The American box office rebounded this year and finally reached pre-pandemic performance; super hits of 2026 include Michael, Obsession, Backrooms, The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Toy Story 5, The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, “Wuthering Heights,” Resident Evil, The Drama, Primetime, You Can See Everything, and Project Hail Mary. It’s not over, either, as the final two months of the year will see certified moneymakers Dune: Part Three, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, and Werwulf unleashed on a public that’s made it clear that they still like going to the movies. Like? Love! Cast your mind back to 2020 and try to remember how many people were completely wrong about the future of the movie business. People said that theatrical exhibition was dead, superheroes would never go out of style, movie theaters would be gone by the end of the decade, streaming was not only here to stay but apparently impossible to impede, and you know what? They were all wrong, completely wrong, and the only reason the world isn’t being subjected to Quibi “microdramas” and other perverse dreams of Jeffrey Katzenberg is because people showed up and inaugurated a new era of American filmmaking.
But personally speaking, it’s been one dud after another in 2026. There are exceptions—Obsession, Maddie’s Secret, Scary Movie 6—but on the whole it’s been a year of major disappointments and movies stuck (or made) in the past. I saw Blue Heron hours before I saw Obsession at the same theater, and the difference was night and day. It reminded me of my dad’s 2016 column comparing Deadpool and The Witch to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, respectively: Blue Heron was more musty Kelly Reichardt festival runoff directed by film critic favorite Sophy Romvari, while Obsession was an epochal shift. Sitting in that packed theater on that now legendary second weekend, it was an obvious that a new generation was embracing the movies on their own terms, eager to see something directed by someone around their age and in their world. As Christopher Nolan said, “that movie works like a motherfucker,” and by all accounts, Curry Barker’s follow-up Anything but Ghosts is another stunner—and he already had that in the can by the time Obsession was released! Ah, yes! Praise be!
No matter how stupid the conversation around Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s bloated You Can See Everything may be, at least conversation is being had among people of a certain age (younger than me). I can only smile and support these films, but I’m no longer drawn to the theater week-in-week-out like a paramedic; I still see more than most people, but this year I missed Tony, Verity, Late Fame, Hope, and Reminders of Him, all films I would’ve seen in the first half of the 2020s without a second thought. When the pandemic shuttered movie theaters around the world and kept them closed in Maryland for a year and a half, I freaked out. It’s one thing to hear senior citizens talk about how “your generation doesn’t go to the movies, your generation uses phones and stays at home” (wow, look who’s talking), but to go to the movies three or four times a week and be the only audience member in a 300-seat theater is unnerving.
Attendance didn’t really pick up again until 2024, with the exception of Barbie and Oppenheimer, an asterisked success that merely illustrated how this kind of moviegoing was already apparently extinct. But as 2024 and 2025 went on, there were signs of life: audiences for new releases finally started to match the extraordinary numbers put up by revival houses, a stunning turnaround in audience habits that I never expected. I remember going to see Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice on a Thursday at nine p.m. in the summer of 2019, when there were maybe a dozen people in the audience; three years later, Ozu’s Floating Weeds sold out the same theater. Netflix’s insistence that theatrical exhibition was “an outdated model” was proven wrong again and again by films that did alright in theaters and exploded in popularity on streaming, particularly Saltburn, The Menu, and Barbarian. Now directors are fleeing Netflix and Apple, who really shouldn’t be so shocked after they spent half a decade trashing “irresponsible auteurs,” advancing the obscene concept of “second screening,” and insisting that every successful film would’ve done just as well locked away on their platforms. Sarandos must be pissed, but what’s a bully supposed to do? He just lost Emerald Fennell, David Fincher, Noah Baumbach, the Coen Brothers, Martin Scorsese, and he’s currently on the ropes with Greta Gerwig and Robert Zemeckis. Ooooh, bad company! Give it up, dude! Throw in the towel!
It’s been a good year for the movie business but I no longer feel compelled to give the cinema mouth-to-mouth resuscitation every other day of the week. That will surely change next year, or in 2028, or 2029—whenever another bazooka year like 2019 hits. This has been a dry but not unprecedented year for me at the movies; it reminds me of 2005, 2009, and 2011, dud years surrounded by some very ripe periods. The fact that I no longer feel the need to provide first aid is surely good, but I can only celebrate and scream “MOVIES ARE BACK!” so long before I remember how few movies I actually liked in 2026. But I’ll never stay home for good. It's in my blood.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM