pivoted

Never in history have we seen so many movies: the streaming It allows us to see several a week but, nevertheless, the movie theaters are empty. Literally emptier than ever in decades. We consume audiovisual content en masse, but not where we historically enjoyed it. Meanwhile, concerts have become the leisure alternative par excellence. Why do we pay hundreds of euros to go to a stadium with 50,000 other people, but not fifteen to see a blockbuster on the big screen? The answer lies in how we value physical space in the experience economy. Some figures. Let’s look at some box office figures: the summer of 2025, traditionally the most lucrative season in the industry, has been the most disastrous since 1981 adjusted for inflation. There is no dream of returning to pre-COVID figures: in October 2025 in the US, only 445 million dollars were raised, less than half of last October before the pandemicwhich exceeded one billion. The average viewer attended only 2.31 times to theaters in 2024, a drop of 33% compared to the 3.5 annual visits in 2019. In Spain, theThe 2025 data is equally dark: The total box office falls by 14% (almost 30 million less), and Spanish cinema itself declines by 2.5-3%. The author of this last study, Pau Brunet, expressly says that “the Hollywood fantasy is crumbling.” And the erosion is constant: Spain had more than 105 million viewers in 2019, which represents a loss of a third of its volume in five years: we are now at 71 million. Windows that don’t perform. The problem is so multifactorial that it is ridiculous to focus only on the drop in the box office to explain it. For example, we have the collapse of display windows: The pre-pandemic standard was 90-120 days in theaters, three or four weeks later in digital sales and then home formats and streaming. After the pandemic, these windows were reduced by more than 60%, and although they now vary depending on the studio, Universal and Warner leave a 45-day window for their most sought-after productions (it can be reduced to 17 days), with the exception of Disney, which operates them for 60 days. In any case, the rest of the windows have been shortened or disappeared, and it is common to watch a movie in streaming just a month and a half after its release in theaters. It is one of the main reasons why people have left the theaters: even blockbusters like ‘Wicked’ can be seen streaming just 40 days after their release in theaters. Even China. A few years ago, China was the market that seemed destined to save Hollywood accountsbut experienced its own collapse in 2024: the box office fell 23% to 42.5 billion yen ($5.8 billion), returning to figures from a decade ago. Attendance fell by more than 200 million viewers compared to ten years ago. One of the main reasons is the degradation of the theatrical experience: cinemas without air conditioning and without customer service staff beyond the bar, a characteristic that has been spreading to theaters around the world for years. The crisis has been going on for a long time. In reality, this fall does not have its roots in the streaming not even in the pandemic. The attendance of the American public had been falling since the sixtiesgoing from one visit per person every two or three months to just twice a year before the pandemic. The real price of admission (adjusted for inflation) has remained stable since the 1980s, but consumers have decided that they no longer want to go to theaters. The problem, as this Bain & Company study states The thing is that, for decades, the industry has placed all the emphasis of its production on pure content, but the films have ended up arriving home in a few weeks. Meanwhile, music has come to understand something fundamental: the value is not in the recorded content, but in the unique, unrepeatable event. The triumph of music. He Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour It closed in December 2024 after 149 concerts in 51 cities, ggenerating gross revenues of 2,077 million dollars. That is, more than the annual film box office receipts of entire countries (compare with the pyrrhic 71 million box office receipts in Spain in 2024). AND We’re not just talking about the concerts.: The average expense per attendee ranged between $1,300 and $1,500, including transportation, accommodation, merchandising and dinners. More than fans, they are tourists generating systemic economic impact. “Swiftonomics“has ceased to be a metaphor and has become a real analytical category in government economic reports. Beyond Taylor. Swift is not an anomaly. The global live music market generated $28.1 billion in 2023 and projections place it at $79.7 billion by 2030. That growth is equivalent to tripling the size of the market in seven years, while cinema struggles to recover the levels of a decade ago. What does live music have that cinema has lost? The term “funflation“: Consumers prioritize spending on memorable experiences even during periods of high inflation Festivals have capitalized on this logic: They sell identity, belonging and experiences that are impossible to replicate at home. Just the opposite of cinema: a film is exactly identical all over the world and once seen, the incentive to repeat it in theaters is minimal, especially knowing that it will be in streaming in 45 days. Reinvention is required. The cinema crisis is not a death sentence, but it is a demand for reinvention. Because the physical space of entertainment is not dying, it is being reformulated. The path that the music industry has followed by completely pivoting its business model with the disappearance of physical formats is the one that cinema has to follow. At the moment, theaters have not gotten the premium experiences right (sophisticated restoration, more comfortable rooms, improvements in image and sound quality), but that is because they still do not differentiate themselves enough from the domestic experience. Cinema needs its own Taylor … Read more