The US box office since COVID
Annual theatrical gross against the pre-pandemic 2019
benchmark · Sources:
The Numbers,
MPA,
Gower Street, BLS
2020 trough
$2.13B
19% of 2019
2025 full year
$8.72B
77% of 2019
2026 YTD
$7.97B
71% of full-year 2019
Top 10 share
37.7%
of 2025 domestic gross · 2019: 38.8%
Domestic Box Office
Nominal dollars
About this data
- Domestic figures are full-market US & Canada theatrical gross from The Numbers. Completed years are fixed; only the in-progress year is refreshed.
- The final bar is year-to-date, not a full year, and is marked accordingly.
- The adjusted view uses CPI-U to restate every year in 2019 dollars. It is general inflation, not ticket-price inflation. Ticket prices have risen faster than CPI, so this is the conservative read of the decline.
- Top 10 share is the combined gross of the ten biggest films of a year, divided by that year’s domestic total. Both figures count dollars earned in the year, not lifetime gross, so a December release counts only its December dollars. The share is a ratio, so the raw-dollar and adjusted views show the same number. It appears in the United States view only: there is no published top 10 for the global market, and no admissions equivalent.
- The year-to-date share sits high for a mechanical reason. A year builds its long tail of small releases over twelve months, and the in-progress year has not yet. Compare full years to full years.
- These are published industry market totals, not sums of the FilmIntel catalog.