Finally, the box office — north of $4.2 billion year to date domestically — seems to be heading back in a place that we haven’t since before Covid. A new generation of filmmakers in Markiplier, Curry Barker, Kane Parsons and Michael Tiddes have finally been able to hook the Gen Z and Gen Alpha crowd into moviegoing.

However, the winds of change are set to blow in the motion picture industry with the looming Paramount-Warner Bros Discovery merger. Will consolidation upend the good thing we have going at the box office?

Deadline sat down this week with industry leaders on a panel at Deadline x Regal Future of Storytelling for the Big Screen to sort out the state of the business. The panelists included Lionsgate Motion Picture Chairman Adam Fogelson, who recently led the studio to its highest-grossing movie ever in Michael); Disney Studios Head of Theatrical Distribution Andrew Cripps, who is delivering another big box office year to the Mouse House, led by this weekend’s anticipated Toy Story 5, set to open to $275 million worldwide; Legendary Entertainment Studios Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer Blair Rich, who was key in bringing Gen Z and Gen Alpha back first with the near $1 billion-grossing A Minecraft Movie last year); Scary Movie filmmaker Michael Tiddes, who rejuvenated the big-screen comedy with a franchise best start of $105M WW); and Regal Cinemas CEO Eduardo Acuna, who has delivered Los Angeles its most state-of-the-art theater with four PLFs at the newly luxuriously revamped Sherman Oaks Galleria.

Watch the panel conversation below and scroll down for photos from the event.

Talking about the rebound of this year’s box office, including a summer that stands per Rentrak at $1.6B+, the best since 2019, Acuna observed, “We’ve reached the peak of digital consumption… We had made decisions based on the fact that people will just want to see their phone even more, and at some point people just don’t.”

“When we recognized that people want to go out, that they want to be treated with good service in a good theater with good product, when we recognized that and gave them that, they just came back in hordes more than any other generation,” he adds.

When it comes to bringing a younger generation into cinemas, Rich observes. “you have to be willing to evolve a [marketing] campaign.” That was the secret to success for A Minecraft Movie. When fans rejected elements in the first trailer, Legendary and Warner Bros listened and pivoted. The changes yielded great riches at the B.O. and an upcoming sequel.

Added Fogelson about studios harnessing a new generation, “Marketers are having to learn a completely different language.”

“All of the things when I was growing up in marketing that we’re sort of held to be certain and true about how you reach an audience, those things, especially for the generations we’re talking about, have changed,” he says.

Case in point: Don’t overshare too much in a trailer; if you do, “you’re going to get flat-out rejected,” the Lionsgate exec says.

“Some of the movies that are succeeding that are coming from this generation, they’re telling story in a very different way,” he adds.

Tiddes gave props to Paramount’s marketing department, which created a string of memes and myriad parodies on social media to lead the masses to Scary Movie.

“Paramount did a fantastic job in marketing Scary Movie. What Scary Movie has always done really well is held up a mirror to where we are currently in time by, making fun of the social pop-culture political aspects while also taking advantage of iconic horror films that are in the zeitgeist,” he says.

Also driving moviegoers? Nostalgia.

“Whether it’s Devil Wears Prada 2, Michael or Toy Story 5 coming out this weekend, that feel-good factor of going back to the movies plays into this pretty strongly as well,” says Cripps.

Given the growing demand for moviegoing post-Covid, the panel largely believed most cinemas are under-screened when it comes to premium large-format auditoriums.

“When you open a movie that we’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars making and marketing, you want those first consumers to see it in the best way possible because they’re going to have a better experience,” says Cripps. “They’re going to be on Instagram and talking about the movie. So you want as many premium screens as possible. It’s so important in this day and age that we offer consumers something different from that experience they get at home.”

And what about that Par-WBD merger, which has promised 30 theatrical releases annually?

Says Acuna, “At the end of the day, what we want is the number of movies we talked about, the windows and not having our customers being confused.”

In regards to how a Paramount-Warner Bros marriage impacts the competition, Fogelson says, “I think wait and see is obviously appropriate because in every consolidation like this one, a lot of things have been said historically, I’m sure, by well-intentioned people who meant them. And then the reality is almost invariably significantly different for a thousand reasons. As it relates to this particular merger, I would say that if, in fact, Paramount and Warner Bros operate as two stand-alones and make all the movies they’re making, then nothing’s going to change.”

Adds Cripps, “We’re in a good place in terms of moviegoing at the moment and hopefully nothing from the merger jeopardizes that.”