Moviegoers are flocking to cinemas in numbers not seen since before the pandemic as the return of Hollywood blockbusters to the big screen fuels what theatre owners hope is the start of a post-Covid box office recovery.

Tim Richards, the chief executive of Vue, the UK’s third biggest chain, says last weekend proved to be its best since February 2020 thanks to a slate of new films being given a theatrical release rather than just on streaming services.

Titles that have pulled in punters include the DC Comics supervillain ensemble piece Suicide Squad, the Looney Tunes character-packed Space Jam: A New Legacy and Jungle Cruise, starring the Rock and inspired by a Disneyland theme park ride of the same name.

In the past week, admissions have been more than two-and-a-half times Vue’s weekly average number for the past 18 months.

This success was matched by Odeon, owned by the world’s largest cinema operator AMC, which said last weekend was its best since theatres were allowed to reopen in May.

“We are ahead of where we thought we would be,” says Richards, adding that in the UK attendance had at times managed to hit more than 80% of those before the first lockdown.

“The fact we are seeing almost pre-pandemic levels today is a positive sign for the future. But it is important to remember as an industry we are still pretty bruised from the past 18 months. It is going to take a period of time before we corporately recover.”

Cinemas have been battered by being closed for months on end during the pandemic, resulting in the lowest annual admissions ever recorded. The UK’s biggest chain Cineworld reported a $3bn (£2.17bn) loss last year.

It will take several years for a complete recovery, with the technology research firm Omdia forecasting that the annual UK box office will not match 2019’s £1.25bn mark until 2023.

There had been concerns in the industry that the pandemic had changed attitudes towards consuming films for ever. Ofcom reported this week that the public spent a third of their waking hours last year watching TV, while subscriptions to streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video soared by 50% to 31m as locked-down Britons turned to the small screen.

However, the recent mass return of cinemagoers allays some of those fears. “I don’t think we have seen a weakening of cinemas’ appeal,” says Phil Clapp, the chief executive of the UK Cinema Association. “We have done an ongoing survey throughout the pandemic and it has shown that the most voracious consumers of streaming services are actually those who said they were most likely to return to see films on the big screen. The biggest consumers of home entertainment are also the most frequent movie-goers.”

The pandemic has also threatened cinema owners’ once-sacrosanct business model, in which they were given exclusive rights to show films for months before they were made available for home viewing.

With the pandemic hitting big-screen attendance, Hollywood studios including Disney, Warner Bros and Universal have ramped up a trend of offering films such as Mulan and Godzilla vs Kong direct to consumers at home for up to $30 (£22) at the same time as in cinemas.

Last week, Scarlett Johansson started a legal action against Disney claiming that the decision to release Black Widow simultaneously in cinemas and on the streaming service Disney+ affected its box office performance. Johansson’s salary is based on the performance of the film in cinemas.

“Only about half a dozen films originally destined for theatrical release have gone to streaming,” Richards says. “The general consensus out there is that studios and film-makers lost a lot of money with that strategy.”

David Hancock, a media and entertainment analyst at Omdia, says more than 160 films were scheduled for release in 2020 and 2021 and that most were awaiting a big screen premiere as that remained the best way for movie-makers to maximise value. The latest edition of the James Bond franchise No Time to Die has been repeatedly postponed from its original April 2020 release date, and is scheduled to come out in the UK next month.

“I don’t think streaming is going to change cinema the same way DVD and VHS didn’t,” Hancock says. “If everything was moved to streaming services that would impact cinema-going, but that hasn’t happened. I think digital releases are still an experiment.”

Hancock adds that if the current positive trends continue, weekly box office take will be back to 80-85% of pre-pandemic levels by the end of this year, although 2021’s take overall will be half that of 2019. He expects weekly box office take to return to 2019 levels by the middle of next year.

“We are going to see almost three years of movies released in 18 months,” Richards says. “We are genuinely seeing the next golden age of cinema.”