
This holiday week, besides “ Encanto,” an animated musical with songs from Lin Manuel Miranda of “Hamilton” fame, there is a Marvel release, “Eternals ” “House of Gucci,” a true-crime picture with stars Lady Gaga, Salma Hayek and Al Pacino “Ghostbusters: Afterlife ” “ King Richard,” a docudrama on the life of tennis stars and sisters Venus and Serena Williams plus the horror sequel, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.”Ĭontrino said momentum is key for generating return business. “The movie lineup is setting up for this,” Pachter said. When compared to pre-pandemic 2019, with 1,228,763,381 tickets sold, the pandemic and resulting theater shut-downs reduced the number of tickets sold by more than 1 billion, according to Nash Information Services LLC.Ĭontrino said the delay in movie releases, also a factor in reduced ticket sales, has ended, as studios rush held-over titles exclusively into theaters to catch the wave of returning moviegoers. It can’t get any worse than 2020, when the number of tickets sold was 223,238,720. That’s fairly close to the fourth quarter of the pre-pandemic 2019 holiday season, which totaled $2.9 billion. In the spring, Pachter told the industry press that box office receipts in the fourth quarter of 2021 would approach $2 billion.




When asked if moviegoers are coming back this fall and winter, Pachter answered: “Yes, they are. Movies and entertainment business analyst Michael Pachter, of Wedbush Securities in downtown Los Angeles, said he is bullish on the movie theater and movie industry business in general, after 18 months of hard times. By the end of the year, Schultz said, he will have launched 20 LOOK theaters in the United States.Ĭan LOOK, along with movie theater titans such as AMC, Cinemark and Regal - who are also ready to begin tearing tickets en masse - be right?
