If it feels harder to get a good cinema ticket in the UAE lately, there are several good reasons for that.
There has been an unusually strong run of releases this summer, with an equally strong UAE response. The Odyssey has made more than $9.3 million in the country since opening on July 16, according to Box Office Mojo. Spider-Man: Brand New Day has already crossed $7.2 million, while Toy Story 5, Obsession and The Devil Wears Prada 2 have all become substantial hits.
Last summer had its own huge successes, led by F1 with $10.4 million and Lilo & Stitch with $7.8 million. Taken together, though, this summer's biggest films have already edged ahead.
But the scramble for cinema tickets isn't simply about greater foot traffic.
Christopher Nolan has spent years convincing audiences that his films should be seen on the biggest screen possible. With The Odyssey, that has reached another level. Shot entirely using Imax film cameras, it has surpassed Avatar to become the highest-grossing Imax release ever, taking $289 million from the format worldwide.
That demand is also concentrated. A standard showing of The Odyssey may still have seats while the Imax screening beside it is booked out. The UAE does not have the rare 70mm Imax presentation, but in London the BFI Imax has extended its run well beyond the summer due to unprecedented demand.
Nolan has made format an integral part of the experience. Terms such as 70mm, aspect ratio and Imax film, once largely the preserve of projectionists and dedicated film fans, are now part of the conversation around one of the world's biggest movies.
That comes as younger audiences are developing a more active relationship with cinema. Gen-Z moviegoing in the US rose sharply last year and has now passed pre-pandemic levels among 18 to 24-year-olds. For a generation supposedly lost to short-form video, they seem increasingly happy to spend several hours watching something with their phones put away – well, one can hope.
Perhaps cinema now benefits from requiring a little more effort and intention. Streaming removed most of the friction from watching a film; social media removed even the need to decide what comes next. Going to the cinema means choosing something, booking it, leaving the house and giving it your attention. It feels more like a collective pastime than another passive stream of content.
The internet hasn't necessarily worked against that. Letterboxed, TikTok and YouTube have created a highly active film culture among younger viewers, and are now producing filmmakers of their own. Curry Barker went from YouTube Shorts to Obsession, one of the year's biggest word of mouth hits, a horror film made for $750,000 that has earned more than $6 million in the UAE and $7 million in Saudi Arabia. And Kane Parsons turned his teenage Backrooms videos into a theatrical film whose audience was overwhelmingly under 35.
And all the talk of blockbuster fatigue, meanwhile, Spider-Man: Brand New Day shows that audiences haven't tired of big movies themselves.
What many seem to have tired of is a certain kind of blockbuster – films weighed down by franchise maintenance, digital environments, cameos and promises about whatever comes next.
Brand New Day includes plenty of that, but ties it together with something far more real and human. It brings Spider-Man back down to earth, with physical stunts filmed in actual locations. More importantly, it remembers that endless sequels mean nothing if we don't get to see how people grow and change.
Its strongest thread is simply whether Peter can find his way back to the people he lost. And because audiences have watched Tom Holland and Zendaya's own relationship develop alongside these films, there's another layer to that too, making the emotion feel more real than your average Marvel romance.
Nolan reaches something similar. The Odyssey is enormous, but it also feels deeply personal. Its scale always feels intentional rather than simply a reason to sell a more expensive ticket, with all that spectacle and technical invention directly serving a story about damaged people trying to find their way home.
That sense of human intention also feels increasingly valuable amid the rise of AI. As generative images, writing, music and video become ordinary online, research suggests knowing a person made something affects how highly people value it. The less heart and personal vision there is in something, the easier it becomes to imagine an algorithm could have made it.
And in the UAE, cinema has had another advantage. The Iran war disrupted the international concert calendar, pushing a number of major touring shows later into the year. Arabic and South Asian performers have continued to fill venues, but anyone looking for the succession of major global touring acts that has become normal here had fewer options this summer. The movies, meanwhile, kept arriving.
We'll get a better sense of whether this lasts towards the end of the year, when the UAE's concert calendar is revived and Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday arrive on the same day in December.
Each offers very different ideas of what a modern blockbuster can be. Denis Villeneuve has made the Abu Dhabi-shot Dune franchise increasingly synonymous with his own filmmaking and the premium cinema experience – the initial 70mm Imax screenings at the BFI in London are already sold out. Doomsday, meanwhile, is Marvel assembling some of the biggest characters in its history for another enormous crossover event.
But the shift towards cinema-going appears far more foundational and generational than a momentary response to this summer's circumstances.
For now, perhaps the safest lesson is simply to book earlier – unless you particularly enjoy the front row.
