The Comfort of Classic Movies in Uncertain Times

Lines stretching around the block to get into a screening at the Toronto International Film Festival aren’t unusual. But they are remarkable when they form for a screening of a 50-year-old film, like they did last September for two special viewings of the 1975 Indian romance classic, Sholay. Equally noteworthy is the number of tickets sold thus far—more than 500,000 at an average price of nearly US $200 each—for the 4-D, AI-enhanced version of The Wizard of Oz that’s currently on at Sphere in Las Vegas. Impressive for a movie that first premiered in 1939.

These aren’t the only old movies drawing new crowds into theatres, either. In 2025, the Twilight saga, Black Swan, Clueless, Jaws, Hamilton and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith were all re-released and screened in cinemas. Anime classics The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, The Boy and the Heron and Angel’s Egg also saw re-releases, and Bollywood brought back a host of fan favourites, including 2007’s Jab We Met and 1997’s Dil To Pagal Hai.

These films often outperformed new films at the box office. Jaws, re-released in August 205 to commemorate its 50th anniversary, beat out both Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing and Jay Roach’s The Roses. Meanwhile, in 2023, a re-release of Titanic hit No. 1 in theatres, which is an impressive feat for a 26-year-old film that first came out the same year Gen Z was literally born. It remains to be seen how the original Star Wars will fare when it’s re-released in 2026; same for Harry Potter, which will screen once again in India, in celebration of its 25th anniversary.

In an era where we’ve never had more novelty at the tips of our scrolling fingers, our collective appetite for reheated cinema only seems to be growing. And that’s no accident, says Dr. Alexandra Gold, a licensed clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.

“We’re living in an uncertain time, and when there’s uncertainty, people are driven to things that help them gain more certainty,” says Dr. Gold. “Seeing a film that they’ve loved brings [people] back to a time where there was maybe less stuff going on. It’s a hard world we’re living in right now.” Watching a movie you’ve already seen is a way of building in predictability at a time when very few things feel stable.

“It’s something that brings a sense of comfort,” she says, adding that going to an actual physical theatre is now enough of a novelty on its own in our digital era. “Part of that is being around other fans. It gives a sense of community, even if you’re not talking to them. You’re in a theatre together and you’re still creating those bonds through this film that you all really connected with.” In the midst of our loneliness epidemic, she says, it’s a way of “feeling less alone, connected to something bigger than [yourself ].”

As coping mechanisms go, spending an afternoon in a movie theatre watching something from your childhood, or or even your parents’ childhood, is a healthy one. It’s also bringing some comfort to the movie industry itself, which struggled to fill seats in the aftermath of the pandemic and the Hollywood strikes that followed.

Hollywood execs and marketers have long known that nostalgia is a powerful tool, but it seems it’s resonating more than ever among the millennial generation. Marie Nicola, a pop culture historian and journalist, notes that there is something particular to this group’s experience that may be driving the current wave of comfort watching.

“Millennials are arguably the first generation to have clung to their comfort items well into adulthood,” Nicola says, pointing to things such as comics-inspired clothing and TV shows such as Friends. She chalks it up to the once-in-a-lifetime events millennials have endured—the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, for example—which have led them to create “a way of self-soothing that is being passed down to the next generation.” Case in point: a 2025 survey conducted by think tank The Human Flourishing Lab at the Archbridge Institute, titled “Historical Nostalgia in Modern America,” found that roughly 68 per cent of Gen Z women and men use historical nostalgia, such as analogue technology and pre-digital cultural products, to manage stress and future anxiety.

When it comes to movies, and why we might be drawn to the classics, in particular, Nicola says this tendency can be traced back to the simple storylines that were pioneered in the early days of Hollywood, right around the Great Depression, such as in The Wizard of Oz, for instance.

“People were already dealing with very complicated experiences in their lives at the time,” she says. “We were trained that, whenever there are periods of strife, storylines in films become very simple.”

That potent combination of the comfort of a familiar movie with a straightforward happy ending, which you can anticipate, may be at the core of the proliferation of these re-releases in a time of rapid technological and social acceleration, not to mention political and economic instability.

“Nostalgia is a tool that helps us slow time down, to help us wrap our heads around it,” Nicola says. And maybe that’s exactly what we need right now—not to live in the past, but to remember that the stories we loved once made us feel safe and can again.