With CinemaCon 2025 in the rearview mirror, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the major takeaways from this year’s conference. Amid all the sprinting to trade show meetings and escalator surfing inside Caesars Palace, did we actually learn anything about the current state of the motion picture exhibition and distribution business that we didn’t know before arriving in Las Vegas? Answering that question seems a much better use of time than the fool’s errand of attempting to prognosticate the success of the 2025 film slate based on endless two minute trailers.

On the plus side, five years after the COVID pandemic began, and nearly three years since “Top Gun Maverick” flew into cinemas to ignite post-pandemic moviegoing, this was the first CinemaCon in which the industry seemed truly stable enough for attendees to have serious conversations (and arguments) about the existential issues it now faces. Some of these issues, such as Hollywood’s dual labor strike in 2023, are self-inflicted, while others are evergreen quandaries which become more prominent on a cyclical basis. One such perpetual challenge provides an ideal starting point for our CinemaCon analysis, as it is one which remained a contentious subject right up until the pandemic closed movie theatres around the world in 2020.

Exclusive Theatrical Windows
If there was one topic of conversation at this year’s CinemaCon that exemplified the old adage, everything old is new again, it would be the debate over exclusive theatrical windows. Prior to the pandemic the theatrical release window hovered at around 90 days (for the most part) before a movie would be available at home. With COVID closing movie theatres for months (and in some cases, years) on end, Hollywood studios began releasing theatrical movies day-and-date, both in cinemas and on subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) platforms. Warner Bros. Discovery and the Walt Disney Company, both of whom were launching their own streaming services, used this distribution strategy for some of their biggest blockbusters, if they didn’t skip movie theatres entirely. The studios had finally cracked the theatrical release window and there was no way they were going to put the genie back in its bottle.

But the pandemic has been over for years and some distributors (not all) now rely on a hodgepodge of release strategies which can keep a theatrical title exclusively in cinemas for as little as 17 days. Such titles are then made available for home viewing via premium-video-on-demand (PVOD), where audiences can rent the movie for a higher fee than regular VOD, though often less than the price of two movie tickets. The subject was raised within the first five minutes of the very first International Day panel discussion on Monday 31 March when Alejandro Ramírez Magaña, the CEO of Cinépolis, suggested that, unlike in North America, the post-pandemic recovery of the cinema business in Europe has been helped by a “consistent and longer window.”

By Tuesday morning, Michael O’Leary, President and CEO of Cinema United (formerly the National Association of Theatre Owners – NATO), was using data to make a similar argument on the Colosseum stage during his annual state of the industry speech, “If you compare the box office results of the top 100 films per year, pre and post-pandemic, we see that the top 20 movies declined by 10% but the box office of the next 80 movies – the small and mid-size movies that are so important – declined by a full 32%. When you consider the relevant windows, 49 days was the average for the top 20 movies. However, the next 80 fall all the way to 31 days. The corresponding drop in box office is not surprising. If we can limit the decline of those 80 movies to the same 10% decline as the top 20 – it would add over $1 billion to the annual box office.”

At the same time, O’Leary was sure to be realistic, admitting that the days of a minimum 90-day theatrical window for all movies are definitely gone. “We understand the desire for the flexibility to shift movies which have maximized their theatrical performance to other platforms to recoup investment,” he said. “But there must be a baseline, and for most movies, the ultimate box office success and consumer demand cannot be effectively determined short of a 45-day window.”

Some attendees saw this as O’Leary drawing a line in the sand with studios. Others, such as Eduardo Acuna, the CEO of Cineworld Group and Regal, the second largest cinema chain in the world, worried that the perception, and at times the reality, that every title will be available on streaming services in a matter of weeks, was training moviegoers to simply wait until a movie was available at home. Because most audiences do not know (or care) about the difference between PVOD, transactional and subscription streaming, it ends up negatively impacting the frequency of theatrical moviegoing.

“Two years before the pandemic, when the window was 90 days, the median opening of a wide release was USD $17.5 million for the weekend,” Acuna stated in making his case for a longer theatrical window. “Last year, that was USD $11.5 million. In that same period, 23% of wide releases opened to less than USD $10 million. Now that number is 41%.

Sitting on the same Tuesday afternoon panel with Acuna was Peter Levinsohn, Chairman of Global Distribution for NBCUniversal Studio Group. He argued that Universal is a “theatrical-first” studio,” despite a strategy of putting smaller films on PVOD after only three weekends in cinemas. He said theatrical distribution is, “the underpinning of every single thing we do. It’s where the brand is created. And it is the proxy for value in all the ancillary windows. So we have no interest in hurting theatrical. The second thing we prioritize is that we need to be where the consumer is, and the consumer is not going to go to see every single movie in the theater. Over the last couple of years, we really fine-tuned the optimization on the windowing, which has made us more profitable, particularly on the small to mid-range films, which are largely the ones that have had a problem post-pandemic. That ability to be more profitable has allowed us to make more movies, and there’s no question that we have by far the biggest slate in the industry, and we’re only able to do that because of the improved economics.”

As Acuna pointed out however, another problem arises with PVOD, one Celluloid Junkie has been reporting on for nearly a decade. “The second a movie goes out on PVOD, piracy just explodes worldwide,” he said. “It’s a huge problem, and we’re losing a lot of box office.”

The difficulty for movie theatre operators is they have about as much leverage as a wet paper towel when it comes to forcing studios to increase their theatrical release windows, especially with the reduced number of wide releases each studio is producing. Indeed, based on their comments during slate presentations, studio executives appeared to mostly brush off the release windows plea. On Monday evening, Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group’s Chairman and CEO, Tom Rothman, was one of the few to reference the topic. “Cost and windows can work for us or against us,” he told exhibitors. “Theatrical needs to be smart about them both. I will let you know that Sony will work with you on both.”

Andrew Cripps, Head of Theatrical Distribution at Walt Disney Studios, also made a point of mentioning that Disney has one of the longest theatrical windows for its films and they never market when a movie will be available on streaming while it is still playing in cinemas.

Preshow and Trailer Length
While cinema operators want release windows to be longer, studios want trailer packs to be shorter. Everyone agrees that slate awareness is at an all time low and that placing trailers before a feature film is the best marketing tool for upcoming releases. However in the United States some cinema chains have taken to running upwards of 30 minutes of trailers and advertisements before the film begins. Moviegoers have grown publicly frustrated at paying for a ticket and then being forced to sit through eight or nine trailers, each roughly 2 minutes 30 seconds on average. In some international territories such as Europe and Asia this is not as much of a problem with the number of trailers and their length being shorter all around.

On the last day of CinemaCon, before presenting Paramount Pictures’ upcoming slate, Chris Aronson, the studio’s President of Domestic Distribution, went over a number of notes he had for exhibitors, one of which was to play no more than five trailers before any movie.

During the International Day executive panel Ramírez Magaña agreed, saying Cinépolis usually runs four trailers before a feature presentation. “We think that more than four trailers, people cannot retain them, and less than four trailers, we are doing a disservice at promoting and marketing other films,” he explained.

During the same panel Jeff Goldstein, President of Global Distribution at Warner Bros. Pictures, suggested exhibitors and distributors should be looking at both the number of trailers as well as the length of each trailer. “I’m an advocate for different lengths of trailers. Not all trailers need to be two-and-a-half minutes which was established 20 years ago,” he said. “Maybe that was appropriate at that point in time, but at this point in time, I think you’re better off getting your message out and telling your story in 90 seconds, or in 45 seconds or in two minutes. And I think that’s the type of thing that all of us have to look at on the studio side. How do we best get our message across, and what are the different ways we can do that?”

At the same time, Goldstein believes that if there is a compelling scene or sequence from a specific film that’s five minutes or a bit longer, then it should be used in a long-format trailer if it helps market the movie effectively. “If there is a compelling piece of footage that’s seven minutes, five minutes, absolutely we should all go after that,” he said. “That’s all our issues in marketing to the public today, linear TV marketing doesn’t work. What does work is working with exhibitors, sharing data and using their subscription programs and loyalty programs.”

Marketing Has Become More Difficult
During his state of the industry address, O’Leary cited a recent study conducted by the National Research Group which found audience awareness of new movies has fallen, with a 38% decline of titles which reached an awareness level of over 50% before opening weekend. The head of Cinema United urged his members to do everything possible to help drive movie marketing to all demographics and not simply rely on studios to market a release.

“Moving forward, our goal should be audience awareness of over 50% for all wide releases,” he challenged. “We live in a time of pervasive and relentless communication, and there is no excuse not to attain this target if exhibition and distribution work together.”

A good starting point, according to O’Leary, would be to market upcoming releases as playing “only in theatres” while simultaneously stopping the promotion for pre-order of current releases for in-home viewing. “‘At-home’ should never be the default app option while a movie can still be seen in thousands of theatres across the country,” he said, a comment which may have been aimed at online movie ticket aggregators.

2026 and 2027 Release Schedules Are Stacked
As the industry recovered from the pandemic in fits and starts, it seems that at each CinemaCon we’ve been told, a version of “wait until next year” when it comes to when the release schedule will return moviegoers to cinemas on a consistent basis. Remember AMC CEO, Adam Aron, telling CinemaCon attendees in 2024 that they had to “survive until 2025”? Well, seeing how the box office played out during the first quarter of 2025, he may have been a year off.

Yet, based on all of the slates studios presented during CinemaCon it truly looks like the release schedule will finally be filling out in a meaningful way toward the end of this year, leading into a packed 2026.

Just a handful of the titles dated during 2026 include the next “ Avengers Doomsday,” the next  “Fast & Furious,” “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping,” “Jumanji 3,” “Masters of the Universe,” “Moana 3,” another “Minions,” “Project Hail Mary,” “Scream 7” “Shrek 5,” “ Spider-Man 4,” “Super Mario Bros. 2,” and “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow.”

Sure, a lot of these are tentpole releases, though they are from historic blockbuster franchises. This also doesn’t account for movies from Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg. It’s looking like studios and distributors may soon have to start making some hard decisions and possibly date their releases up against each other.

The Debut of Cinema United
Speaking of Mr. O’Leary, that NATO finally decided to change its name should not come as a shock. Given the current political climate, having the same acronym as a 32-member international military alliance – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – finally caught up with the exhibitor trade groiup.

Though many joked that the organization was becoming a soccer / football team (à la Manchester United), the name began rolling off presenters’ tongues pretty swiftly with few, if any, making the mistake of referring to NATO. Like the name CinemaCon, which wasn’t universally loved initially, the industry will eventually get used to the association’s new moniker.

And though the new name and branding might have taken centerstage for Cinema United, its leader quietly, yet quite publicly, stepped into his own after two years in the role. Having spent his first year getting adjusted to the cinema business, O’Leary appeared confident on the Colosseum stage, aggressively addressing numerous obstacles both exhibitors and distributors must contend with.

“We know the issues we face, and we must dedicate ourselves to the hard business of resolving them,” he said before concluding with, “We are on the brink of the next great era of cinema. Let’s get to work.”