Nobody likes leaving the house. You might think you do, but remember all those times you cancelled plans and snuggled back into your pajamas basking in that sweet sense of relief? Going to the movies is a blast, but now that it’s easier than ever to find just as much entertainment at home with all the streaming services out there, it’s harder and harder for theaters to entice audiences to show up. In 2017, it showed.

According to Box Office Mojo, 2017 (remember 2017?) had the lowest number of theater ticket sales in 25 years — we haven’t seen numbers like this since 1992. In 2017, movie theaters sold 1.239 billion tickets, which is down almost a hundred million from 2016’s 1.315 billion tickets.

So, how could theater chains start to fix this? Well, as I mentioned before, it’s easier than ever to find theater-caliber entertainment just by sitting on your couch and clicking a button, and with movie tickets more expensive than ever why would anyone want to go to the trouble? It’s on the moviemaking companies to put out stuff tons of people will want to go see — last year was full of box office duds that were supposed to be huge tentpoles, from Justice League to Ghost in the Shell. Plus, most of the year’s best films never got a wide release or are just getting one this month. The theater is still the best place to see most movies, I’d argue (I saw my favorite movie, Jurassic Park, in a theater for the first time last summer and wept), but theaters and distributors need to do more to coax their audiences out into the open.

Gallery – The Best Movie Posters of 2017:

 

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