One lesson of 2025 may be that only younger people \u2013 children in particular \u2013 can save cinemas from imminent annihilation.<\/p>\n
This defies a line popular with pointy-headed cineastes. The argument goes that exhibition of high-end films in often-venerable formats preserves the mystique of the medium. You had an example of this in 2025 with screenings of Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s One Battle After Another<\/a> in 70mm film and VistaVision 35mm film. <\/p>\n Earlier in the year, Brady Corbet\u2019s The Brutalist<\/a>, the first feature entirely shot on VistaVision for more than 60 years, also unspooled in lovely wide-gauge film. The exhibitors who have the equipment \u2013 almost all projection rooms now use only film-free digital tech \u2013 will, indeed, confirm that such screenings are invariably jammed. <\/p>\n Those lucky cinemas are already salivating over the prospect of Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Odyssey arriving in such formats in July 2026.<\/p>\n Such outings for physical prints are, in a sense, what vinyl is to the music industry \u2013 a luxury throwback to another era \u2013 but they constitute a minute percentage of the market. The exhibition business is not going to be saved by art-house cinemas hosting 70mm showings of Lawrence of Arabia.<\/p>\n Cue miserabilist essays on how lazy, chuckle-headed young people have destroyed one of the great cultural mediums. You know the sort of rubbish. Look at these idiots staring blankly at their phones while they walk in front of hurtling traffic.<\/p>\n Oh for the days when, for two coppers and an old jam jar, you could watch Betty Grable and Buster Keaton from the cheap bit of the balcony. They couldn\u2019t be bothered getting off their sofas and keeping the picture palace alive. And so on.<\/p>\n [\u00a0The 50 best films of 2025 \u2013 a full list in reverse orderOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n The conversation around Netflix\u2019s potential takeover<\/a> of Warner Bros has accelerated this fretting. Ted Sarandos, the streamer\u2019s chief executive, has made some efforts to placate those who want to protect the window between a film\u2019s theatrical release and its arrival on smaller screens. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not like we have this opposition to movies in theatres,\u201d he said this month. \u201cMy pushback has been mostly in the fact of the long, exclusive windows, which we don\u2019t really think are that consumer friendly.\u201d<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t sound exactly great for the cinema business. Stupid young people with their consumer-friendly windows.<\/p>\n But Ted Sarandos is 61. He grew up with ET and Jaws and Star Wars. Who do you think has been occupying most cinemas seats over the past 12 months? I\u2019ll give you a clue: it\u2019s not middle-aged cineastes seeking out nice crackly prints of The Brutalist.<\/p>\n Before the arrival of Avatar: Fire and Ash (which should upend everything), the highest-grossing English-language films of 2025 worldwide were, in increasing order of hugeness, A Minecraft Movie<\/a>, Lilo & Stitch and Zootopia 2. <\/p>\n [\u00a050 films to see in 2026, from Ancestors to Wuthering HeightsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n No qualification is required on the raw sums. Those last two have each made more than $1 billion. That is old school cuckoo-bananas money. A Minecraft Movie is only a little short of that sum. Also in the top 10 are the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon<\/a> and two Asian animations, Ne Zha 2 and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle.<\/p>\n Does anything there appeal largely to an older audience? Maybe the latest Mission: Impossible<\/a> flick. You could make a better case for Clarksonians flocking to F1: The Movie<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just children. Look around a movie theatre showing a film without talking rabbits and you\u2019ll not see an abundance of greyheads. Nearly two-thirds of \u201cheavy cinemagoers\u201d in Ireland are between the ages of 16 and 44, according to research in 2024 by Kantar Media for Pearl & Dean Ireland. <\/p>\n \u201cAs someone who goes to the movies three or four times a week I can tell you, it\u2019s basically only young people going,\u201d Sean Burns, a Boston-based critic, wrote this month. \u201cThe over-40 set is staying home and blaming the industry\u2019s decline on the kids. Typical boomer shit.\u201d<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t sound too wide of the mark. The evidence shows kids are still desperate to be taken to family films. Teenagers are happier to consume narrative in communal spaces than Sean\u2019s boomers pretend. There remains a base level of youngish support for a medium that too many are already consigning to the mausoleum. <\/p>\n The problem \u2013 and it\u2019s no easy one to solve \u2013 is keeping that audience there through deep middle age and on into dotage. <\/p>\n Man (or woman) cannot live on Minecraft alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI believe that children are the future,\u201d Walt Whitman once wrote. \u201cTeach them well and let them lead…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":214922,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60,1868,2031],"class_list":["post-214921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-netflix","tag-warner-bros"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Zootopia](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/MCLUNDICEZFEVKYBJRCOK2RBAU.jpg\")
Zootopia 2 hit Irish cinemas in November 2025 <\/p>\n