The Return of Cinema Going, Featuring Gen Z
Movie theatres have been here to tell stories to people for over 100 years. For many it’s an escape from reality. It’s a raw human experience that people yearn for. Within the last few years, however, movie theater attendance went downhill. With Covid pandemic, high priced movie tickets, and the rise of streaming movies from the comfort of your home, many people–including Gen Z–slowly shied away from watching movies in the theaters.
This year there has been a return to movie theater going as a whole for multiple generations in the United States. The Economist reported on August 11 that “five films have already grossed more than $1bn at the global box office; three more have exceeded $500m…. Although overall ticket sales are still down from pre-covid levels, analysts predict that the global box office will take $35bn this year, up 7% from 2025.”
This trend was especially seen with Gen Z. Many journalists have made the claim that Gen Z has returned to cinemas for the cultural aspect, escape of isolation, and the third space it provides them. Like Amy Wild wrote in The Guardian in April 2026, Gen Z is “ditching doomscrolling” and social media takes and going to the theaters to form an opinion and build community. Forbes writer Khian Bakhtiari, a Gen Z writer himself, studied Sociology at University of Leicester. In his article “Gen-Z Fuels The Movie Theater's Surprising Box Office Boom,” published in July, he writes that 87 % of Gen Z has made it to the movies, compared to the Baby Boomer’s 58%.
In this decade alone, the world has seen several box office successes in all different genres of film genres: Nolan’s historical drama Oppenheimer, 2023’s Barbie, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, and Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Outside of huge blockbuster films, Bakhtiari notes that theaters have also released films that have caused audiences to think and have open discussions with people on the Internet and with their loved ones in life. These films include 2026’s Obsession, A24’s The Drama, Luca Guadagnino's Challengers, and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Schienert’s Everything Everywhere All At Once. All of these films, good or bad, have specifically allowed Gen Z to make it a cultural thing. Gen Z films video essays about their opinions regarding these films, the actors, and the crew within the films. They make posts online discussing their thoughts. We’ve also seen the rise of Letterboxd, a whole app based on reviewing and rating films.
One of the main reasons Gen Z is returning to movie theaters again is because of the culture. Gen Z wants to experience the next big film to create their own opinions about and develop a claim to share with the world. Many Gen Zers even see the same film up to 5 times simply because they enjoy the movie going experience. Bakhtiari goes back to say, “Going to the cinema is part of a wider trend of young people seeking shared communal experiences.” Creating a premise for Gen Z as a whole, we long for community.
Continuing that point, in an article published by USA Today this past July, Luca DeSanto, a student writer from the University of Michigan, makes the claim that the Gen Z’s return to movies is an attempt to gain a “third space.” This is ultimately a space for community and common interest, outside of home or the workplace. On a generational level, Gen Z has been called the "loneliest generation” due to our excessive use of technology, particularly with our social media usage. The pandemic of 2020 has been noted to many people as the most isolated they have been from human interaction or human entertainment. As Gen Z has actively engaged in returning to movies, it has allowed them to find community. DeSanto connects his own movie theater experience when watching Obsession: “For the next two hours, no one looked away. . . . The entire audience was in that film together.”
As Gen Z watches these films, they find other people who also enjoy those films. This opens our communal discussions and maybe even a blossomed friendship. This perhaps is slowly decreasing the Gen Z loneliness epidemic, as the lonely are finding community for themselves and are making the connection that not just Gen Z–but humanity as a whole–needs community. We can’t find it naturally. We build paths to make it ourselves.
