It was the kind of May that theater chains had stopped expecting. Popcorn buckets moving, screens sold out on weekday nights, and attendance figures that, for one month at least, buried the doomsday narrative that streaming had finished the multiplex for good.
Cinemark announced it had logged its biggest-ever domestic box office in May 2025. AMC Theatres, meanwhile, reported its highest-attended month of May since 2019 — the last full pre-pandemic benchmark anyone in the industry still treats as a target worth chasing. Both chains credited a one-two punch of genre and prestige: the A24 horror title Backrooms and the Nicole Kidman-led drama Obsession pulled audiences who do not typically overlap, filling the same multiplexes on the same weekend.
The results were reported by The Hollywood Reporter and quickly circulated across the exhibition sector, where the mood has been cautiously optimistic since late 2024 but rarely this loud about it. Two distinct audience cohorts — the horror crowd that turned Sinners into a 2025 conversation piece earlier in the year, and the adult-drama audience that studios spent most of the 2010s abandoning to prestige television — showed up in numbers that moved the needle at the chain level, not just the single-title level.
The timing matters. May closes out before the summer blockbuster corridor fully opens, which means these figures are not being carried by a single franchise tentpole. Exhibitors head into June with a fuller slate and, for the first time in a while, some recent evidence to show skeptical investors. The next test arrives when the summer numbers are tallied — and whether the audiences who came back for Backrooms stay for whatever is next on the board.