Casting of Amazon MGM Studios Cinemacon 2025 seen at Amazon MGM Presentation Cinemacon 2025 at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace on April 02, 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Stewart Cook | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty images
Hollywood technology saves – but not in the way you might think.
In 2022, the electronic commerce giant and the upstart upstart movie studio Amazon Promised to spend about $ 1 billion each year for theatrical outings, a figure that would finance between 12 and 15 films per year. Today it seems ready to deliver.
Earlier this month, the company, which operates the Prime Video streaming platform and recently acquired MGM Studios, went on stage in Cinemacon in Las Vegas to boast its range of films made only for the big screen.
The inaugural presentation of Amazon during the annual Cinema United agreement – previously known as the National Association of Theater Owners – seduced exhibitors, marketing specialists and the media with flashy trailers and first -sized images of future films as “Project Hail Mary”, “After the Hunt” and “Verrity”.
This also brought a star power with Ryan Gosling, Andrew Garfield, Julia Roberts, Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman and Michael B. Jordan who put themselves at the head of these cinematographic outings.
“I thought that the presentation was incredible,” said Brock Bagby, president and chief content, responsible for programming and development in B&B theaters. “For their first year, they released all stops.”
Although the studio does not have a complete list of more than a dozen films before 2026, it has regularly invested in theatrical content in recent years. Amazon has achieved a large release, a film that played in more than 2,000 theaters, in 2023 and five in 2024. This year, Amazon has only four wide outings on the calendar so far, but the company should have 14 in 2026 and 16 in 2027.
This wave of theatrical content is exactly what the national box office needs. While successful franchise films have been abundant as a result of the pandemic, the overall number of wide outings has shrunk in the last decade. Even before the coche and double Hollywood labor strikes slow down production, Hollywood made fewer and fewer films each year, according to Comscore data.
Films at mid -Budget – Often in drama, comedy and genres of romantic comedy – began to disappear in the mid -2010s while the studios sought to invest in larger budgetary films that could cause higher profits. Relatively lower budget films have since been mainly redirected to streaming platforms in order to store these services with more affordable content.
Analysts provide that the National Box-Office has lost about $ 1 billion each year for total tickets due to this change.
At the same time as the studios modified their film slates, the cinema merged. The most recent union between Walt Disney Company And 20th Century Fox, announced for the first time in 2017 and finalized in early 2019, led to a loss of 10 to 15 films outings per year, according to comscore data.
In 2015, 20th Century Fox released 17 films. After his acquisition, the pandemic and strikes, he published less than half a dozen titles each year.
“With the consolidation in the past of certain studios, the production numbers have decreased in recent years, and with fewer versions, there is fewer potential for sales of the box office and concessions,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “More importantly, cinema theaters need new films to attract customers to their auditoriums.”
Amazon’s commitment to the theater, alongside the emergence of small studios like Neon and A24, should help to fill the gap left by the acquisition of 20th Century Fox.
“They have filled the gap that we are missing in Fox, which is so exciting, and it looks like a slate similar to Fox, where there are some big titles, but a lot of this environment,” said Bagby.
What industry experts have discovered is that the strength of the box office is not only based on the success of franchise films – superhero films, big budget and other action rates – but also on the volume and diversity of content.
There is a direct correlation between the number of theatrical versions and the force of the global box office. During the pandemic, the drop in sales of box office tickets has largely followed almost in locking stage with the percentage of drop in film versions.
“The number of films released continues to be treated in the right direction,” said Michael O’Leary, CEO of Cinema United. “When we consider large outings at 2,000 or more locations, we saw 94 last year, but we expect at least 110 in 2025. Beyond that, the distributors obtained release dates up to 2028 for films with a lot of commercial potential.”