
that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but all those films in the middle
are fewer and further between. A strong argument can be made that Hollywood
grew so obsessed with making money in overseas markets that it lost interest in catering to American audiences:
[Matt] Damon believes the ability
to penetrate international markets explains why studios prioritize superhero
blockbusters. The number of Chinese movie screens has grown from just under
5,000 in 2009 to over 82,000 by 2021. Superhero movies are easily translatable
across cultures because of their striking visuals and simplistic plots. Foreign
countries might not show interest in a Coen Brothers portrayal of the 1960’s
folk music scene or an Adam McKay biopic of a former vice president. The
existence of international markets like China, India, South Korea, and Mexico,
combined with the ancillary revenue made from merchandising, explains why comic
book franchises and action/adventure/fantasy remakes have taken over Hollywood.
Our old friend Kyle Smith, now the film critic for the Wall
Street Journal, fights
a constant battle to remind people that there are a lot of options at the
multiplex beyond superhero movies. Maybe those non-superhero movies are not
advertised as well as they used to be, or they aren’t generating buzz and
enthusiastic recommendations the way they used to, but they’re out there.
Speaking of superhero blockbusters, we should take a
moment to stare in amazement at how Disney has managed to take not one but two
of the all-time most popular franchises, a pair of toy- and merchandise-selling
golden geese, and run both of them into the ground. There was a time not that
long ago — 2019, when Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame was released — when it
looked like the Marvel superhero movies and the Star Wars films would make
billions, year after year, for the foreseeable future.
Chalk it up to the “M-She-U,” or the retirement of
popular characters and actors, or the rapid proliferation of Marvel shows on
Disney Plus, but the magic is gone; there’s nowhere near the sense of a Marvel
movie being a must-see as there was before the Covid-19 interruption.
Your mileage may vary, but I actually feel like Marvel
has enjoyed a comeback in quality this year with Thunderbolts and The
Fantastic Four: First Steps. By the standards of other movies, they did
okay; Thunderbolts is the 12th highest-grossing movie of 2025 with $190
million in the domestic box office, and Fantastic Four ranks 7th at $274
million. But by the standards of previous Marvel movies, they’re flops.
Star Wars hasn’t released a movie in theaters since
before the pandemic. In May, we will get The Mandalorian and Grogu,
featuring characters from a Disney Plus television show that was beloved by
fans for about two seasons, then bizarrely careened off the rails in its third.
Again, your mileage may vary, but the trailer for
the forthcoming movie looks astonishingly “meh” for a Star Wars movie.
Finally, this complaint is the most nebulous, but I feel
like the entire storytelling culture of Hollywood’s creative class is broken. This
tweet from Riley Hale spoke to me:
Hollywood removed the hero’s
journey, masculinity, redemption, sacrifice, and beauty standards in 2025, then
wondered why global box office fell 18 percent and no film cracked $1 billion.
. . . The same industry that spent a decade lecturing audiences on
“problematic” tropes now releases 400 movies a year that nobody wants to watch.
They didn’t just kill the blockbuster. They sterilized the entire reason humans
ever told stories in the first place.
I notice that Amazon’s Reacher was one of the biggest streaming hits of the year, and in a lot
of ways, it’s an “old-fashioned” show. A big burly hero, played with a lot of
charm by Alan Ritchson, gets ensnared in a mystery and constantly runs into
thugs and villains who look at the 6’3”, 240-pound former military police
investigator Jack Reacher and think, “Oh yeah, I can take this guy in a
fistfight.” As you can imagine, it almost never goes well for them.
So, yes, Hollywood and the movie business have a lot of
problems. But one of the biggest and most glaring ones is that they stopped
making movies that people enjoy watching.
*Netflix’s Champagne Problems starring Minka Kelly
features one of the meanest stereotypes of a German ever depicted on screen,
with the character delivering a full monologue about how Die Hard is a
Christmas tragedy and Hans Gruber is a misunderstood hero. The movie is fine,
but that character is hilarious.
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