Though slightly below projections, No Time to Die’s opening weekend box office grosses in the US—coming hot on the heels of Venom: Let There Be Carnage’s positively pre-pandemic $90-million weekend—suggest people are indeed getting more comfortable with heading back to movie theaters (whether that’s a good idea or not probably depends on where you live and how many shots you’ve had). Great news for the studios and theater chains, yeah—and also for ticket buyers who miss the big screen experience.
The death of movie theaters has been long prophesied, and the exact shape of the moviegoing experience post-COVID (if we ever freaking get there) remains hazy. At this moment, though, it looks very much like it always did, even if increasingly shorter windows between theatrical debut and home streaming/rental are now likely a fact of life. Box office grosses—the primary way to gauge a film’s success for more than a century—may no longer define what’s a hit and what’s a flop, as streamers can now crow about premium rental fees and boosted subscriber numbers.
Slow recovery and new business models aside, the pandemic’s impact on global box office has been profound. And, look, we’ve had bigger things to worry about, but some films that could have been box office contenders never had a shot—these are good movies that we might have seen in theaters if we hadn’t been smartly avoiding huddling in enclosed, crowded spaces. These 12 films received exclusive theatrical releases at some point during the pandemic, without a simultaneous streaming option (though in some cases the window between theater and on demand was as short as a few weeks).