#Streaming to be $94B business by 2025 as Hollywood rebounds

The coronavirus pandemic may have dealt a dizzying blow to Hollywood, but Tinseltown is expected to bounce back in just a few years, led by surging demand for streaming video.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a new report has predicted that streaming video will generate a massive $94 billion in revenues by the end of 2025, up 60 percent from 2020.

The industry, led by players like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney Plus, will be buoyed in 2025 by a whopping $81 billion in subscriptions sales and about $13 billion in sales tied to renting or buying movies, PWC predicted.

With movie theaters reopening their doors, PWC sees cinema revenue, including advertising, rebounding by 2024, just a few short years after being nearly toppled by the coronavirus pandemic.

Cinema revenues fell to a miserable $13.1 billion in 2020 from $44.4 billion in 2019, but are on track to grow to $25.4 billion this year and to nearly $45.2 billion in 2024, according to the report.

Within that will be a jump in global box office revenue, which fell to a sorry $11.8 billion in 2020. Box office sales, according to the report, will climb to $41.6 billion in 2024, above down from even 2019 levels of $40.7 billion.

The rebound has already started, PWC principal CJ Bangah told The Hollywood Reporter.

“We do expect some of the big blockbusters that are coming out over the summer and into the fall are going to help the industry have significantly healthier revenue this year,” Bangah said. But a full recovery will take a few years because “cinema growth is so closely correlated to vaccination status,” Bangah said.

While the global box office is expected to return to normal by 2024, it will be helped in good part by the return of moviegoing in China. The North American box office, PWC said, won’t make a full recovery until one year later, in 2025.

PwC sees the global media and entertainment sector overall growing 6.5 percent in 2021 and a further 6.7 percent in 2022 as more countries “emerge from lockdown.”

Last year, the global media and entertainment industry declined 3.8 percent to $2 trillion, marking “the most significant year-on-year drop” in the report’s 21-year history, PWC said.

The drop came as theaters were forced to shut their doors to stave off the pandemic. The deadly virus also put a crimp on Hollywood film and TV production, forcing delays of highly anticipated blockbusters like Marvel’s “Black Widow” and “Fast and Furious 9,” which only further exacerbated the woes of cinemas.

According to Comscore, global box office revenue fell to $12.4 billion in 2020 from an industry high of $42.5 billion in 2019. In North America, ticket sales hit a 40-year-low struggling to reach $2.2 billion last year, after they reached $11.39 billion in 2019.