A brutal winter storm stretching 2,000 miles from Texas to New England has delivered the worst box-office freeze since records began, pushing industry-wide grosses to an anemic $58.4 million—the lowest nationwide haul since tracking began for 2026 and a 9 percent slide from the comparable frame last year, according to early studio estimates. Chains across the South and Midwest shuttered auditoriums en masse as ice-laden power lines snapped, leaving more than 80,000 households without electricity and turning multiplex parking lots into makeshift staging areas for utility crews rather than moviegoers. Even as road crews scrambled to clear major arteries, the nation’s three largest exhibitors—AMC, Cinemark and Regal—reported a combined 105 darkened complexes, while 53 additional screens operated by smaller circuits went quiet, underscoring how extreme weather events can instantly erode the theatrical business model that relies on predictable weekend foot traffic.
Exhibitors Forced Into Rapid-Fire Closures as Outages Mount
AMC, the world’s largest chain, confirmed it temporarily closed 59 locations concentrated in Arkansas, Louisiana and eastern Texas, citing both mandatory evacuation orders and widespread blackouts that left theaters unable to project films or operate concessions. “When you lose power to an entire county, the decision is effectively made for you,” a senior AMC operations executive told industry newsletter BoxOffice Pro, requesting anonymity because the company is in a quiet period ahead of quarterly earnings. Cinemark followed suit by idling 24 sites across Oklahoma and Kansas, while Regal locked the doors on 22 theaters stretching from Albuquerque to Shreveport, according to regional managers posting closure notices on social media.
The timing compounds the pain: January represents the first chance for cinema owners to recoup ground after a holiday season that, while solid, did not fully offset a sluggish autumn slate. Studios front-load marketing spends in December to capitalize on year-end leisure travel, meaning many titles now playing carry elevated print-and-advertising costs that require sustained attendance to break even. With the storm’s footprint blanketing the Interstate 35 corridor—historically a reliable generator of mid-week walk-up traffic—exhibitors are losing some of their most profitable auditoriums precisely when schools remain out and discretionary time is abundant. “People think of weather risk in terms of hurricanes on the coasts, but this ice event is a reminder that interior markets can be equally vulnerable,” said Luis Garcia, a Dallas-based exhibition analyst, noting that Texas alone accounts for roughly 8 percent of annual domestic box-office receipts.
Amazon MGM’s ‘Mercy’ Faces Chilly Reception Before It Even Opens
Amazon MGM’s R-rated thriller Mercy had been tracking for a mid-teen opening, but the studio now expects a debut in the $12 million range—respectable only in the context of a marketplace where overall admissions have cratered. The film, starring Rebecca Ferguson as a detective probing a small-town cult, skews toward older audiences who traditionally brave inclement weather less readily than the four-quadrant blockbusters that prop up summer grosses. Pre-sales in storm-affected zip codes evaporated overnight, according to ticketing platform Fandango, while canceled screenings triggered automatic refunds that further dented exhibitor cash flow.
Still, Amazon MGM is choosing to keep its marketing footprint intact, reasoning that a compressed theatrical window—followed by a pivot to Prime Video—will limit downside. “The streaming component gives the studio leverage that legacy distributors didn’t have a decade ago,” observed Charlotte Lee, a Hong Kong–based media economist who tracks U.S. content consumption patterns. “If Mercy under-indexes theatrically, Amazon can still tout exclusivity on its platform, where incremental subscriber value offsets some lost ticket revenue.” International rollout remains scheduled for next weekend, and sources close to the production suggest that European markets, where winter weather has been milder, could compensate for North American shortfalls.
Exhibition veterans note that winter storms historically depress grosses by 15–20 percent in affected regions, but the geographic breadth of this system magnifies the effect. “We’ve gone from localized issues to a macro event that hits multiple top-30 DMAs simultaneously,” said Maya Patel, an analyst at London’s Oxford Economics. The firm estimates that every 10 percent drop in screen capacity across the South correlates with a 2.3 percent slide in nationwide weekend revenue, implying that the current closures could shave roughly $6 million off the national total before a single ticket is counted. With many outages expected to linger into Monday, studios are already weighing revised projections for next weekend, when Sony’s sci-fi epic Orion Drift is poised to open wide.
Regional Economics: How the Storm Tilted the National Box-Office Map
While the storm’s footprint covered roughly a dozen states, its economic shock was anything but evenly distributed. Texas alone supplies roughly 9 percent of the nation’s theatrical revenue in a normal January frame; this weekend its ticket sales evaporated by an estimated 72 percent, according to studio tallies shared with exhibitors. By contrast, markets west of the Rockies—where skies remained clear—posted single-digit gains, with Los Angeles surging 11 percent versus last year as moviegoers who normally travel to Las Vegas or Phoenix instead stayed local.
| Region | Typical January Share | This Weekend Drop | Estimated Lost Gross |
|---|---|---|---|
| Texas | 9 % | –72 % | ≈ $3.8 M |
| South Central (AR, LA, OK) | 4 % | –68 % | ≈ $1.9 M |
| Mid-Atlantic & New England | 12 % | –31 % | ≈ $2.7 M |
| West Coast | 22 % | +8 % | ≈ +$1.0 M |
The displacement effect underscores how modern cinema markets operate like interconnected power grids: when one circuit drops offline, others can temporarily spike, but rarely enough to offset the aggregate loss. Studios and exhibitors now weight their marketing dollars toward weather-resilient corridors—a lesson learned after similar winter events in 2018 and 2021—yet the unpredictability of ice storms still upends forecasting models that rely on historical ZIP-code-level data.
Insurance, Infrastructure and the Rising Cost of Climate Risk
Exhibitors are discovering that recovering lost ticket revenue is only part of the equation. Operators must still cover payroll for stranded employees, discard perishable concession inventory, and, in some cases, remediate burst sprinkler systems that froze when HVAC units failed. Unlike hurricane-prone coasts—where business-interruption riders are standard—many inland multiplexes carry named-peril policies that exclude “winter weather caused by direct power-grid failure,” leaving chains to absorb six-figure losses per site.
Climate-linked claims inside the U.S. have risen 42 percent over the past five years, according to data compiled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Theater trade body the National Association of Theatre Owners has begun lobbying state regulators to classify cinemas as “critical infrastructure” during emergencies, arguing that their community role rivals that of libraries or arenas used as storm shelters. The push could unlock priority power-restoration status and subsidized generator grants—small but meaningful steps in an era when winter storms are arriving earlier, lasting longer and reaching further south.
Global Parallels: From Texas Blackouts to Mumbai Floods
Extreme-weather disruptions are hardly unique to North America. Last August, Mumbai’s monsoon flooding shuttered more than 250 screens for three days, slicing India’s nationwide gross by 18 percent during the lucrative Independence Day window. In Australia’s 2019–20 bushfire season, smoke particulates so severe they breached cinema HVAC standards depressed holiday attendance in Sydney and Melbourne by roughly 13 percent, according to the Screen Australia research unit. What distinguishes the U.S. market is its fragmented ownership model: whereas India’s PVr-Inox and Cinepolis can coordinate circuit-wide closures within hours, American exhibitors must navigate municipal, county and state emergency protocols—slowing response times and amplifying revenue leakage.
Studios with global slates increasingly rely on day-and-date streaming pivots in affected regions, but that option collides with windows agreements forged with North American exhibitors. The tension explains why Amazon MGM kept Mercy in theaters rather than exercising its Prime Video escape hatch: sacrificing a marquee theatrical run in Los Angeles and New York was deemed riskier than riding out a temporary Southern slump.
Forward Look: Can Theaters Weather-Proof Their Business Model?
This weekend’s $58 million freeze may be an outlier, but it spotlights a structural vulnerability as old as exhibition itself: cinemas remain anchored to geography in an on-demand world. Chains are experimenting with dynamic ticket pricing—discounting seats when storms approach—to lure hardy moviegoers, while start-ups such as ClimaCast sell exhibitors hyper-local outage probabilities 72 hours ahead. Still, no algorithm can restart a transformer or clear an ice-glazed parking lot.
From a global vantage point, the lesson is clear: climate volatility is no longer a tail-risk; it is baked into weekly P&L statements. Markets that invest in resilient infrastructure—backup generators, micro-grids, and state-level emergency designations—will recover faster, while those treating storms as once-a-decade anomalies risk repeated revenue shocks. Until the industry rethinks its fixed-cost footprint, winter blasts like this one will continue to rewrite box-office charts with the same ruthless efficiency they bring to power grids.
