For eight weeks this summer, an empty seat at the BFI IMAX in London was hard to find. Its 70mm presentation of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey ran 173 consecutive screenings, at 94% occupancy, selling more than 82,000 tickets worth £2.17m, and took £219,867 in its opening weekend, the venue’s best ever and the highest of any IMAX screen in the world for the film. Madeleine Mullett, the cinema’s programme manager, called the demand proof of the appetite for “cinema at its most authentic”.

The cinema admissions figures from across Europe looked much the same. France recorded 19.94 million admissions in August, double the previous August and its best August since monthly records began in 1980. UK admissions reached 17,003,838 for the month, up 56% on August 2025 and the strongest August since 2018, leaving UK admissions 15% ahead of last year so far and box office 22% ahead. UNIC, the European cinema operators’ association, cited year-on-year rises of 71% in Spain and 77% in the Netherlands from the box-office analysts at Gower Street.

Streaming and shorter release windows were supposed to have ended cinema-going. They didn’t. On the headline numbers, summer 2026 looks like a comeback. The detail tells a narrower story, and for anyone who designs, equips or maintains an auditorium, a more useful one.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey carried the summer almost everywhere. Italian cinemas sold 20.8 million tickets between June and August, UNIC reported. They took €68.5m at the box office in August alone, against about €22.5m a year earlier, and three Hollywood releases took more than 80% of that money, led by those two. No Italian film reached the month’s top ten. The same two films earned more than $1.5bn between them in the US over the summer, more than 30% of the season’s takings there, according to CNBC.

Exhibitors read the summer the same way. Eddy Duquenne, chief executive of the Belgian cinema group Kinepolis, attributed his company’s strong first half partly to an industry supply problem t  that is now being resolved. As a result, audiences were waiting for the films.

The autumn has already tested that reading. The CNC, France’s national film body, reported that September admissions fell 7.3% from a year earlier, to 8.88 million. The year to date is still 25.3% ahead of 2025, and American films account for 47.2% of French admissions so far this year.

Price matters too. On 5 and 6 September, more than 550 UK cinemas charged £4 a ticket and sold 1.54 million admissions. Four in ten of those customers told organisers they wouldn’t otherwise have gone. Even then, some operators held the line on premium screens: Cineworld charged £6 for IMAX.

Beneath the summer spike sits a longer trend. UNIC counted 863.6 million admissions across 39 European territories in 2025, 5.3% fewer than in 2024, yet box office slipped only 1%, to €6.9bn. Germany shows the pattern clearly. Its cinemas sold 47.5 million tickets in the first half of 2026, up 16.9% on a year earlier but still about six million fewer than in the first half of 2019. Revenue, at €502.2m, was roughly 9% above the first half of 2019, because the average ticket rose to €10.57 from €9.92 a year earlier. Italian cinemas sold 16% fewer tickets than in 2019 between January and May, while revenue fell only 2%. The US shows the same split at a larger scale. Its summer box office of $4.76bn was the highest on record and nearly 10% above 2019, yet admissions remained roughly 250 million below 2019 levels.

Fewer visits, each worth more. Much of that extra value comes from premium screens, although no European market publishes its share of the box office. The clearest figure comes from Cinemark, a US-based chain, where premium large-format auditoriums produced nearly 15% of worldwide box office in the second quarter from 6% of its auditoriums. In the US this summer, CNBC reported average prices of $18.26 for a premium large-format ticket and $20.57 for IMAX, against $12.75 for the average ticket.

British exhibitors can see the effect in their own results. Cineworld’s opening weekend for Spider-Man: Brand New Day set records in its 4DX auditoriums, which add moving seats and physical effects, and in its ScreenX rooms, which extend the picture onto the side walls. The two formats beat their previous bests by 16% and 84%. The chain had its biggest weekend since 2019 with 14 fewer cinemas than during the 2023 “Barbenheimer” summer, after a £35m upgrade programme, and expects 35% of its UK estate to use laser projection by the end of 2026. Its Leicester Square IMAX was on course to become the first in the company’s history to take more than £1m from a single title. IMAX, for its part, reported its biggest weekend ever across Europe, the Middle East and Africa with The Odyssey.

Kinepolis has been spending in the same direction. In the first half it opened the Benelux’s only 70mm IMAX screen, in Brussels, and refitted its Breda cinema with reclining seats throughout. Its visitor numbers rose 33.8% to 19.1 million, although part of that growth came from the 14 Emagine cinemas it absorbed in February.

Premium remains a small part of the estate. UNIC estimates about 1,004 premium large-format screens across Europe, the Middle East and Africa; Europe alone has 40,214 screens. The home keeps improving as well. AVIXA’s guide to HDR describes a picture technology that began as a niche professional tool and is now expected on mainstream televisions and laptops. Every gain in the living room raises the bar a cinema must clear to justify the trip.

Audiences say what clears it. A moviegoer survey by the Global Cinema Federation, whose members account for about 70% of the world’s box office, found strong attachment to enhanced sight and sound, large-screen formats and luxury seating. The same survey found people now see 2.2 fewer films a year in cinemas because those films reach their homes sooner, and UNIC notes that markets with longer theatrical windows have tended to recover more strongly.

Younger audiences are part of the case. In the same survey, 78% of moviegoers under 25 said they were going to the cinema as often as or more often than they had six months earlier and only 7% of all respondents said they would rather watch films at home.

Germany’s exhibitors have put a number on the gap. The cinema associations HDF Kino and AllScreens report an annual modernisation backlog of €110m across German sites, and say upgrades to technology, foyers and auditoriums can raise visitor numbers by up to 30%.

That puts a laser retrofit, an immersive-sound upgrade or a large-format conversion in the same conversation as ticket pricing. Each decides how much a seat can earn on the nights that matter.

The work itself is familiar. A laser light source ends the routine lamp changes of xenon projection and holds its brightness far more steadily over its life. Object-based immersive audio adds speakers across the ceiling and side walls, with the amplification and processing to drive them. Larger, brighter images and louder, more enveloping sound make every reflection in the room more noticeable, so acoustic treatment often has to be revisited at the same time. For integrators, the brief changes accordingly. An exhibitor will judge the work by what the room can charge, how many weeks it can hold an event film and how reliably it performs while doing so.

Reliability carries a sharper price than it used to. A premium auditorium makes most of its money when one film sells out for weeks; the BFI IMAX ran 173 sold-out screenings in a row. A failed light source or amplifier in that window cancels the most valuable shows of the year, so service contracts, spares and remote monitoring belong in the same budget as the projector.

The same logic is spreading beyond cinema. AVIXA’s September European roundup traced it through shopping centres and permanent immersive venues, where projection, spatial sound and interactive systems are part of the reason people visit at all. Cinemas have traded on that idea for more than a century, and this summer showed it still works when the room delivers something the sofa can’t.

People came back to the cinema this summer for two films, and many paid extra to watch them in rooms built to do them justice. That is a narrower recovery than the headlines suggest. Admissions in Germany and Italy remain below 2019, France has already dipped, and the release schedule set the pace.

The cinema survived the long decline as an event business, and in an event business the venue is the product. Exhibitors who treat image, sound and seating as the core of their offer will earn more from every blockbuster and give audiences a reason to come for the films in between. That is where the work lies for integrators: refurbishments judged by what each seat earns, and auditoriums kept running on the nights that pay for the rest of the year.