This summer has made one thing clear: Hollywood is changing.
The Odyssey sold out IMAX screenings a year before release. Obsession, from a 26-year-old YouTube creator, became Focus Features’ highest-grossing film ever. And when A24 announced a partnership with Google’s DeepMind, fans immediately pushed back, questioning whether the studio understood the community that helped build its success.
They look like separate stories, but they’re evidence of the same change.
Gen Z now makes up roughly 40% of moviegoers, up from 34% in 2019. They’re the largest audience segment, with attendance among the group up ~25% in the last 12 months.
But zoom out – the box office is still about 20% below pre-pandemic levels.
What looks like growth is really a shift in composition. Gen Z is becoming the largest share of a smaller market, and they’re showing up far more selectively than previous generations.
Attendance is concentrating around specific releases, when the experience feels compelling enough to break away from mobile screens and daily routines. This dynamic is redefining both what succeeds and what a movie theater is for.
What gets people there is changing.
Discovery has changed just as much as attendance. 63% of Gen Z now discovers long-form content through social clips before engaging with the full experience. The clip has become the trailer, the review, and often the recommendation.
Hollywood spent decades assuming audiences would arrive because of name recognition, but Gen Z is asking: Does this belong to the internet I actually live on?
The box office numbers already show the answer. A Minecraft Movie approached $1 billion globally, powered by a generation that grew up inside that world. Obsession proved something equally important: Curry Barker didn’t build an audience after getting a deal, he built it before Hollywood arrived. Cultural momentum now exists before the studio does.
Smart studios are realizing cultural relevance no longer gets manufactured in a conference room, and younger audiences aren’t waiting for Hollywood to define what matters. Gen Z assigns meaning through clips, commentary, edits, memes, and shared language.
Studios will succeed by recognizing that momentum early and building with it instead of trying to manufacture it.
A few are already adapting, bringing creators into campaigns, hiring fan editors, and building alongside communities rather than marketing to them. Simply put, the people best equipped to translate a story into culture are often the ones already participating in it.
The backlash to A24’s AI partnership underscored how much ownership audiences now feel. Fans were defending a studio they believed belonged, in part, to them.
This fandom-driven evolution is filling a broader cultural gap. As Gen Z drinks less and goes out less frequently than older gens did at the same age, movies are re-emerging as a kind of IRL ritual, a place to be around others and feel part of something happening in real time.
The same platforms fueling that behavior are also reshaping who gets to lead it.
Creators are no longer waiting for Hollywood to discover them.
Curry Barker, Kane Parsons, and Markiplier built communities first, then brought Hollywood to them. The gatekeepers increasingly arrive after the audience.
Hollywood is no longer competing solely with streaming platforms. It is competing with TikTok, YouTube, and a creator economy that never turns off. Executives now track platforms like Letterboxd and social media not simply to measure reactions, but to understand culture as it forms. The model is flipping.
The change is visible even at the Oscars. While the broadcast drew 17.8 million TV viewers, content tied to the event generated 3 billion views on YouTube. For many people, that’s the primary experience (and soon it will be, as the Oscars are set to stream on YouTube).
Gen Z isn’t going to the movies out of habit, they’re choosing moments. Those moments tend to fall into two lanes: large-scale experiences that are loud, communal, and impossible to ignore, or smaller cultural worlds that feel deeply owned by the people inside them.
The common threads are participation, ownership and intent. This requires a different approach to how films are brought into the world:
· Prioritize participation over passive viewing.
· Build worlds audiences can help shape long before release.
· Invest in fan communities as creative partners, not just marketing channels.
· Design every release to feel like a moment worth leaving the house for.
For brands the lesson is: You are no longer marketing into culture. You are building with the people shaping it. Show up earlier, collaborate openly, and create systems where audiences have a real role in how ideas evolve and spread.
Hollywood must embrace this new role: less gatekeeper, more participant; less originator, more amplifier; less deciding what culture is, more recognizing where it already exists.
The brands that learn the same lesson will have a much easier time earning relevance with the next generation.
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Sources:
Cinema United, Strength of Theatrical Exhibition Report (2026)
Comscore, U.S. and global box office data (2025)
The New York Times, reporting on Gen Z moviegoing behavior and theatrical trends (2025)
Variety, coverage of theatrical performance and audience trends (2025–2026)
The Hollywood Reporter, coverage of audience behavior and industry strategy (2026)
ABC, Oscars broadcast ratings (2026)