We’ve heard the doomsayers often enough. Television killed the movie star, they say. Streaming services killed the Hollywood star, they say. And for a while, they were even right. Especially after Covid, the pleasure of thronging to movie theatres to watch the summer’s latest blockbuster, appeared to have drastically abated. Add to that the Hollywood staff strikes, and Netflix’s burgeoning cultural influence and there appeared to be a real crisis on Hollywood’s hands.
And yet, even before the year dawned, 2026 heaved with possibilities, thanks in part to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey tickets selling out nearly a year before the film’s actual release.
Predictably enough then, Odyssey was one of the big flicks that steered Hollywood to a resurgent year. But it was only one of a far larger bouquet of successes.
Conventional wisdom has dictated that the road to the big bucks was paved with big budgets, established franchises and familiar IPs. That logic flew out of the window in 2026. Alongside Odyssey sat a bunch of unlikely winners – from Obsession, that cost less than one million dollars to make and brought in more than four times that mount, to Backrooms, that successfully leapt from YouTube to the big screen to Project Hail Mary, a science fiction film. Spider-Man, The Odyssey, Toy Story 5, Michael and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie all grossed more than one billion dollars worldwide. Ticket sales rocketed upwards by 15%, although – tempering the ebullience somewhat – theater attendance still remained more than 20% below pre-pandemic levels, meaning that fewer people bought more expensive tickets.
In part, this points to the fact that going to the movies has become an event in itself. Netflix, once considered the Hollywood giant slayer, has become an everyday affair, available at home to watch at our convenience. Streaming is now an unremarkable background activity: watching a show at home now competes with cooking, texting, and scrolling, draining it of the specialness it once had.
But the movie theater is an entirely different beast. It requires preparation, planning, and time spent with friends and family; going to the picture house has become a social and community ritual in the same way it used to be for earlier generations. In a way, it holds a mirror to society’s growing restiveness with online, digital events; everything from mahjong to chess is migrating offline onto brick and mortar spaces.
And certainly people under 25 appears to be accounting for a large part of the audience, a demographic once dismissed by older generations as being nose-to-phone loners who preferred to watch films on their own at home. Ironically, it was this very phone-fixedness that would drive younger generations to the cinema, thanks to online communities like TikTok and Letterboxd that generated immense buzz.
But equally, older movie-goers are thronging the halls, to watch movies like Michael, a biopic about the musician Michael Jackson that has grossed more than any biopic ever made. And films such as The Devil Wears Prada 2 drew both legacy watchers and younger, newer film-goers. Overall admissions in cinema grew across all key demographics, including younger audiences, families and culturally diverse segments. In early April, a study found that Gen Z and Millennials were among the most active moviegoers, with 92% of those surveyed saying they prefer going with others.
None of this takes away from the existential crises that have been threatening to suffocate the industry — shrinking film budgets, say, and the very real danger of filmmakers’ decreasing faith in the medium’s viability in an era of artificial intelligence. But 2026 has proved that Hollywood is not doomed. Does it signal a lasting change or is it merely another brief respite? That’s unclear. But it does reveal that the doomsday story can be set aside for another day.
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