We're offering a 2-week trial of WrapPRO for $1. If you’ve been wanting to check out our full coverage, now’s the time. Hi there! I'm just back from CinemaCon 2026 in Las Vegas and I'm pretty excited to say there was a lot worth sharing. Four days of intensive presentations of movies to be released this year and of those in production made clear that the business of going to a movie theater — buying a ticket and sitting with strangers in a dark room — has come back with the passion of religion. I mean — even Ted Sarandos showed up. After a pandemic, two strikes, mergers and countless job cuts, exhibitors finally have something to rally around, with a box office off to its hottest start since before the pandemic, and the possibility of it hitting $10 billion buoyed by the likes of new "Star Wars" and "Avengers" installments, a Chris Nolan epic "The Odyssey," the final "Dune" blockbuster — and lots and lots of animation. As I wrote in today's WaxWord, the pivot is remarkable. It has been at least six years, since the advent of COVID, that declining attendance, a flood of investment in streaming, the erasure and then tightening of theatrical windows and the decline of movie production overall spurred many to think: It’s over. Movies were nice for 100 years or so, and now people simply prefer to stay home or watch unremarkable crap on their phones. But nothing ever stays the same, does it? “What makes me hopeful is that we as an industry are willing to do things we were never willing to do before,” Eduardo Acuna, CEO of Regal Cinemas and Cineworld, told our Jeremy Fuster. There was also plenty of anxiety about the pending merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, and despite Paramount CEO David Ellison taking the stage and reiterating his vow to release 30 films a year, skepticism remains. “We’ve seen studios do bad marketing on a film when they’ve got just a dozen films. Can one studio handle that many?” one exhibitor who wished to remain anonymous told Fuster. Many, however, took the advice of Cinema United CEO Michael O'Leary at the start of the event. “How can we take full control of the things we can control and responsibly deal with the things that we can’t control?” O’Leary asked. Have a great weekend! Sharon Waxman, Editor in Chief Follow me here. 
That willingness to try new things has helped sustain exhibitors when the pipeline of big movies dried up. Some examples of those experiments we collected from conversations at CinemaCon... 
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