With the Academy Awards approaching to celebrate the year’s best films, a new survey offered a reality check about moviegoing: Just over half of Americans say they set foot in a movie theater over the course of a year.
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the summer of 2025, 53% of U.S. adults said they had seen a movie in theaters in the prior 12 months. A small but notable 7% said they had never seen a movie in a theater at all.
The findings reflected a domestic box office still fighting to regain its footing since the COVID-19 pandemic, when ticket sales collapsed 81% in 2020 due to theater closures. In 2025, moviegoers in the U.S. and Canada bought 769.2 million tickets, less than half of the all-time peak of roughly 1.6 billion tickets sold in 2002, according to data from Nash Information Services.
Box office revenue peaked at an inflation-adjusted $16.4 billion in 2002, and annual ticket revenue held relatively steady through the 2000s and 2010s before falling to under $3 billion in 2020 when theaters closed for months. Last year, U.S. theaters sold just over $9 billion worth of tickets, per media analytics firm Comscore. The number represents a recovery, but nowhere near a full one, as ticket sales have been lagging around 20% below pre-pandemic levels.
The data also highlighted generational and economic divides in who was buying tickets. Two-thirds of adults ages 18 to 29 said they had attended a movie in theaters in the past year, in contrast to just 39% of those 65 and older. Income told a similar story, as upper-income Americans reported going to the movies at the highest rate, at 64%, compared with 57% of those in the middle-income bracket and 43% of lower-income adults.
Attendance also varied by race and ethnicity, with Hispanic adults the most likely to report going at 59%, followed by white adults at 53% and Black adults at 49%. Gender, by contrast, was not a significant factor — the survey found near parity, with 53% of men and 54% of women saying they had gone to a movie theater in the past year. Political affiliation showed a slightly wider but still modest gap, with Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents reporting attending at a higher rate of 58%, compared with 50% of Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents.
