Film attendance has been diminishing, but not at BlackStar. It’s bigger than ever.

Across Hollywood, industry leaders are cheering the “return” of summer moviegoing.

Last month, Variety published a cover story titled “The Box Office Bounces Back,” which celebrates attendance levels not seen since before the COVID-19 pandemic, and a projected $10 billion in domestic profits this year. Carried both by blockbusters like The Odyssey and lower-budget hits like Obsession, the article claims that “everyone had it wrong” about the cinematic appetite of Gen Z and the future of the art form. Actor/director Seth Rogen finds a “sense of optimism” among studio heads that mirrors “how it felt 15 years ago.”

Yet, buried at the end of the effusive piece is the familiar admission that “industry watchers” also know that ”there aren’t enough films geared to women or Black or Hispanic ticket buyers.”

Which begs the question: To where — or to what — exactly do they want us to return?

Experts in the article and elsewhere credit the apparent shift in cinematic habits to a generation raised on YouTube and Letterboxd that is now antsy to get off their phones, for the apparent shift in cinematic habits. But it remains unlikely that the most influential voices behind internet culture — namely Black creators — will be the ones to benefit from these observations.

Despite the fact that people of color bought the majority of opening weekend tickets for five of the Top 10 films released in theaters last year (including Ryan Coogler’s Sinners), and specifically represent “the majority of the audience share” for the most profitable genres of film (horror and animation), most of the mainstream excitement around the rising fortunes at the box office has focused on white directors like Backrooms’ Kane Parsons.

At the BlackStar Film Festival, we’ve felt the disconnect between the cinematic doomsayers of the past few years and the reality on the ground at our festival, which also started 15 years ago and has substantially grown since the onset of the pandemic.

In 2024, while the same publications were fearing disaster based on still-dipping box office receipts, we were experiencing record attendance in Philadelphia at a festival where masking was still required. This included a sold-out screening of Shatara Michelle Ford’s Dreams in Nightmares on opening night that brought over 500 people into the Kimmel Center to watch the world premiere of a feature film rooted in Black queer culture.

It was an unforgettable moment of intergenerational joy and community safety that felt very much like the future of moviegoing to us.

We’ve never doubted the desire for the kind of space that BlackStar provides, but we have felt, like many sister organizations in the field, the impact of a film industry with limited imagination that’s still reliant on very narrow measures of “success.”

Funding for our nonprofit, BlackStar Projects, started to dwindle in 2024, not based on our numbers — which were, again, on the rise — but based on a lack of corporate interest in Black independent cinema after an initial influx of support during the racial reckoning that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

As much as things change in Hollywood, they seem to stay the same — or at least attempt to return to the median.

Which is why box office results have always been an imperfect indicator of film trends or what audiences crave. Especially if you’re interested in building a sustainable, care-based ecosystem for filmmaking which challenges rather than sustains the status quo.

A more interesting question than which movies make the most money, particularly given the state of the world, is which movies are contributing to real change? Which filmmakers can speak to and for the people working to free us from white supremacist capitalism?

As we celebrate the 15th edition of the BlackStar Film Festival this week, we have ample evidence that what Black, brown, and Indigenous communities want is a space that actually brings us together around such movies; not just to watch, but to talk, critique, celebrate, learn, laugh, and cry.

In 2025 we started using the tagline “Cinema for Liberation,” but from the beginning BlackStar has been committed to building environments where films are seen as tools for broader social change. And we’ve watched our audience expand even as we’ve stuck to our values and insisted on centering care amid the most challenging moments.

Maybe flying under the radar is how we have managed to sustain this for so long, but nevertheless, if the film industry is truly looking for a model on how to build and retain an audience long term, they could try looking here.

We pride ourselves on our curation, facilitated by some of the world’s greatest programmers, but there’s no doubt that the context in which our films play is just as important. Too many of those in charge of arts institutions have devalued the importance of safety, in the physical and emotional sense, referencing the losses of the pandemic without thinking of the mass loss of life.

The pandemic wasn’t a business problem to solve, but rather a health crisis to adapt to, compounded by racist, misogynistic, and oppressive state policies that made — and continue to make — it frightening to gather in large groups. What our model proves, though, is that leaning into your politics rather than shying away from them is a pathway to keeping your audience coming back, summer after summer.

This looks like a goal of making every screening as accessible as possible, giving a documentary about the formidable late cultural worker and author Toni Cade Bambara the spotlight moment at the 2025 festival — knowing her ideas would speak to the moment — or by leaning into our values and showing up in solidarity with our people in Haiti, Palestine, Sudan, and beyond, in these moments of human-made catastrophe and genocide.

It also means, since 2012, paying filmmakers and thinkers in a way that feels respectful, knowing that many of them are not making back the money they’ve spent to produce their work.

It’s not only BlackStar that makes this radical space possible, but the vibrant organizing and artistic history in Philadelphia. As outlined in Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams, there has been a legacy of Black internationalism in our liberation movements — specifically so in Philadelphia.

By Black internationalism, we mean a global, transnational framework in which Black Americans connect our struggles to those of worldwide anti-colonial liberation movements. For example, this fall we’re proud to launch the “People’s Cinema Club” at the Village of Industry and Art, a weekly film series in collaboration with some of the city’s diverse independent cinema organizers, including cinéSpeak, the Philadelphia Asian American Film Foundation, and the Philadelphia Latino Arts and Film Festival.

At BlackStar, we’re not interested in returning to a Hollywood system that was built to exclude and demean us, but we are invested in learning from our elders and ancestors who have been using moving images to expand our vision since the advent of the art form.

What we find in that archive is a long history of independent screenings, festivals, and organizing around cinema as a tool to dream bigger and organize together, across racial and class lines. We see the filmmakers of color we platform not just as artists, but as the architects of the better world in which we want to live.

The 2026 BlackStar Film Festival takes place from Aug. 6 to 9, at venues across the city. For a full schedule of events, click here.

Maori Karmael Holmes is the founder of the BlackStar Film Festival and chief executive and artistic officer of BlackStar Projects. Nehad Khader is the BlackStar Film Festival director.