Five New Year's Resolutions For Movie Studios And Theaters

An iconic New Year's Eve scene from Carol (2015)

Over the December 26-28, 2025 weekend, for the first since July 2018, seven different movies grossed $10+ million each at the domestic box office. Even as Avatar: The Way of Water does gangbusters business worldwide, smaller titles like The Housemaid, Marty Supreme, and Hamnet are bringing people to multiplexes.  Theatrical moviegoing isn't dead. It just needs crowdpleaser titles and a steady stream of new movies to excel. Shocker: when the theatrical marketplace can only rely on Snow White or Tron: Ares to carry the day, people aren't scrambling to go to the movies.

So much of the ongoing problems with the box office in the 2020s are rooted in external industry problems. For starters, corporate consolidation (namely, the elimination of 20th Century Fox) has drastically reduced the number of movies that get theatrical releases each year. Then there are studios refusing to release all kinds of motion pictures in theaters, instead opting to drop many projects (namely comedies and romantic dramas) onto streaming for a quick instant paycheck.

As 2026 prepares to begin, let's continue that time-honored New Year's tradition of "resolutions" and talk about what movie studios can do better in the new year. Here are four New Year's resolutions for the major film studio and one resolution for movie theaters themselves as we look toward the future. December 2025's exciting, bustling box office business is a sign that the world of theatrical moviegoing can be gloriously thriving 24/7/365....if only these resolutions are taken to heart.

Abandon Streaming-Exclusive Movies

Are you in the theatrical film business or not? Lemme put it this way...do you care about giving artists long-term income (via post-theatrical release revenue streams like cable TV residuals) and offering consumers an ability to possess art (via home physical media releases, which streaming-exclusive movies don't get)? If the answers to either is yes (and both should get a resounding yes by anyone), abandon streaming-exclusive movies. Sending features to Paramount+, Disney+, Apple TV, Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Max, or any other streaming platform in 2025/2026 is idiocy. 

It deprives artists of chances to make more income long-term, audiences of more opportunities to experience films, and banishes motion pictures to obscurity.  Yet here comes Disney sending the Searchlight Pictures title In The Blink of An Eye to Hulu in February, or Paramount expelling an Avatar: The Last Airbender movie to Paramount+. Sony's various film divisions (like Columbia Pictures and 3000 Pictures) are still making original films like Beach Read for Netflix. Given how outfits like Netflix are outwardly hostile to the existence of movie theaters, studios like Sony getting into the streaming exclusive movie business is as long-term beneficial as hiring Jason Voorhees to be your personal bodyguard.

Stop this nonsense. It doesn't make any sense to offer exclusive feature-length movies to audiences on streaming in any way, shape, or form. Even in pure monetary terms, these studios are now owned by such big, money-rich corporations that there's no excuse not to send every movie possible into theatrical release. Paramount has $100+ billion stored away to bid on Warner Bros, but not the moolah to promote a Last Airbender movie? Amazon MGM Studios, what're you doing sending The Wrecking Crew and other movies to streaming when your parent company has an obscene amount of money?

2025's box office nadirs were caused by a lack of new movies in theaters. That solution would be automatically solved if Amazon, Disney, Paramount, and other corporations just gave their films normal marketing campaigns and (at least) 45-day theatrical runs. Streaming-exclusive movies, go into the dustbin of history, pleeeease.

Younger Audiences Are The Future

The concept back in early 2021 that older audiences (the first to get the COVID-19 vaccine) would be the ones driving North American theatrical moviegoing turned out to be a bit off the money. Horizon: An American Saga, After the Hunt, The Last Duel, Book Club: The Next Chapter, none of these movies aimed at the 60+ crowd made a box office dent. Meanwhile, younger moviegoers have shown up for everything from Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour to A Minecraft Movie to Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle to Marty Supreme. Instead of handing more money to McG and Brett Ratner, Hollywood needs to pursue younger filmmaking voices under 35 that can deliver movies deeply relevant to the audiences coming out in droves to theaters. Sorry studio executives, but tapping into Running Man and Tron nostalgia isn't where the future of moviegoing is. 

Stop Worrying And Embrace Foreign Langauge Cinema

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle outgrossed Snow White, Predator: Badlands, Tron: Ares, The Accountant 2, and Ballerina (among many other costlier English-language films) at the domestic box office in 2025. Yes, this project was based around a beloved brand name. Not every random title from outside America will flourish the same financially. Between this feature, Godzilla Minus One, RRR, and The Boy and the Heron, though, the 2020s have been an exceptional time for foreign language cinema at the domestic box office. Younger audiences are clearly open to seeing movies with subtitles. There's a plethora of acclaimed and accessible titles from around the world for studios like Lionsgate, Focus Features, Briarcliff, Vertical Entertainment and other labels to acquire and give major domestic theatrical releases to. A new opportunity to bolster the box office has opened up. Even getting a fraction of Infinity Castle's success from wide release foreign langauge releases would bolster the 2026 box office tremendously.

Counterprogramming Works!

This past July, Jurassic World Rebirth was the only major movie opening over the 4th of July weekend. Similarly, Thunderbolts* was the only big film of note kicking off May 2025. What was this nonsense depriving theaters of motion pictures two years after Barbenheimer proved the marketplace could house multiple hits in one weekend? Heck, The Housemaid and Avatar: Fire and Ash just soared to terrific numbers opening on the same day in December. The dearth of new releases is a major ongoing problem for the box office, as is leaning so many weekends on just one big new wide release. When that title becomes a flop like Tron: Ares, the whole marketplace suffers. Counterprogramming used to be common in the theatrical cinema world. It's time to normalize it once more. In other words, someone cobble together a Colleen Hoover adaptation that can open the same day as Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three. Or, better yet, make a gay-ass comedy starring Ayo Edebiri and Patti Harrison as wacky mechanics to open the same day as Spider-Man: Brand New Day. 

Movie Theaters, It's Time To Bring Back National Cinema Day

Hi movie theaters! Here's my one "New Year's resolution" for y'all, directed right at Cinema United, the organization that's dubbed itself "the largest exhibition trade organization in the world". In late summer 2022 and 2023, Cinema United announced a program called National Cinema Day where domestic movie theaters would offer discounted tickets ($3 in 2022, $4 in 2023) for all movies at any showtime. The event was a big hit in boosting attendance, but it vanished in 2024 and 2025. Last year, Cinema United instead announced a quartet of events (like National Popcorn Day) that would offer other "discounts" and events for moviegoers. Half of these events (like Family Day), I don't even remember occuring. 

With the national minimum wage remaining stagnant for 17 years and countless Americans struggling financially, the movie theater, once the go-to affordable option for folks looking for escapism, is now often monetarily out of reach. Perhaps that discounted movie theater ticket day could be a cure for these woes. I say we not only bring back National Cinema Day, but have it occur three times a year. Use this holiday as a way to boost a trio of weekends that're normally dead zones for the box office: the Super Bowl weekend, the final weekend of August, and Halloween weekend. These aren't frames that usually house big blockbusters whose potential $100+ million openings would be affected by lower ticket sales. On the contrary, late August releases could only benefit from being seen as more attractive to audiences if they're cheaper to attend.

These National Cinema Days could even offer exciting opportunities to bolster awareness and excitement for other corners of the cinema world. Offering $5 movie tickets over Saturday, February 7 (the day before the Super Bowl), for instance, could explicitly be advertised as a day where people could catch up on the Best Picture Oscar nominees (which will be announced two weeks earlier). Watching assorted Best Picture contenders on the big screen could get more people invested in what's happening at the 98th Academy Awards, and the show's ratings could prosper. That's just one of the many exciting possibilities of bringing back National Cinema Day throughout 2025 at multiple intervals. 

C'mon Cinema United! Brazil has seven whole days of discounted movie tickets as part of Cinema Week! Let's take a cue from this country and our own National Cinema Day exploits from 2022 and 2023, and give everyone a chance to experience the magic of the movies.