In a 2025 that generated $8.87 billion at the domestic box office, 780 million people actually went to the movies.
That’s roughly two visits a year for every person living in the United States; the nation’s population factored at an estimate of 347.3 million.
However, admissions were down from EntTelligence’s 2024 figure of 820 million, by -4.9% with the previous 12 months seeing a spike in tickets prices across the board, read general price of admission was $13.29, + 5.7% from 2024, while the price of a premium large format ticket was $17.69, +4.9%.
The latest figures come from entertainment stat org EntTelligence’s annual report, which also says that moviegoers consumed over 95 billion minutes of features on the big screen in calendar year 2025.
Pre-Pandemic, the industry averaged well over 1B tickets sold annually during the period of 2005 to 2019.
The annual report also provides some light on attendance in regards to windows and that’s that 35.6% of all moviegoers went to see movies in the first 3 days of release. Compare that to 73.2% of all attendees watched movies in their first 14 days of release, while 90.7% of all moviegoers headed to cinemas during pics’ first 30 days of release.
Disney led all motion picture studios (of course) in admissions repping close to 26% of the 780M or 202.9M; the studio’s domestic figure at $2.49 billion. Warner Bros repped 20.15% of admissions or 157.1M after $1.9 billion at the North American B.O. Universal films attendance was 17.96% (140M, $1.78B), Sony’s 6.4% (49.9M, $610.5M), Paramount’s 6.4% (49.9M, $554M), Lionsgate’s 3.9% (30.4M, $331M) and A24’s 2.77% (21.6M admissions). Disney’s admissions figure doesn’t include Searchlight, Sony’s doesn’t include Sony Classics, and Uni’s doesn’t count Focus Features in the EntTelligence calculation.
Among genres, most people attended action movies at 39.2% which actually had the highest average ticket at $13.88 over horror ($13.07, 11.56% attendance), drama ($12.85, 10.3% attendance), animation ($12.67; 14.4% attendance) and comedy ($12.50, 5.6% attendance).
PG family films were very popular and pulled in the lions share of admissions at 34.4%, followed by PG-13 with 31.5% and R-rated movies at 28.3%.
Among cities, Los Angeles had the most foot traffic at 8.97%, followed by New York with 6.48%, Dallas at 3.69%, Chicago at 3.28% and Houston with 3.13%.
Blue voting zones pulled in more moviegoers than red, 56.5% to 34.6%, and that’s because most movie theaters are located in Democrat leaning zip codes (as of the 2024 presidential election).
In demos, males and females were roughly even in admissions, 50.15% to 49.85%. Kids under 13 repped 10.76% of attendance while those over 60 years old repped 11.1% of attendance.
Per industry sources, the hope is that the domestic box office gets to $9 billion in 2026. The last time the box office hit that threshold post Covid was 2023, the year of Barbie and Oppenheimer.