As the Academy Awards ceremony, which honors the year’s best films, approaches, a new survey examines the reality of movie viewing. Just over half of Americans say they go to a movie theater in a given year.
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the summer of 2025, 53% of U.S. adults said they saw a movie in a movie theater in the past 12 months. A small but notable 7% said they had never seen a movie in a theater.
The findings reflect that the domestic box office is still struggling to regain footing since the coronavirus pandemic, which saw ticket sales drop 81% in 2020 due to theater closures. Moviegoers in the U.S. and Canada bought 769.2 million tickets in 2025, less than half the record high of 1.6 billion in 2002, according to data from Nash Information Services.
However, an August 2025 survey by NRG/National Research Group shows that 77% of Americans ages 12 to 74 went to the theater to see at least one movie in the past 12 months.
Box office revenue peaked at an inflation-adjusted $16.4 billion in 2002, and annual ticket revenue, which remained relatively stable throughout the 2000s and 2010s, dropped to less than $3 billion in 2020 when theaters were closed for several months. More than $9 billion in tickets were sold at U.S. theaters last year, according to media analytics firm ComScore. While the numbers indicate a recovery, ticket sales are still about 20% below pre-pandemic levels and far from a full recovery.
The data also highlighted generational and economic disparities in who buys tickets. Two-thirds of adults ages 18 to 29 say they have seen a movie at a theater in the past year, compared to just 39% of adults ages 65 and older. The same holds true for income, with high-income Americans reporting the highest rate of going to the movies at 64%, compared to 57% of middle-income adults and 43% of low-income adults.
Attendance also varied by race/ethnicity, with Hispanic adults having the highest rate of attendance at 59%, followed by white adults at 53% and black adults at 49%. In contrast, gender was not a significant factor, with the survey finding that it was about equal, with 53% of men and 54% of women saying they had gone to the cinema in the past year. By party affiliation, the gap widened slightly but remains small, with Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents reporting higher participation rates at 58% compared to 50% for Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents.
