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“Let’s Go to an Immersive Experience”

The sentence that is quietly replacing “let’s go to the movies” — and why the story doesn’t die with the format.

There is a sentence that used to organize a whole evening. Let’s go to the movies. It didn’t specify a film. It rarely even meant one in particular. It meant: let’s go somewhere, together, and have something happen to us.

That sentence is dying. Not because people stopped wanting the evening — but because the thing at the end of it stopped being worth the trip.

Listen to how people plan a Friday now. Let’s go to the Sphere. Let’s do the Van Gogh thing. Let’s book the escape room, the teamLab, the Meow Wolf, the dark ride, the immersive dinner. The grammar has already changed. The industry just hasn’t caught up to it.

The decline is not what the industry keeps telling itself

The comfortable story in exhibition is that COVID broke the habit and streaming stole the audience, and that a strong slate fixes it. The numbers say something more uncomfortable.

Domestic box office landed at roughly $8.87 billion in 2025. Against 2019’s $11.3 billion, that’s down more than 20 percent. But revenue is the flattering metric. Look at admissions — actual human beings in actual seats — and 2025 drew about 780 million, down from roughly 1.2 to 1.3 billion in 2019. That’s not a dip. That’s nearly forty percent of the audience gone.

The gap between those two numbers is the whole story. Ticket prices rose from about $9.16 in 2019 to $13.29 in 2025, with premium large-format seats at $17.69. As one industry analysis put it bluntly: America’s theaters are charging considerably more to considerably fewer people, and calling it a recovery.

And here is the part that should end the pandemic excuse permanently. According to The Numbers, North American ticket sales peaked in the early 2000s and have fallen roughly 46 percent since the turn of the millennium — while box office revenue rose 14 percent over the same period, papering over the erosion with price increases. The audience began leaving twenty years before anyone had heard of a lockdown or a streaming war.

PwC’s forecast is that global box office may not return to pre-pandemic levels until 2030. Twelve years to get back to where you started is not a recovery. It’s a plateau with good lighting.

Meanwhile, the occasion went somewhere else

People did not stop leaving the house. They stopped leaving the house for that.

Location-based immersive entertainment — themed attractions, immersive theatre, experiential art museums, live immersive gaming — is now valued at roughly $147 billion in 2026 and forecast toward $261 billion by 2031. Operators have announced more than $80 billion in new attraction spending through 2035, led by Disney’s $60 billion commitment and Universal’s Epic Universe.

The multiplex is on the wrong side of that trade. It sells a seat, in the dark, facing forward, in a room engineered in the 1930s and refurbished ever since.

The proof is a movie

Here is the fact that should reframe this entire debate for anyone who thinks “immersive” means abandoning storytelling.

The single biggest financial driver at the Sphere in Las Vegas right now is The Wizard of Oz.

An 87-year-old film. Reimagined for an immersive venue, it passed its 500th showing in March 2026. In Q1 2026, the Sphere segment posted revenue of $266 million, up 69 percent year over year, with the increase attributed primarily to higher per-show revenue from Oz. The quarter before, Sphere Entertainment turned its first operating profit since opening in 2023 — and named the same show as the biggest contributor.

The story didn’t change. Dorothy, the road, the house in the storm — all intact. What changed was the container. And the container was worth a 69 percent revenue increase and the difference between losing money and making it.

This is the thing the “cinema is dying” headlines get wrong and the “cinema is fine” headlines get wrong in the opposite direction. Film is not the casualty here. The passive box is the casualty. Great stories are not losing to experiences. Great stories are being moved into them, and finding out they’re worth more there.

The Sphere sold roughly 1.3 million concert tickets in 2024 for a record $420.5 million gross — the highest annual figure for any venue in the fifty-year history of Billboard Boxscore. The Eagles’ 56-show run averaged $250 a ticket, with around 30 percent of attendees traveling to Las Vegas specifically for it, and 92 percent rating it as exceptional.

Nobody flies across a country for a multiplex.

Why immersive tells stories better

The case isn’t that immersion is flashier. It’s that immersion recruits more of the human being.

Presence beats depiction. A film shows you a place. An immersive experience puts you in one. The difference is not degree, it’s kind — your body accepts the second as happening in a way it never quite does with the first. People describe immersive experiences the way they describe events in their lives, not the way they describe media they consumed.

The frame stops being a window and becomes an environment. Cinema’s grammar was built around a rectangle you look at. Immersive design has no offscreen — the story is behind you, above you, moving through the room. Attention becomes something the audience spends rather than something the edit assigns.

Shared physical presence is doing enormous work. The pandemic proved that people will consume infinite content alone and still feel starved. What they were missing was not narrative. It was being somewhere with other people while something happened. An immersive venue sells exactly that. A streaming subscription structurally cannot.

And sound is the load-bearing element almost everyone underestimates. You can look away from a screen. You cannot look away from a sound field. Vision tells you what is in front of you; hearing tells you what surrounds you — it is the sense that reports place. Immersion fails most often not because the visuals are insufficient, but because the audio collapses the illusion: a hot spot near the speaker, a dead zone at the back, distortion at the moment the scene needs to be loudest. Get the sound field wrong and the guest is looking at a very expensive picture. Get it right and they stop noticing the room entirely, which is the whole objective.

What this actually means for exhibition

Not extinction. Conversion.

Notice that the premium end of theatrical is the part that’s growing: North America now has roughly 950 large-format screens, up 37 percent in five years. PwC reads that as a clear signal that audiences will still leave the house for something that can’t be replicated at home.

That’s the entire lesson in one data point. The commodity middle — twelve identical screens showing the same slate at rising prices — is what the audience is abandoning. The differentiated, high-immersion end is what they’re paying more for. The buildings aren’t the problem. The format inside them is.

An exhibitor with a 300-seat room, a trained operations staff, a liquor license, and a location people already know how to drive to is holding most of what an immersive venue operator has to build from scratch. The question is not whether those rooms survive. It’s whether they get reformatted before someone builds a purpose-built venue down the road.

The honest counterargument

Anyone selling you this thesis without the objections is selling you something. Here are the real ones.

Immersive economics are brutal. The Sphere cost $2.3 billion and took until late 2025 to post a single profitable operating quarter. That is not a model most operators can copy. Its own analysts have raised the obvious questions: whether pricing power survives the novelty wearing off, and whether the format becomes commodified once everyone has one.

It has an accessibility problem. At $200 to $400 a seat, the Sphere excludes audiences who would happily pay $75 to $150 elsewhere. Cinema’s historic superpower was that it was cheap. Immersive, so far, is a premium product.

Its biggest wins lean on nostalgia. U2, the Eagles, Backstreet Boys, Metallica, The Wizard of Oz. Residencies built on pre-existing affection, not new stories. The format has not yet proven it can originate culture at scale rather than reframe it.

Some stories genuinely work better in a rectangle. Interiority, ambiguity, the controlled gaze, the cut that withholds information — these are cinema’s native powers, and immersion is worse at them, not better. A close-up on a face doing almost nothing is one of the most powerful tools in narrative art, and no amount of surround will improve it.

And the market forecasts should be read skeptically. Estimates for “immersive entertainment” in 2026 range from $12 billion to $186 billion depending on who’s counting and what they count. That spread tells you the category is real but its boundaries are contested.

The sentence, though

None of those objections touch the thing that’s actually changing.

Habits don’t shift because an industry loses an argument. They shift because a sentence stops being said. Let’s go to the movies meant something for a hundred years, and it is being replaced — not by let’s stay home, which was streaming’s threat and turned out to be only half of one — but by let’s go do something.

That instinct is exactly what filled theaters in 1946. It hasn’t weakened. It has relocated.

The industry that figures out how to put a great story inside it won’t be the film industry’s replacement. It will be the film industry, in a room worth leaving the house for.

MARZIANI InMERSION SYSTEMS™ builds Planar Matryxx™ audio platforms for themed attractions, immersive venues, cinemas, and live spaces. See Industries or get in touch.

Sources: Comscore, EntTelligence, The Numbers, PwC Global Entertainment & Media Outlook, Mordor Intelligence, Billboard Boxscore, and Sphere Entertainment Co. Q1 2026 results.