Yeah it’s interesting to look at the history of the number of movies past a certain threshold. Doesn’t proceed as steadily as would be convenient. While I note that the number of 2B is similar to the number past 1B a dozen years ago, we also know that we got a bunch more from 2011-2015 — and in the next 5 years I bet we see 1-4 new movies past 2B. The big difference is that China was a hugely populous emerging market at the time and there is no equivalent now — if anything the decline of CBO, especially when it comes to HW, will be an artificial headwind on nominal WW gross growth instead of an artificial tailwind. Though the early 2020s has unusually high global inflation, vs the unusually low global inflation of the early 2010s
So is 2B the new 1B? Well, sort of. But also 1.5B is sort of the new 1B. Depends what you mean.