Here is the strangest statistic in the movie business right now: IMAX operates less than 1% of the world’s cinema screens, yet on the opening weekend of a major film it routinely captures more than 20% of the box office. For a blockbuster like Dune: Part Two, IMAX pulled in 22.7% of the entire domestic opening gross from just 809 screens worldwide.
That is not a rounding error. It is the clearest sign of a structural change in how people watch movies — one that COVID accelerated and streaming made permanent. The middle of the movie business has hollowed out. What’s left is a barbell: everyday viewing has moved to the couch, and theatrical moviegoing has narrowed to a smaller number of must-see-huge events. On those nights, audiences don’t just want a ticket. They want the biggest, loudest, most expensive screen in the building.
A tiny slice of screens, an outsized slice of money
Start with the concentration, because the numbers are genuinely lopsided.
- IMAX represents under 1% of global screens but captured more than 50% of all premium large-format (PLF) box office revenue as of early 2025.
- In 2025, IMAX delivered a record 3.8% of the entire global box office — up 70 basis points year over year — on $1.28 billion in IMAX-format grosses, a 40% jump from $920 million in 2024.
- In a single recent quarter, IMAX generated 20% or more of the domestic opening-weekend box office for three separate titles.
Widen the lens from IMAX to all premium formats — IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and the big-chain house brands like AMC’s Prime and Cinemark’s XD — and the same pattern scales up. Premium screens accounted for 15.6% of North American box office in 2024, up from 14.5% in 2023 and just 10.3% in pre-pandemic 2019. In 2025, more than 16% of all domestic tickets sold were for premium large-format showings, versus 13.8% two years earlier. For tentpoles specifically, premium formats can account for up to half of opening-weekend revenue.
The economics compound the effect. In 2025 the average U.S. movie ticket ran about $13.29, while a premium-format ticket went for roughly $17.65 — a premium of a third or more. So a small share of seats becomes a much larger share of dollars. At one regional chain, Phoenix Theatres, premium auditoriums make up 29% of the screens but drive 40% of attendance; on a peak Saturday in April 2025, AMC recorded 33% of its attendance in premium halls.
Fewer screens. Higher prices. Disproportionate demand. That’s how 1% becomes 20%.
What actually changed: the middle fell out
None of this would matter if audiences still went to the movies the way they did in 2019. They don’t.
The share of U.S. adults who go to the movies at least once a month collapsed from roughly 39% in 2019 to about 17% in 2025. The casual, habitual trip — a random Tuesday, a mid-budget comedy, a “let’s just see what’s playing” evening — largely evaporated and hasn’t come back. Since the pandemic, some 5,700 screens have gone dark in the U.S., and total box office still sits below its pre-COVID peak.
That casual habit didn’t disappear into thin air. It moved to the living room. Streaming is no longer the alternative to theatrical — it is the default consumer behavior. The old 90-day theatrical window, once sacrosanct, is effectively history. Studios now route films to the channel that fits them: a mid-budget title like Sinners can land day-and-date on a streaming service to test appetite, while a would-be blockbuster gets a theatrical-first release designed around premium screens.
The result is a bifurcation the industry has been circling for years and COVID finally forced. As one widely shared analysis put it, theatrical distribution has become an “event-only channel” — extraordinarily powerful for a handful of mega-films, and increasingly inefficient for everything else. The mid-budget original — the $30-to-60-million adult drama or comedy that used to be the connective tissue of the release calendar — is the clearest casualty. A few break through theatrically each year, but for most, streaming is now the natural home.
Why the survivors go premium
Once moviegoing becomes an occasion rather than a routine, the logic of the premium screen takes over.
If you only go to the theater a few times a year — and you’re choosing the theater specifically because it offers something your excellent home setup can’t — then the differentiator is scale. A 70mm IMAX frame, a wall-height screen, seats that rattle with Dolby Atmos bass: these are the things a Netflix subscription and a nice TV cannot replicate. The premium format isn’t an upsell on the experience anymore; for the event film, it increasingly is the experience.
Filmmakers noticed, and so did marketers. Directors like Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve now shoot with IMAX cameras and treat the format as the intended way to see their work, and studios market films as “Filmed for IMAX” — turning the format into part of the product rather than a delivery method. That, in turn, drives the scarcity that powers the whole flywheel: there are only so many IMAX and premium houses, big premieres sell them out first, and sold-out premium runs generate exactly the “you had to be there” urgency that gets people off the couch in the first place.
Exhibitors have responded with an arms race. IMAX keeps signing new-build and upgrade deals; Dolby Cinema has expanded; and the major chains are pouring money into their own premium brands — sometimes competing directly with IMAX for the same auditoriums. When the middle of your business is shrinking, you invest in the part that’s growing.
The caveats worth keeping
A few honest qualifications, because the barbell can be overstated:
- “1% to 20%” is an opening-weekend, big-film phenomenon, not an all-year average. IMAX is about 4% of the annual global box office, not 20% — the 20%+ figure applies to the opening frames of the tentpoles built for it.
- IMAX is not all premium formats. IMAX is the ~1% headliner; the broader PLF category (a larger share of screens) is what accounts for ~16% of tickets.
- The model depends on a supply of event films. In a year thin on true four-quadrant blockbusters, the premium tier still outperforms — but the whole theatrical business feels it. The strategy concentrates risk as much as reward.
The bottom line
The pandemic didn’t kill the movie theater; it sorted it. Streaming absorbed the everyday viewing that used to fill mid-week seats, and what remained migrated toward a smaller number of genuine events — watched, increasingly, on the largest and priciest screens available. That’s why a format sitting on less than 1% of the world’s screens can define the opening weekend of the year’s biggest films, and why the phrase moviegoers now say without thinking twice is not “let’s see a movie” but “let’s see it in IMAX.”
