Dallas isn’t just one of the most populated Texas cities and home to a thriving diverse populace — it’s also now a massive theatrical moviegoing hub. According to ComScore, Dallas-Fort Worth was the third-biggest market in America in 2023, only behind Los Angeles and New York City. This former trading post helped deliver over $271 million the year of Barbenheimer, or 3% of the entire domestic box office market.
The history of this market’s movie theaters stretches back to the 1910s. This is when locations like The Washington Theatre and the Grand Central Theatre dazzled patrons. DFW has always housed passionate moviegoers, so it’s no wonder it wormed its way into key parts of cinema history. Most notably, Dallas housed a legendarily successful test screening for “Jaws.” However, it would’ve been unthinkable for DFW to become a go-to moviegoing destination. After all, until 1993, Dallas housed the last local film censorship board in America. The Dallas Motion Picture Classification Board angered studios while driving local residents to other markets to see the latest motion pictures.
In the second half of the 1990s, though, DFW bounced back as a go-to cinema destination. In 1999, only 205 IMAX auditoriums existed on the planet. Two were in Dallas. The Ti Founders IMAX Theater and the Cinemark 17 (the latter being the inaugural Cinemark/IMAX collaboration) each housed that eventually ubiquitous gigantic screen. Speaking of Cinemark, the heavy DFW presence of that Texas-based theater chain has also proven vital to this market. Cinemark now operates roughly 21 multiplexes across DFW.
Meanwhile, opening ritzier arthouse theaters in the early 2000s, like the Angelika Dallas, drastically expanded the market’s moviegoing landscape.
“Dallas has been a major moviegoing city for over half a century; but its indie cinema scene was usually in small, older, not so well-run theaters,” Dallas Film Society artistic director James Faust told IndieWire. “The Angelika and The Magnolia put great new important independent cinema in modern movie palaces usually reserved for Hollywood blockbusters. Dallas became an indie cinema boom town.”
The rehabilitation of the Dallas cinema scene gradually began to bear fruit in its box office reputation. Per ComScore box office data, DFW was already the fifth biggest North American moviegoing market as early as 2018. DFW outgrossed Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Houston, among others, that year. Across the final years of the 2010s, DFW stood firmly as the fifth-biggest moviegoing market with a 2.76% average market share.
In 2022, DFW finally moved up in those charts. This is the year where DFW first grossed more than Chicago and San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose (previously the fourth and third-biggest moviegoing markets, respectively) to secure a 3.11% market share. DFW maintained that position in 2023 and will likely retain it this year. As of this writing, Dallas is still the third-biggest North American market for 2024 with a 3.15% share. That’s its biggest piece of the domestic box office pie yet! With figures like that, the Dallas Motion Picture Classification Board truly has become a distant memory.
DFW’s ascension is especially interesting since it doesn’t coincide with a deluge of other Southern markets dominating the top 10. Even fellow Texas market Houston hasn’t increased dramatically. Its 2.21% market share in 2019 (in eighth place) only improved to 2.35% in 2023 (in seventh place). DFW isn’t scaling the charts because of a rising tide of Southern or Texas box office markets. Instead, this domain is thriving on its own merits.
The biggest DFW movies of 2024 so far offer valuable insight into what films are propelling this market share. Per ComScore, DFW and the larger domestic marketplace share the same top three movies (“Inside Out 2,” Deadpool & Wolverine,” and “Despicable Me 4”). However, the second and third-biggest live-action films in DFW in 2024 so far are “Twisters” and “Bad Boys: Ride or Die.” In contrast, the latter film is the seventh-biggest live-action movie of 2024 in the entire North American marketplace. The abnormal popularity of “Ride or Die” crystallizes how action films are far and away the most popular motion pictures in this market. ComScore reports that action films make up 41% of the DFW box office. Is it any wonder, then, that “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” and “Deadpool & Wolverine” are among DFW’s five biggest movies of 2024?
Family movies, meanwhile, dominated the top 12 biggest DFW movies of 2024. A whopping five PG-rated kid’s films (“Inside Out 2”, “Despicable Me 4”, “Kung Fu Panda 4”, “IF,” and “The Garfield Movie”) make up the dozen highest-grossing DFW films of the year. In contrast, only four family movies make up the top 12 biggest 2024 films in North America. Costly family outings to the theater are undoubtedly fueling DFW’s box office surge.
The 17th biggest DFW feature, meanwhile, is the Telegu epic “Kalki 2898” AD. Fellow Telegu genre films “Hanu-Man” and “Gantur Kaaram” arrive in 37th and 53rd place, respectively. Those titles did significantly better in DFW than in the rest of North America. “Kalki 2898 A.D.” narrowly cracked the top 50 2024 films in North America. Meanwhile, it’s among DFW’s 17 most popular features of the year!
While Telegu genre films flourish in DFW, arthouse titles aren’t so lucky. These projects do drastically worse in DFW compared to North America at large. “Poor Things,” “American Fiction,” and “Thelma” (among others) fell far outside of the top 50 highest-grossing DFW movies of 2024. One piece of trivia for you readers: making Texas an eye-catching part of “Civil War’s” plot didn’t help the film perform any better in DFW compared to the rest of the country. “Civil War” ultimately fell outside the top 20 biggest movies of 2024 both in DFW and North America so far.
The ComScore data offers several illuminating insights into DFW’s bustling cinema scene. For one thing, DFW moviegoers especially love action films and making theatrical moviegoing a family outing. However, titles like “Kalki 2898 AD” truly solidify why DFW has become a critical box office force. Roughly 220,000 Indian Americans live in the DFW area, and per a 2019 Pew Research Center study, Dallas has the fourth-largest Indian-American population in America. Is it any surprise, then, that “Kalki 2898 A.D.” outgrossed “Civil War,” “Furiosa,” and “Longlegs” (among all but 16 other 2024 movies) in DFW? Is it shocking “Hanu-Man” left “Fly Me to the Moon” and “The Ministry of Ungentlelmanly Warfare” in the dust in DFW?
Features hailing from the various sectors of Indian cinema consistently crack the domestic box office top 10 each week. A good chunk of that revenue emanates from DFW moviegoers. The increased ubiquity of this country’s cinema in North America is a rising tide lifting up DFW’s box office prowess. Indian American audiences aren’t the only marginalized group helping this Texas market thrive, though. Dallas County alone is 41% Hispanic as of June 2023. Meanwhile, a 2022 Census report revealed that 23% of the Dallas population is Black, just a tad behind the 27% of citizens who are white. These are demographics that outlets emphasize are critical to box office success. Hispanic moviegoers have proven integral to some of the biggest box office successes in the last 20 years.
“Bad Boys: Ride or Die” saw 26% of its national opening weekend box office driven by Hispanic moviegoers. Similarly, “Deadpool & Wolverine” saw 32% of its national opening weekend gross come from Hispanic moviegoers. Much like how “Kalki 2898 A.D.” overperforming bolsters Texas theaters, blockbusters drawing in Hispanic audiences also aid these locations. As DFW increases substantially in its Black and Hispanic populations, racially diverse movies also thrive in the marketplace.
It doesn’t hurt, too, that there’s a thriving younger population in Dallas. That 2022 Census Reporter revealed that 20-29 year-olds make up 18% of the Dallas population, aka the biggest demographic block in terms of age in the city. Folks 29 or younger make up 41% of the city’s entire population. That’s a market proven impressively resilient and dedicated to movie theaters in the wake of COVID-19. Some of the biggest hits from 2021-2024 (“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” “Inside Out 2,” etc.) thrived because of younger audiences coming out in droves. Older-skewing movies like “Horizon: An American Saga” or “The Last Duel,” meanwhile, vanished with little a trace. If you can get folks under 30 interested in your motion picture, you have a real shot at theatrical box office success in 2024 anywhere.
Also aiding this marketplace? Specialty theaters that become go-to social and event destinations. Americans now exist in an age where many big cities don’t even have movie theaters. There isn’t even a place nearby to see the latest Marvel feature, let alone specialty fare geared toward niche audiences. Dallas denizens, meanwhile, have several special locations screening classic movies, arthouse fare, film festival programs, and other eye-catching events. These include the Violent Crown Cinema and the Angelika Dallas. The latter is one of only eight Angelika locations in North America.
Especially important among those glossy specialty domains is the Texas Theatre, which reopened its doors after decades of dormancy in 2010. Known for ages as simply the place where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested after assassinating John F. Kennedy, the Texas Theatre quickly developed a new identity. Now, it’s a go-to destination for specialty screenings and social events that bring audiences of all stripes together. For Faust, the ripple effect of locations like the Texas Theatre is “a vibrant, smart, film-going community” in DFW.
Two screens at the Texas Theatre host diverse big-screen programming ranging from “Memoria” to “The People’s Joker” to “Manchester Morgue” and everything in between. Covering all cinematic bases is key to the Texas Theatre’s success, a reality not lost on the people running it. “In our place, our typical patron is pretty well versed in cinema culture,” said Texas Theatre creative director Jason Reimer. “So we have to make sure we’re curating special series of various genres.” Special events like celebrity appearances and the annual Oak Cliff Film Festival reinforce the Texas Theatre’s variety and unique programming.
Ahead of other regions, DFW theaters reopened shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the industry. Governor Greg Abbott said movie theaters, along with other indoor entertainment centers, could reopen on May 1, 2020, with limited capacity. By August 2020, just five months after these locations closed, many Dallas movie theaters were up and running.
That minimal pause ensured DFW theatrical moviegoing habits weren’t disrupted for long. Compare this to San Francisco movie theaters, which remained shuttered for roughly an entire year after their closure in March 2020. Granted, the sparse attendance of these locations and minimal new movies in theaters from July 2020 to March 2021 makes it difficult to imagine these DFW theaters were really bringing in hordes of moviegoers. Many frequent pre-COVID moviegoers likely waited until 2022 or beyond to return to theaters even with local Cinemark locations open. Still, that minimal closure time for DFW theaters in 2020 is worth mentioning. After all, DFW leaped from fifth to third place in the domestic box office landscape between 2019 and 2022.
DFW was already among the top five moviegoing markets before the pandemic, so the early reopening of DFW theaters element may be largely immaterial to its current box office status. Over three decades, DFW went from housing the last movie censorship board to the biggest non-L.A./NYC domestic market.
“I think the various cinema-friendly areas of the country all have specific community needs. I don’t believe the interaction of art in any form is something that could be, or should be streamlined into one cohesive thing,” said Reimer. “So I deeply believe any experience that we may be having will be specific to the community we interact with. If I had any advice for anyone starting a theater, I would say: Get the theater open and then give it to your community. Our job isn’t to pontificate our own ideas; it’s to share and reflect the art form with our community and allow them to feel an ownership of our space.”
