The Fifty-Dollar Movie Ticket
Hollywood, Beijing, and What It Means for Investors Over Fifty-Five
Podcast script  ·  Truesdell
When I was growing up, a movie ticket cost a couple of dollars. You walked into the theater on a Saturday afternoon, you bought a box of popcorn, and you settled in. It was not a special occasion. It was a Saturday. That model is gone.
This spring, Regal Cinemas sold opening-night seats to Dune: Part Three for fifty dollars apiece in their 70-millimeter IMAX house. Premium tickets now average eighteen dollars nationwide. They run as high as thirty in New York and Los Angeles. A standard adult ticket on a regular screen is about thirteen dollars. The dollar matinee is a memory.
That price gap — from a couple of dollars to fifty — is the story I want to walk through with you today. It is a story about how the theater business has changed. It is a story about the kinds of movies Hollywood is making and is not making. It is a story about the quiet competition the Chinese government has been running against American culture for the better part of twenty years. And it is a story about where I think an investor over fifty-five ought to be paying attention right now.
Part One: Why the Ticket Got Expensive
Every spring, the theater industry gathers in Las Vegas for a convention called CinemaCon. Cinema United, formerly the National Association of Theatre Owners, runs the event. About six thousand industry professionals from more than eighty countries attend. The 2026 convention was held in April at Caesars Palace and was described as the largest in the organization's history.
The Wall Street Journal sent reporters to cover it, and the price story came through clearly. Theater attendance in the United States is down more than a third from pre-pandemic levels. Fewer people are going to the movies. But the people who do go are spending more. AMC's chief executive told reporters that the average customer now spends about nine dollars on concessions per visit, nearly double what it was before COVID. Premium large-format screens — laser projection, immersive sound, big screens — now make up a growing share of total box office. Theaters have learned what the airlines learned twenty years ago: charge the loyal customer more, dress up the product, and call it an experience.
Not everyone in Hollywood is happy about this. Tom Rothman, chairman of Sony Pictures, used his CinemaCon platform to argue that ticket prices have climbed so high that going to the movies has become a special-occasion purchase rather than a routine one. He wants prices to come down. The theater owners pushed back. Their answer was straightforward: the studios are producing about twenty-five percent fewer films than they did before the pandemic. With fewer titles to fill the calendar, the economics force higher prices on the films that do release.
Both sides are right. Fewer movies, higher prices, fewer customers, more spending per customer. That is the business today. For the consumer over fifty-five who remembers when a movie was an ordinary weekend habit, the change is real. The casual matinee is gone. What replaces it is a planned outing — closer in cost and feel to a nice dinner than to a Saturday afternoon at the mall.
Part Two: What the Movies Used to Stand For
I want to step back from the dollars for a moment and talk about the films themselves, because the change there has been just as significant.
For a long stretch of American history, our movies carried a point of view. They did not preach. The good ones never preach. But they had a backbone. John Wayne made The Green Berets in 1968, in the middle of an unpopular war, and he put his name and his face on a picture that took the soldier's side. Conservatives have argued for decades that Hollywood lost that nerve somewhere along the way, that the studios in Burbank grew uncomfortable with flags, with uniforms, with anything that looked too much like national pride. There is some evidence for that complaint.
But every so often, the older tradition reappears. Top Gun: Maverick is the clearest recent example. Tom Cruise climbed back into the cockpit, the Navy lent its aircraft and its carriers, and the film grossed almost a billion and a half dollars worldwide. Audiences applauded in the theater. The Top Gun franchise has been a quiet patriotic anchor for nearly four decades now, and that is not an accident. There is a market for these stories. There always has been. People will pay eighteen dollars or thirty dollars or even fifty dollars when a film delivers something they recognize and want to support.
That is the lesson I think the studios most need to hear. The audience is not gone. The audience is selective. When the product is good and the message is honest and the experience justifies the price, the seats fill. When it does not, they do not.
Part Three: The Long Game Out of Beijing
Now I want to spend some time on a story the Wall Street Journal has been reporting this spring that I think every American investor and every American moviegoer ought to understand.
In January, a Chinese animated film called Ne Zha 2 was released in China. It is based on traditional Chinese mythology — a story about a young hero who battles demons. By every measure, it is a sophisticated production: strong special effects, broad comedy, dramatic action. It is, in essence, China's version of a Marvel film. In its home market it earned one-point-two billion dollars. That is more revenue than any American film has ever generated in a single country. It surpassed the domestic record set by Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015.
On its own, that is just a successful movie. But the background matters.
In 2008, DreamWorks released Kung Fu Panda. It was an American animated film built around Chinese cultural material — pandas, kung fu, ancient temples — and it was a major hit inside China. According to the Journal, officials inside the Chinese Communist Party watched that success carefully and drew a strategic conclusion. An American studio had used Chinese culture more effectively than Chinese studios themselves. The Party decided to fix that.
What followed was a deliberate, long-term effort. The Chinese government invited American directors to teach Chinese crews. Chinese studios studied Pixar and Marvel in detail. State money flowed into domestic animation. By 2016, Chinese films were regularly beating American films at the Chinese box office. That trend accelerated during the first Trump administration as trade tensions widened. Today, the heads of major Hollywood studios plan their budgets on the assumption that the Chinese market will contribute essentially nothing. Recent Disney releases — Mufasa: The Lion King, Moana 2 — barely registered there. Ne Zha 2 dominated. The shift is real, and it is structural.
The asymmetry between the two markets is worth describing clearly. In the United States, Ne Zha 2 can play in any theater that wants to book it. No federal agency reviews the film. The Chinese Embassy ran a trailer on a billboard in Times Square, and no one in Washington tried to stop it. That is consistent with the American principle of free expression. We do not censor incoming culture, even from competitors.
Inside China, the situation is the reverse. Every film shown in Chinese theaters — American, Chinese, or otherwise — passes through a Communist Party censorship process. Scenes referencing Taiwan, Tibet, or Hong Kong are routinely cut. Marvel films have been delayed for months. Top Gun: Maverick reportedly faced scrutiny over a flag patch on Maverick's jacket. China admits roughly thirty-four foreign films per year, and its domestic releases receive the best calendar dates and the largest screens. That is not a free market. It is a managed one, designed to favor state-approved content.
There is one piece of good news in this picture. The Chinese audience is not infinitely receptive to state-backed messaging. A nationalist action film called Operation Hadal opened around the same time as Ne Zha 2 and earned only fifty million dollars — a disappointment by Chinese standards. Earlier propaganda hits like The Battle at Lake Changjin and Wolf Warrior cleared far higher numbers. The Chinese public, like any audience, eventually tires of being lectured.
Inside the United States, Ne Zha 2 had a limited footprint. The original Mandarin-language release played mainly in coastal cities with large Chinese-American populations — New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco — and earned roughly twenty million dollars in North America. A wider English-dubbed release in over two thousand theaters opened to about one-and-a-half million dollars and flopped. In suburban and small-town America, audiences chose familiar pictures with familiar stars. The original Ne Zha film in 2019 earned less than four million in North America.
But the limited U.S. footprint should not be read as a non-issue. Beijing is not trying to win Pensacola or Ocala on opening weekend. The strategy is patient and targeted. Plant cultural pride in diaspora communities. Build familiarity with Chinese heroes among the next generation of moviegoers in major cities and on streaming platforms. Compete for share of imagination, not share of box office. That is how soft power works. The Chinese government has been playing that game with state money and state patience while American studios have been arguing with theater chains about ticket prices.
Part Four: How Hollywood Is Fighting Back
The American response is taking shape, and CinemaCon was where much of it became public.
The Walt Disney Studios used the convention to announce a new premium large-format certification program called Infinity Vision. In practical terms, Infinity Vision is a Disney-endorsed seal of approval for top-tier auditoriums — screens that meet specific standards for size, laser projection, and immersive audio. About seventy-five qualifying screens are already certified in the United States, with roughly three hundred globally and more expected.
The timing is strategic. On December 18, 2026, Disney releases Avengers: Doomsday, directed by the Russo brothers with Robert Downey Jr. returning as Doctor Doom. The same date, Warner Brothers opens Dune: Part Three, and Dune has already locked up most of the dedicated IMAX screens in North America. Disney's Infinity Vision program effectively gives the studio a second premium tent to compete under. Before that, on September 25, Disney is re-releasing Avengers: Endgame with new footage on Infinity Vision screens — a clear effort to demonstrate the format and condition audiences for Doomsday in December.
IMAX, for its part, remains the dominant brand in the premium-screen category. The company operates four hundred and twenty-six locations in North America alone. Industry analysts expect IMAX revenue to grow roughly eight percent in 2026 on the strength of the upcoming film slate, which includes major Disney, Warner, and Universal titles. IMAX has characterized the Disney program as more of a marketing exercise than a competitive threat, and the underlying numbers support that view. A rising premium-format market lifts every credible operator in the category.
The broader theatrical business is recovering. Through the early part of 2026, U.S. box office is running at its highest level since before the pandemic. Industry forecasts call for nine-and-a-half to ten billion dollars in domestic box office for the full year. That is still below the pre-2020 peaks, but the trajectory is positive, and the premium-format share is rising faster than the overall total. The casual moviegoer may be staying home. The committed moviegoer is paying more and going to better theaters.
Part Five: What an Investor Over Fifty-Five Should Take From This
I want to spend a few minutes on the investment implications, because there are several worth considering.
The first observation is that the theatrical exhibition business is not the dying industry that streaming-era headlines have suggested. The CinemaCon trade show — four hundred booths, suppliers from around the world, capital expenditure flowing into laser projectors, premium seating, immersive audio systems, and concession upgrades — is the picture of an industry reinvesting in itself. The language used at the show is the language of business: qualified buyers, sales pipelines, return on investment, decision makers. Theater operators are spending. Suppliers are selling. Studios are committing to theatrical windows. That is a recovering sector, not a collapsing one.
For a portfolio designed for stability, income, and selective growth, three categories of names are worth examining. I want to be clear that I am describing the structure of the opportunity, not making a specific recommendation for any individual situation.
The first category is the theater operators themselves. The publicly traded exhibitors have recovered unevenly from the pandemic. The differentiator is balance-sheet strength. Operators carrying heavy debt from the 2020-2021 period have less capacity to fund the premium upgrades that are now driving margin. Operators with cleaner balance sheets are in a stronger position to capture the recovery.
The second category is the suppliers. IMAX is the best-known name and has the clearest exposure to the premium-format growth trend. Other suppliers — projection manufacturers, audio system providers, premium seating companies — exhibit at CinemaCon and participate in the same capital expenditure cycle. These businesses tend to be less volatile than the theater operators themselves because they sell to multiple chains rather than depending on the attendance of any single circuit.
The third category is concessions and beverage. The Coca-Cola Company is the presenting sponsor of CinemaCon, and that sponsorship reflects the underlying economics. Concessions are a high-margin business that has grown faster than ticket sales themselves. The nine-dollar cup of soda is a high-margin cup of soda. Coca-Cola has paid dividends to American shareholders without interruption for more than sixty years, and the theatrical channel is one of many durable revenue lines. For a retirement portfolio focused on income, the consumer staples names tied to the theatrical business deserve a place on the watch list.
I would add one general note. The theatrical exhibition business is real-estate-based. It generates recurring discretionary consumer spending. It benefits from a content slate that is showing signs of strengthening through 2027. For investors who value tangible-asset businesses with predictable cash flow, the sector fits the profile better than the headlines suggest.
Part Six: What I Am Watching in Washington
I want to close with a forward-looking observation, because there is a policy dimension to this story that has not yet fully developed.
The first Trump administration reshaped the U.S.-China conversation around trade, tariffs, and technology. Steel, semiconductors, intellectual property, and supply chains all received sustained policy attention. What did not receive comparable attention was the cultural and entertainment dimension of the same competition. The Chinese government has spent twenty years building a state-supported film industry designed to compete with Hollywood at home and to project influence abroad. That effort has produced measurable results, and Ne Zha 2 is the clearest recent example.
The open question is whether the second Trump administration will engage with the cultural side of the China competition in any sustained way. A serious policy conversation might address several issues: the asymmetric market access between American and Chinese films, the financial ties between Chinese capital and American studios, the distribution of state-backed Chinese content on American streaming platforms, and the reciprocity question more broadly. Whether any of those issues becomes a formal policy priority remains to be seen.
There is a reasonable debate to be had about how far the federal government should go. One view holds that the cultural contest with China is exactly where the next phase of the strategic competition will play out, and that ignoring it cedes ground that will be difficult to recover. Another view holds that the answer is not government intervention but free competition — better American films, better American theaters, and American audiences making their own choices. Reasonable people will disagree on where the appropriate line falls.
What I can say with confidence is that the policy dimension is now an investable variable. If the administration takes up the cultural-trade question with China — through executive action, through trade negotiation, or through Treasury or Commerce review of cross-border investment — the names we have discussed today will move. Operators, suppliers, and studios all have exposure to that policy outcome. The investor who is paying attention to the regulatory landscape will be better positioned than the one who is not.
Closing Thoughts
The casual movie outing of the nineteen-sixties and seventies is not coming back. The dollar matinee is gone. The neighborhood single-screen has been replaced by larger, fewer, more expensive auditoriums equipped with laser projection and reclining seats. For some of us, that change carries real loss. For others, it is an upgrade. Either way, it is the market we have.
What I would encourage is this. When a film comes along that justifies the price — Avengers: Doomsday in December, the Endgame re-release in September, the next Top Gun, the next genuine American event film — make the outing. Pay the eighteen dollars or the thirty dollars. Once in a while, pay the fifty for the right seat on the right night. Every ticket is a small vote for the kind of stories and the kind of industry that built American cultural leadership in the first place.
From an investment standpoint, the sector deserves a careful look. The premium-format trend is real. The recovery is real. The Chinese competitive challenge is real but contained, at least for now, by the limits of soft power and the persistence of American creative strength. The policy variable in Washington is the one to watch closely over the next twelve to eighteen months.
I will continue to follow the story, and I will continue to share what I see, in plain language and with respect for your time and your capital. Thank you for listening.
— Truesdell