Superman's real-life kryptonite: The incredible shrinking cinema business

Sydney Morning Herald

19-07-2025

There's a new Superman movie in theatres this week and business is, as they say, boffo! ' Superman soars to $[US]122 million, third-biggest box office opening weekend of 2025,' raved Variety, referring to ticket sales in the United States and Canada. (In Australia, the film brought in $8.13 million for the weekend.) If you follow box-office news, it's all very normal: big bucks, records broken, blah blah blah.
But there is one thing in Hollywood that's rarer than a substantive movie role for a female actor over 40, and that's the disclosure of the actual number of tickets a particular film sells on a particular weekend in a box-office report.
That number can lead you into an alternative reality worthy of a David Lynch film. It also explains why going to the movies is so freaking irritating these days.
Now, $US122 million ($187 million) might seem like a respectable haul for an opening weekend. However, if you look up the average cost of a movie ticket in the US, which is $US11 and change, and then do a little maths, you get the number of actual tickets that Superman sold: About 11 million. (The number is actually a lot lower; those big-franchise films get a disproportionate share of their incomes from high-priced Imax showings and the like, but that's another story.)
Let's flash back to the last big Superman movie, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, in 2016. That opened to $US166 million. Here's where we step through the looking glass. Movie ticket prices back then were $US8.50. More maths, and we get … 20 million tickets sold on the opening weekend. In other words, the Superman franchise has lost about half its fan base. Holy Kryptonite, Batman!
Loading
Hollywood's biggest secret: despite all the incessant talk about box-office records, ticket sales have been heading south – for decades. Per capita movie-ticket sales were down by a third in the first 20 years of this century. (Australia's admissions have declined similarly, from 92.5 million in 2001 to 55.4 million last year.) The pandemic made things much worse, of course, but the rebound hasn't brought us back.
Fewer ticket sales mean someone has to pay, and it's coming out of the pockets of those among us who still go to see movies on the big screen. It feels a lot like being mugged.
My wife and I went to the swanky Hoyts in Sydney's Entertainment Quarter to see F1: The Movie the other night. Tickets for the 'Xtreme Screen' showing were about $30 – and as I checked out online I saw that Hoyts had added a $5.10 'booking fee' to the order. (That extra 10 cents was a nice touch.)