This Christmas, Hollywood’s major film releases are competing for Americans’ entertainment time with a slew of new shows on Netflix — and all those television series that slipped through the cracks during the year.
Yet many of those films — “Aquaman,” “Bumblebee,” “Mary Poppins Returns” — are projected to do big business in theaters, with “Aquaman” already winning the weekend with a strong $68 million opening through Sunday. Their success will cap a record-breaking year at the box office, upending the conventional wisdom that movie theaters’ relevance is fading.
Movie-ticket revenue in the United States has risen 8 percent in 2018. That puts the industry on track for the largest year-to-year increase of the domestic box office in nearly a decade — and suggests that, surprisingly, theaters can more than hold their own in the age of widespread at-home entertainment.
But the news also comes with significant dark clouds. Industry experts say that a future for the movie theater — a venue that Americans have for the past century pridefully counted as both an economic engine and cultural gathering spot — may be far from assured.
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