Since 2002, US and Canadian cinema admissions have fallen by more than half. Since 2022, the number of scripted TV series has fallen too. Thirty years of data show money leaving the multiplex for prestige television — then leaving much of the industry altogether.
In 1996, the US and Canadian box office sold 1.3 billion tickets to films including Independence Day, Twister and Mission: Impossible — standalone, star-driven, mid-budget spectacles built for a single theatrical weekend.1 In 2025, the same market sold 769.2 million tickets — fewer than half the 1.6 billion sold at the admissions peak in 2002.1,2 Over the same period, the volume and cost of scripted television climbed sharply, then, since 2022, began falling too.3
This piece traces where the money and the ambition went across three decades — cinema admissions, the volume of scripted series, per-episode production budgets and the theatrical "missing middle." One reading is that capital didn't simply vanish from film; it reallocated to television, then, in the last few years, began contracting in both places at once. That reading is this desk's synthesis of the data below, not a single sourced fact in itself — the section on what the numbers don't settle explains why.
Television production costs escalated fastest at the top of the market. HBO's Game of Thrones cost about $6 million per episode in its first season (2011) and roughly $15 million per episode by its eighth and final season (2019) — a two-and-a-half-fold rise within one show.5 Amazon's The Rings of Power then reset the ceiling: its 2022 first season cost a reported $58 million per episode, nearly ten times Thrones' starting budget and about four times its finale-season cost.5
Streaming platforms funded this with content budgets that dwarf any single studio's theatrical slate. Netflix's own disclosures put its content spending at $6.9 billion in 2016 and $18 billion in 2025 — a rise of 162%, and a total the company says exceeds $135 billion cumulatively over the decade.4 Those are the company's own figures, released to mark an anniversary, and have not been independently audited; treat them as company-reported rather than neutral fact.
Industry analysts and film writers have tracked a related shift on the theatrical side: the mid-budget adult drama, thriller and comedy — once a staple of studio slates — now rarely gets a wide theatrical release.7 In 2024, the five major theatrical studios released 62 films wide; only 20 of those carried a production budget under $100 million.6 The rest were tentpoles, sequels and established IP — the budget tier that now carries the theatrical risk almost alone.
The genres most associated with the vanished middle — the political thriller, the historical drama, the character-driven ensemble piece — have not disappeared from screens; several now run as limited series instead, where an 8–10 hour order can justify a budget a theatrical distributor would not risk on an original story without a franchise attached.
Cinema admissions in the US and Canada peaked at roughly 1.6 billion tickets in 2002, held broadly between 1.2 and 1.4 billion through the 2010s, collapsed 81% in the pandemic year of 2020, and have recovered to only 769.2 million in 2025 — a level Pew Research notes is still under half the 2002 peak and about 60% of 2019's total.2
Meanwhile the volume of scripted US television — FX Networks Research's annual industry tally, presented each year at the Television Critics Association press tour — nearly tripled from 210 series in 2009 to a record 600 in 2022, before falling 14% to 516 in 2023, the tally's first major decline outside the 2020 pandemic dip.3
There is no single, audited time series of "total capital allocated to film" versus "total capital allocated to television" — the figures above are proxies (admissions, a trade tally of series counts, reported per-episode budgets, one company's disclosed content spend), not a unified ledger. Netflix's spending figures are self-reported and were released to mark a company anniversary; they have not been independently audited. The FX/Landgraf scripted-series tally and a rival count from Ampere Analysis disagree on how steep the post-2022 decline has been — Ampere puts 2023 series volume down 24% on 2021–22, against FX's 14% drop from 2022 to 2023 — so the size of the contraction, though not its direction, is genuinely disputed among trackers. No confirmed full-year figure for 2024 or 2025 scripted-series volume had been published at the time of writing. Finally, the causes most often cited for these shifts — changing attention spans, subscription-retention incentives, the 2023 strikes, streaming profitability pressure — are analysts' interpretations rather than findings from controlled research, and are presented as such throughout.
Whether the shift to long-form television is good or bad for narrative craft is a genuine, ongoing argument among critics and practitioners — and evidence cannot settle it, because it turns on what viewers and critics value in a story, not on a measurable fact.
Freed from fixed act-break runtimes and advertiser slots, writers can let a story "flow more naturally," with pacing and structure shaped by the material rather than a broadcast slot.8 Academic writing on "narrative complexity" makes a related point: extended character depth and slow-building plotting are simply unavailable within a two-hour film.8
Without a fixed runtime, shows "stretch out just because they can," and reviewers have argued for years that many prestige series would benefit from cuts a theatrical edit would have forced.9 Showrunner Mike Schur has argued network constraints "force you as a writer to think about act breaks" in ways some streaming series visibly lack.9
The measured figures behind every exhibit and hero stat in this piece, for auditing.
| Item | Year(s) | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| US/Canada cinema admissions | 1996 | 1.31bn tickets | Nash Information Services1 |
| US/Canada cinema admissions (peak) | 2002 | ~1.6bn tickets | Pew Research / Nash2 |
| US/Canada cinema admissions | 2019 | ~1.23bn tickets | Pew Research / Nash2 |
| US/Canada cinema admissions | 2020 | 231.6m tickets | Pandemic low; Pew Research2 |
| US/Canada cinema admissions | 2025 | 769.2m tickets | Pew Research / Nash2 |
| US scripted series tally | 2009 | 210 | FX Networks Research3 |
| US scripted series tally (peak) | 2022 | 600 | FX Networks Research3 |
| US scripted series tally | 2023 | 516 | FX Networks Research3 |
| Netflix disclosed content spend | 2016 | $6.9bn | Company disclosure4 |
| Netflix disclosed content spend | 2025 | $18bn | Company disclosure4 |
| Game of Thrones, per episode | S1 (2011) / S8 (2019) | $6m / $15m | Variety, via trade coverage5 |
| The Rings of Power, per episode | S1 (2022) | $58m | Variety, via trade coverage5 |
| 2024 wide theatrical releases, 5 majors | 2024 | 62 total / 20 under $100m | Greenlight Analytics6 |
Left out to hold this piece to length: