The US box office since COVID
Annual theatrical gross against the pre-pandemic 2019
benchmark · Sources:
The Numbers,
MPA,
Gower Street, BLS
2020 trough
231.6M
19% of 2019 tickets
2025 full year
762.2M
62% of 2019 tickets
Domestic Tickets Sold
Domestic admissions
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.
- Tickets sold is domestic admissions from The Numbers' market summary. It is the cleanest read of the recovery, because it strips out price entirely: 2025 sold 62% of the tickets 2019 did while taking 76% of the dollars. Note the 2010–2019 average ticket prices behind it match NATO's published series exactly, and the resulting picture agrees closely with the independent CPI-deflated view.
- Caveat on the newest years. NATO stopped publishing ticket prices after 2019, so 2020 onward uses The Numbers' own estimates, and 2024 and 2025 carry the same $11.31, which suggests the price is being held constant rather than re-estimated. Treat the last year or two as indicative. There is no admissions series for the in-progress year, or for the Global view.
- These are published industry market totals, not sums of the FilmIntel catalog.