Gen Z is saving Cinema: So why is our industry still making movies for their parents?
I was standing outside a multiplex in LA on a Friday night a while ago, early for a screening with a friend, doing the thing you do when you are early for a screening, which is loiter near the posters and pretend to check your phone. In front of the poster for the film I was about to see, a group of seven Gen Z kids were photographing each other. Not quickly. They were doing a proper shoot! Someone had brought a second outfit. One of them was directing the others into the right light. There was a running commentary being recorded for somebody’s story. The whole production took, I am not exaggerating, around twenty minutes. Then they went in, bought an embarrassing quantity of snacks, and I watched them file into the same screening I was about to sit in. What the fuck just happend here?
I stood there with my lukewarm coffee, trying to fight off the jet lag, and had one of those small, slightly humiliating professional moments where you realise the industry you have spent a quarter of a century in has fundamentally changed underneath you while you were looking at some Chinese microdrama that super convincingly makes the case that theatrical is fucked.
Because the obituary had already been written. You have read it. I have, in weaker moments, helped write it. Drumroll: Streaming killed the theatrical habit. Badum-tssss. The phone generation could not sit still for two hours in the dark. The cinema was a nineteenth-century technology, a thing nobody under thirty would pay fifteen bucks to experience when everything ever made was available on the device in their pocket before they had finished deciding what to watch.
It was such a good story, so confidently told with the texture of something obviously true. It has also turned out to be almost entirely wrong, and the kids in front of the poster were the first clue I had been paying attention to that I did not yet understand.
Here for those of you who don’t believe me: is what the numbers actually say. Gen Z cinema attendance grew twenty-five percent in 2025. Eighty-seven percent of them went to a theatre at least once in the past year, which is a higher share than any other generation, including the ones who grew up on theatrical as the default. Forty-one percent went six times or more. For comparison, only thirty-nine percent of adults over sixty-five went at all. IMAX hit 1.28 billion dollars globally, a forty percent jump, with Gen Z driving a disproportionate share of it.
The generation raised entirely on streaming, on TikTok, on infinite frictionless on-demand content, is now the primary customer keeping the cinema alive?
That requires an explanation that goes considerably deeper than “they just like movies.” And the explanation...
is hidden in my most recent article on Substack
https://lnkd.in/dWDptM8y
