Motion Picture and Video Exhibition — U.S. Industry Primer

NAICS 2022 code 51213. NAICS stands for the North American Industry Classification System, the standard the U.S. government uses to group businesses. This is a five-digit industry that rolls up the entire "showing movies to a paying audience" link of the film business. It contains exactly two child industries: 512131 — Motion Picture Theaters (except Drive-Ins), the indoor multiplexes and single-screen cinemas, and 512132 — Drive-In Motion Picture Theaters, the outdoor lots where you watch from your car.[5] This primer synthesizes the two child primers plus our ground-truth federal statistics for the 51213 level; it does not re-research the sector from scratch.

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1. Overview

Exhibition is the last link in the film value chain: production → distribution → exhibition → the audience. An exhibitor does not own the films it shows. It licenses titles from studios, sells tickets, and — where the real profit lives — sells popcorn, soda, candy, and increasingly full meals at very high markups. It is a venue-and-experience business built on real estate and fixed costs, and its fortunes rise and fall above all with one thing it does not control: the quality and volume of films studios release each year.

The reason to understand this level as a whole is that it is a single economic engine expressed at two wildly different scales. Both children run the same two-part model — a thin, studio-shared box office plus a fat, fully-kept concession line — and both depend on the same Hollywood slate, the same shrinking theatrical window, and the same competition from streaming. But one child is a $13 billion, publicly-investable, chain-dominated business, and the other is a $100 million, privately-held, family-run niche. The distinctive value of looking at 51213 is the contrast between them.

Ways in for investors:

• Public-market participants can access the sector only through the indoor child — a small, clean roster of theater operators, a premium-format technology licensor, the industry's largest landlord, and a cinema-advertising network (Section 4).
• Private participants run the full range: private-equity owners of national chains, a Hollywood studio that now owns a circuit, and — at the small end, especially among drive-ins — individuals who buy and run a single site. This is one of the few consumer industries with both billion-dollar public peers and a genuine buy-one-and-operate-it path.

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2. What's inside — the two child industries and how they differ

The two children share a business model but almost nothing else about their scale, ownership, or investability. The table below is the core of this primer.

CR4 is the combined revenue share of the four largest firms; HHI is the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, a standard concentration measure where higher means more concentrated.

How to read the contrast. The single most important fact is the mismatch between the two share rows: drive-ins are ~7% of the industry's physical sites but under 1% of its revenue. That is because an indoor multiplex out-earns a drive-in roughly nine-to-one per site (~$3.2M versus ~$346K). Beyond scale, the children diverge on three axes that matter to an investor:

1. Ownership and investability. The indoor child is where public money can go — every listed exhibition name is an indoor-dominated business. The drive-in child has no public pure-play; exposure there is a private-business or land purchase. If you want a stock, you are buying the indoor child whether you mean to or not.
2. What the asset really is. For the giants, the asset is the operating business (attendance, concessions, loyalty, premium screens) sitting on mostly leased real estate. For a drive-in, the asset is frequently the land itself — 10-plus acres whose "highest and best use" may be housing or retail — with the theater a low-cost way to hold a redevelopment option.
3. What "consolidation" means. In the indoor child it means distress-driven mergers and bankruptcies among big chains, plus a brand-new entrant type (studio-owners). In the drive-in child it means attrition — sites close and get redeveloped one at a time — with no roll-up and no national buyer.

Everything below covers the level as a whole, flagging where the two children pull apart.

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3. How big it is (rollup figures)

The figures below are our ground-truth federal statistics for the 51213 level.

County Business Patterns (CBP) supplies employment, payroll, and establishment counts (2023); the Economic Census supplies firms, receipts, and concentration (2022), so the years differ and should not be mechanically reconciled. Four things to read carefully:

The rollup is the indoor child. The two children sum almost exactly to the level: 4,057 + 290 = 4,347 establishments, 121,566 + 773 = 122,339 employees, and ~$12.98B + ~$0.10B ≈ $13.08B in receipts.[1][2] Indoor cinemas account for roughly 99% of receipts and employment. Any statement about "the industry's" revenue is, to the first decimal, a statement about indoor theaters.

Receipts are bigger than "box office." The $13.076 billion 2022 receipts figure sits well above that year's domestic box office of roughly $7.4 billion, because the Economic Census counts the theater's entire revenue line — tickets plus concessions, on-screen advertising, event rentals, and premium upcharges.[2] "Box office" is only the ticket portion. The two are not comparable.

Fewer firms than sites — and slightly fewer firms than the children imply. There are 4,347 sites but only 2,076 companies,[1][2] because the big circuits each run hundreds of locations. The 2,076 rollup firm count is also modestly below the sum of the two children's firm counts (1,916 indoor + 176 drive-in = 2,092), because a handful of operators run both indoor and drive-in sites and are counted once at this level — a normal feature of how the Census avoids double-counting multi-industry firms.

Undercount caveat. These counts cover employer establishments with paid employees; they exclude the self-employed and businesses without employees (measured separately in the Census Bureau's Nonemployer Statistics program) and most government employees.[3][4] For the indoor child the exposure is small — it is formal, brick-and-mortar, and concentrated. The drive-in child is where undercount bites: those sites are seasonal, often run on unpaid family labor, and their swap-meet, event, and land-rent income can be classified outside the code. Community, nonprofit, and nonemployer venues in both children can also fall out of the employer counts. No suppressed values are used or estimated here.

For physical-footprint context beyond the federal snapshot, industry researchers count roughly 38,500–39,500 indoor screens across ~5,100–5,400 indoor sites in 2025 (a different definition from Census establishments), while the drive-in trade body lists roughly 280 open drive-ins with ~480 screens.[16][18] Both footprints are smaller than they were before the pandemic; the indoor count is being actively pruned, and the drive-in count has roughly stabilized.

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4. The investable universe (where value concentrates across the children)

Nearly all investable value sits in the indoor child. Tickers and scale below are for orientation; reserve valuation judgments for your own diligence.

Public companies (all indoor-dominated)

Two adjacent public plays:

• EPR Properties (EPR, NYSE) — a real-estate investment trust (REIT) that is the biggest single landlord to U.S. movie theaters; you own the buildings, not the operations, and tenant credit matters as much as attendance.[12]
• National CineMedia (NCMI, Nasdaq) — the largest U.S. on-screen cinema-advertising network; it monetizes the pre-show, not the ticket.

Major private or non-listed owners

• Regal — the #2 U.S. chain, a subsidiary of UK-based Cineworld; it went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2022, emerged in 2023, delisted, and is now controlled by its former creditors.[13]
• Alamo Drafthouse — the dine-in chain acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2024, the first time in decades a major Hollywood studio owned a theater circuit.[14]
• Family and PE-owned regionals — B&B Theatres, Harkins, Cinépolis (U.S.), Emagine, National Amusements (Showcase); nonprofit/foundation-backed operators such as Santikos; and art-house Landmark (Cohen Media Group).

The drive-in child

No U.S.-listed company is primarily a drive-in business, so there is no public way to buy this child. Identifiable private operators include West Wind Drive-Ins (~6 sites across CA/AZ/NV, the largest drive-in "chain"), Malco Theatres (a Memphis indoor chain that also runs a drive-in), and a long tail of single-site family operators such as Shankweiler's (PA, the oldest, 1934) and Bengies (MD).[20][18] Marcus is the only public name that even rhymes with the drive-in thesis, because it owns its land and ran outdoor screenings in 2020 — but drive-ins do not move its numbers.

Where value concentrates: for public exposure, Cinemark and AMC are the cleanest indoor operators, IMAX is the differentiated higher-margin sidecar, and EPR/NCMI are the adjacent bets. For private exposure, the indoor long tail and the entire drive-in child are the field.

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5. How the money works

Both children run the same two-engine model, which is why they share a code:

Engine 1 — the box office (thin, shared). The theater does not keep the ticket price. It splits box-office revenue with the film's distributor ("film rental") on a sliding scale that favors the studio early — 60–70%+ to the studio in a blockbuster's opening weeks, easing as the film ages. Over a full run, exhibitors typically retain only about 45–55% of the box office.[22] Cinemark's 2025 results make the scale concrete: roughly 57 cents of every admissions dollar flowed back out as film rental and advertising.[8] Drive-ins face the same split; their double-feature format (two films on one admission) is a value-per-carload lever, not a way around the studio's cut.[19]

Engine 2 — concessions (fat, kept). The theater keeps essentially all concession revenue, with gross margins routinely 80–90%+ — a bucket of popcorn costing under a dollar sells for ten or more.[22] This is where a theater actually earns its profit. The old saying — "we sell tickets to sell popcorn" — is even truer at a drive-in, where a captive carful spends heavily; operator models put concessions at 40–60% of a drive-in's total revenue.[19]

Where the children diverge on economics:

• Indoor leans on premiumization and frequency tools — recliners, laser projection, premium large-format (PLF) screens like IMAX and Dolby Cinema, dine-in service, on-screen advertising, online-ticketing fees, and subscription/loyalty programs (AMC Stubs, Cinemark Movie Club) that pre-commit spend. Average North American ticket price rose from about $9.16 (2019) to $11.51 (2024), with premium seats pushing the transaction average higher.[7]
• Drive-ins lean on concession capture and land optionality. Their most valuable "asset" often never appears on the income statement — the market value of the 10-plus acres under the screen. Many supplement dark nights with swap meets, car shows, concerts, and food-truck events.[19]

Cost behavior (shared): film rental is variable and rises with admissions; concession supplies are variable; labor has a fixed staffing floor that flexes with attendance (and a sharp seasonal dip for drive-ins — first-quarter payroll is a small fraction of the annual total); rent, debt service, utilities, insurance, and maintenance are largely fixed.[1][8] The result is heavy operating leverage: costs are mostly fixed, so a strong slate fills fixed seats and drops straight to profit, while a weak slate leaves the same costs against far less revenue. That is why a chain can swing from record revenue to a large loss on the same asset base — visible in AMC's 2025 net loss despite ~$4.85B of revenue.[7]

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6. What drives demand

The demand drivers are common to both children, with weather layered on for the outdoor child:

1. The Hollywood slate — dominant. No exhibitor can create demand without attractive releases. Attendance tracks how many appealing wide releases studios put out and how well they perform, and moviegoing has shifted from a habit to an event — audiences turn out for a handful of blockbusters and stay home otherwise.[16] Drive-ins skew toward family and event titles.[19] North American box office was about $8.75B on 760 million admissions in 2024, versus $11.4B on 1.244 billion admissions in 2019 — prices up, volume far below the old norm.[7]
2. Theatrical windows and streaming. Every film eventually reaches home viewing; a shorter theaters-only window weakens the reason to go out. Exhibition competes directly with streaming (Section 7).
3. Discretionary spending and price. Cinemas compete for entertainment dollars and leisure time; ticket and concession prices affect frequency, especially for lower-income households (and, for drive-ins, the cost of the drive itself).
4. Premiumization (indoor) / nostalgia and experience (drive-in). Recliners, PLF screens, and dine-in raise the value of an indoor trip; a distinctive, social, family-friendly night out sustains drive-ins.
5. Alternative content. Concert films, live sports, re-releases, anime, and specialty titles fill screens between major releases across both children.
6. Weather and season length (drive-in only). Rain, smoke, cold, and short days directly cut a drive-in's operating nights; the indoor child is insulated from this.
7. Local trade areas and seasonality. Population, income, and access set each site's economics, and revenue concentrates in summer and the winter holidays, making quarterly results lumpy.

The recent recovery has leaned on higher prices and premium formats; lower visit frequency remains the central structural question for both children.

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7. Regulation

Exhibition is lightly regulated, and most threads apply to both children.

The end of the Paramount Consent Decrees. From 1948 until 2020, court orders arising from United States v. Paramount Pictures barred Hollywood studios from owning theaters and outlawed practices like block-booking. In August 2020 a federal court terminated these decrees at the Department of Justice's (DOJ's) request.[21] Studios may now own theaters again — Sony's 2024 purchase of Alamo Drafthouse is the first concrete result, and the long-run competitive implications (studio-owned chains favoring their own films) are still unfolding.[14] For tiny drive-ins the practical effect is minimal.

The theatrical window — negotiated, not regulated. No law sets how long a film must play only in theaters before moving to premium video-on-demand (PVOD). The window collapsed during the pandemic and has stretched back to a de-facto ~45 days, with the biggest 2025 films averaging longer. The exhibitor trade body Cinema United (formerly the National Association of Theatre Owners) is pressing studios to commit to a 45-day minimum.[17] Window length is a central commercial battleground for both children.

Accessibility, copyright, and anti-camcording. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) makes theaters public accommodations — indoor sites must offer closed captioning and audio description for films distributed with them, and drive-ins must address accessible parking, routes, and restrooms. Public performance requires proper licensing from copyright owners, and federal law separately prohibits camcording inside a facility.

Drive-in-specific rules. The dominant constraint is local land use and zoning — large-parcel rules plus light-spill, noise, traffic-queue, screen-height, and stormwater requirements for a lit outdoor venue. In-car audio runs over a low-power FM (frequency modulation) transmitter under the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) unlicensed Part 15 rules, so most drive-ins need no broadcast license.[25] And because a giant screen is visible from public roads, drive-ins were historically targeted by local nudity/obscenity ordinances until the Supreme Court limited that on First Amendment grounds in Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville (1975).

Everyday compliance (both). Liquor licensing for venues serving alcohol; food-service, fire, building, and occupancy codes; wage, labor, and workplace-safety rules; consumer-protection and data-privacy obligations. Film ratings (G/PG/PG-13/R/NC-17) are voluntary industry self-regulation, not government censorship.

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8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

A concentrated top, a fragmented tail, and different mechanics in each child. At the rollup level, CR4 is 55.5% and the HHI is 1,001.5 — just barely into the "moderately concentrated" band by U.S. antitrust convention.[2] Notably, the rollup HHI (1,001.5) is a shade below the indoor child's own HHI (1,017) because folding in the fragmented drive-in tail slightly dilutes measured concentration. The three national circuits — AMC, Regal, and Cinemark — together generate roughly half of North American box office, sitting above hundreds of local and specialty operators.[7]

Scale helps with film booking, national advertising and loyalty programs, equipment and concession purchasing, and overhead absorption — but competition is fundamentally local: a single trade area can pit a national chain against an independent or a premium-format venue.

Consolidation means different things in each child:

• Indoor consolidation is distress-driven, not empire-building. The pandemic pushed multiple chains through bankruptcy (Cineworld/Regal filed 2022, emerged 2023; Alamo 2021). Weak locations close, screen counts fall, and survivors reinvest in premium formats and acquire good real estate rather than build aggressively. A genuinely new entrant type — the studio-owner (Sony/Alamo) — now blurs the historic wall between the people who make films and the people who show them.[14]
• Drive-in "consolidation" is attrition, not acquisition. The count falls because sites close and get redeveloped, one at a time — driven for decades by rising land values, retiring owners, and difficulty getting first-run films. The 2013 digital-projection transition (studios stopped shipping 35mm prints, forcing $60,000–$100,000 projector purchases) was a defining shakeout. There is no national consolidator and no roll-up thesis; entry is capital- and land-intensive while exit is easy and often lucrative (sell the land), which is exactly why the child keeps shrinking even as survivors do fine.[18]

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9. Risks

Shared across both children:

• Content/slate risk. The industry is a hostage to Hollywood's output. The 2023 Writers Guild and actors' (SAG-AFTRA) strikes hollowed out the 2024 calendar — exhibitors bear risks they do not control.
• Structural demand erosion. Whether the drop from 1.24 billion to ~780 million annual U.S. admissions is cyclical or permanent is the sector's central question; if casual moviegoing keeps fading, the whole footprint is oversized.[15]
• Streaming and windows. Shorter theatrical windows and substitution toward home viewing cut frequency.
• Fixed-cost leverage. Rent, debt service, maintenance, and minimum staffing run through weak periods; costs are largely fixed against volatile revenue.
• Input-cost inflation. Wages, concession supplies, utilities, and insurance can rise faster than ticket and concession prices.

Concentrated in the indoor child:

• Financial leverage. AMC carries over $4B of debt and posted a ~$632M net loss in 2025 even as revenue rose.[7]
• Distributor bargaining power. AMC's seven largest studio distributors accounted for ~83% of its U.S. admissions — a concentrated supplier set with strong leverage over film-rental terms.[7]
• Retail real-estate exposure and speculative trading. Many theaters anchor malls under long leases, and AMC in particular became a "meme stock," with price and share count driven at times by retail-trader dynamics rather than fundamentals.

Concentrated in the drive-in child:

• Redevelopment pressure. The core risk is that the land's highest and best use is housing or retail — rising suburban land values have been the single biggest driver of closures for decades.
• Weather and single-site concentration. A one-location operator has no diversification against a rained-out season.
• Aging fleet and owner succession. Much of the surviving stock is decades old with aging owners, and property-tax drift on appreciating land squeezes a low-revenue business.

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10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public markets (indoor child only)

• Operators: Cinemark (CNK) is the profitable, dividend-paying, best-managed pure play; AMC (AMC) is the largest and most leveraged, with meme-stock volatility that makes it speculative; Marcus (MCS) blends theaters with hotels; Reading International (RDI) is a small-cap operator-plus-real-estate.
• Picks-and-shovels: IMAX (IMAX) — the asset-light technology/licensing bet that profits from premium screens without the chains' lease burden.
• Adjacent: National CineMedia (NCMI) for cinema advertising; EPR Properties (EPR) to own the buildings as a landlord rather than the operations.

Evaluate operators on attendance recovery, average ticket price, concession spend per patron ("per cap"), same-theater revenue, screen productivity, film-rental rates, lease-adjusted debt, liquidity, and maintenance capital spending. Compare enterprise value with EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) while treating leases as a real claim on cash flow; free cash flow (FCF) is more informative than reported net income when depreciation and lease structures differ. Adjacent names underwrite differently — the landlord on tenant credit and rent coverage, IMAX on installations and licensing, mixed businesses (Marcus, Reading) on segment analysis. These are cyclical, leverage-heavy names where one year's slate can distort earnings.

Private markets (both children)

• Institutional (indoor): the largest chains outside AMC/Cinemark are PE- or strategically owned (Regal via Cineworld's creditors; Alamo via Sony), so large-scale private exposure runs through those sponsors, their debt, or theater real estate leased to exhibitors — including distressed assets needing refurbishment or lease restructuring.
• Small-business (both, but the drive-in child especially): the fragmented tail means an individual can realistically buy and operate a single-screen indoor theater or a drive-in. For a drive-in, separate the operating business from the land and underwrite both — the parcel is often the real asset, with the theater a low-cost way to hold a development option, and the best operators program the lot beyond movies (concerts, markets, car shows). Diligence hinges on location-level attendance, local competition, rent or land value, concession economics, film-booking access, lease maturities, and — for drive-ins — verified title, zoning, weather history, and owner succession plans.

Outlook

Sentiment is the most positive since the pandemic. Analysts project 2026 domestic box office near $9.6 billion, up roughly 11%, on the strongest slate in years.[23] A stacked slate is precisely what this fixed-cost industry needs to convert soft attendance into profit. But the base case is an uneven cyclical recovery, not a full return to the old attendance model. Premium formats, food service, loyalty programs, and alternative content can lift revenue and profit per patron, but higher prices alone are unlikely to restore historical visit frequency.

The two children face that future very differently. The indoor child — 99% of the money — will keep shrinking its footprint while trying to earn more per visit; the winners pair strong local real estate with disciplined leases, differentiated experiences, high concession capture, and enough financial flexibility to survive weak release periods. The drive-in child looks likely to stabilize around ~300 sites as a small, durable niche sustained by nostalgia and experiential demand, with survival favoring owners who control their land outright and program beyond the screen.[18] For the level as a whole, the durable question is whether stretched windows, premiumization, and a leaner footprint can stabilize attendance at a permanently lower plateau — or whether the long slide resumes once the tentpoles thin out.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 51213 and children 512131/512132 (establishments, employment, payroll). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
2. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Concentration of Largest Firms (firms, receipts, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI), NAICS 51213. https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN
3. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns Methodology (employer-only coverage/undercount). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
4. U.S. Census Bureau, Nonemployer Statistics (businesses without paid employees). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics.html
5. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS: 51213 Motion Picture and Video Exhibition (definition and children). https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=51213&year=2022
6. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards, 2023 (NAICS 512131 = $47M; 512132 = $12.5M). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
7. AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc., 2025 Form 10-K, U.S. SEC. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1411579/000141157926000016/amc-20251231x10k.htm
8. Cinemark Holdings, Inc., 2025 Form 10-K, U.S. SEC. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1385280/000119312526056015/cnk-20251231.htm
9. The Marcus Corporation, 2025 Form 10-K, U.S. SEC. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/62234/000006223426000011/mcs-20251231.htm
10. Reading International, Inc., 2025 Form 10-K, U.S. SEC. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/716634/000071663426000005/rdi-20251231x10k.htm
11. IMAX Corporation, 2025 Form 10-K, U.S. SEC. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/921582/000162828026011770/imax-20251231.htm
12. EPR Properties, 2025 Form 10-K, U.S. SEC. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045450/000104545026000007/epr-20251231.htm
13. Regal (Cineworld), "About Regal," 2026. https://www.regmovies.com/about
14. Sony Pictures Entertainment, "Sony Pictures Entertainment Acquires Alamo Drafthouse Cinema," 2024. https://www.sonypictures.com/corp/press_releases/2024/0612/sonypicturesentertainmentacquiresalamodrafthousecinema
15. Deadline, "Box Office: 2025 Admissions at 780M, -5% From 2024," 2026. https://deadline.com/2026/01/box-office-2025-admissions-1236660208/
16. MMCG Invest, "The Incredible Shrinking Multiplex," 2026. https://www.mmcginvest.com/post/the-incredible-shrinking-multiplex-inside-the-movie-theater-industry-s-fight-for-survival
17. Cinema United, "Strength of Theatrical Exhibition — 2025 Update," 2025. https://cinemaunited.org/2025/12/17/cinema-united-releases-strength-of-theatrical-exhibition-2025-update-spotlighting-important-movie-theatre-industry-metrics/
18. United Drive-In Theatre Owners Association (UDITOA), "Statistics / Directory" (~280 open theaters, ~480 screens; closure causes). https://uditoa.wildapricot.org/Statistics
19. Financial Models Lab, "Drive-In Movie Theater KPIs and Economics," 2025. https://financialmodelslab.com/blogs/kpi-metrics/drive-in-movie-theater
20. West Wind Drive-Ins, "About West Wind Drive-In Theaters." https://www.westwinddi.com/about-us
21. U.S. Department of Justice, "Federal Court Terminates Paramount Consent Decrees," 2020. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/federal-court-terminates-paramount-consent-decrees
22. RogerEbert.com, "How your ticket price is divided" (film-rental splits and concession margins). https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/how-your-ticket-price-is-divided
23. Variety, "Box Office Predictions 2026," 2026. https://variety.com/2026/film/news/box-office-2026-predictions-avengers-doomsday-spiderman-brand-new-day-odyssey-1236615235/
24. Wikipedia, "Drive-in theater" (peak of 4,063 sites in 1958; history). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive-in_theater
25. Federal Communications Commission, "Low Power Radio — General Information / Part 15 unlicensed operation." https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/low-power-radio-general-information