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It has been just one day at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, and there’s already a palpable sense of relief in the air.

Attendance at this year’s show is up about 5% from last year, according to Cinema United, the trade group that organizes the four-day convocation of thousands of movie theater owners, studio executives and industry folks at Caesars Palace.

Groups of people wearing orange-colored lanyards are everywhere throughout the hotel and casino, with many filling the Colosseum on Monday afternoon for a presentation from specialty film companies Angel Studios, Sony Pictures Classics and StudioCanal.

“The energy in every room reflected a sector that believes deeply in its own future,” said Stephanie Silverman, owner of the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville who serves on Cinema United’s strategic planning committee. “For independents, that sense of collective purpose is powerful — we’re not just holding on, we’re building toward something real and lasting.”

Amid such upbeat sentiment, CinemaCon allows theater owners and their business partners to see what’s coming from each studio and get a snapshot of the year ahead.

On Monday, Provo, Utah-based Angel Studios showed footage from their upcoming film “Young Washington,” about the early life of the first U.S. president, as well as a trailer from an animated retelling of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

“Theatrical isn’t fragile,” Shelley Schulz, vice president of domestic theatrical sales and exhibitor strategy at Angel Studios, said during the presentation. “It’s not fading. It’s evolving.”

European indie film studio StudioCanal also unveiled some of its upcoming films, including scenes from a new animated “Shaun the Sheep” movie that got laughs from the audience, before bringing out director Danny Boyle to applause and cheers to speak about his new film “Ink,” about the beginnings of the British tabloid “The Sun.”

Later this week, Warner Bros., Universal, Amazon MGM, Paramount and Disney will unveil footage from their upcoming releases and likely bring their major stars on-stage to build excitement about this year’s slate.

As I reported Monday, a string of recent hits like Amazon MGM Studios’ “Project Hail Mary” and Universal Pictures, Nintendo and Illumination’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” have pushed year-to-date domestic box office revenue about 23% higher than the same time last year.

The upswing signals that the exhibition business is embarking on its long-awaited recovery from the devastating downturn that occurred in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Studio executives and theater operators chalk up the improved prospects in part to a better and more plentiful crop of bankable movies that are bringing people back to the multiplex.

Exhibitors feel better about the lineup this year — it’s full of major franchises like “Star Wars” and Marvel superheroes as well as well-known animated titles such as “Toy Story 5” and “Minions & Monsters.” Also coming are anticipated films from acclaimed directors Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg.

“We’re getting into that cadence we needed in terms of having good movies, different types of movies being released every weekend,” Cinépolis USA Chief Executive Luis Olloqui told me ahead of CinemaCon. “This year in general, we’re feeling more confident, more optimistic.”

It’s quite the turnaround from the anxiety I heard last year leading into CinemaCon, when theater owners grappled with the box office downturn and the general shakiness of the industry.

Not to say that this year is all roses.

As I wrote, there are still major question marks facing the industry, including how Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery will affect the business. Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison has said the combined company will release 30 films a year, but exhibitors fear that cost cuts from the deal could impede that goal, which many believe is unrealistic.

And Hollywood is still going through a painful retrenchment.

Just last week, Sony Pictures Entertainment said it would cut hundreds of jobs across its film, TV and corporate divisions. Then came the news about upcoming layoffs at Disney, which could number as many as 1,000.

It hasn’t been much better in the exhibition space, either. In February, Dallas-based Look Dine-In Cinemas abruptly closed three Southern California locations; then, in March, the iPic chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and said it planned to pursue a sale of its assets.

A better box office this year wouldn’t solve all of these problems, but it would inject more hope into an industry that has been in turmoil since the pandemic.

Stuff we wrote

Film shoots

Number of the week

Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive David Zaslav could get as much as $887 million to leave the company after the Paramount Skydance acquisition.

That amount “represents one of the highest golden parachute estimates ever observed,” investor advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services wrote in a recent report. The firm said support for the proposal “is not warranted.”

Warner shareholders will vote April 23 on the proposed takeover.

What I’m watching

For years, one of the shows on my weekly must-watch list is “Ghosts,” the delightful comedy about a couple who moves into a historic mansion haunted by its previous inhabitants. After a long week, the antics of Viking ghost Thorfinn always make me laugh.

GO to Dungeon Lane today and it’s strange to think it occupies a special place in Paul McCartney’s heart.

Yet it will go down in pop history alongside other street names associated with him, joining Penny Lane and Abbey Road.

Situated in the Speke neighbourhood of Liverpool, the L24 postal district, a faded road sign sets the tone for its desolate air.

It is bordered on one side by a solar farm business and, on the other, by a fenced-off area of scrubland which separates it from the city’s John Lennon Airport.

Before you get very far, a bright yellow “emergency access gate” bars further exploration.

But, as a child, Dungeon Lane was McCartney’s gateway to a stunning rural idyll where he could escape the hustle and bustle of urban life.

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In the Fifties, the lane took him past a daffodil farm to the Oglet Shore on the widest stretch of the River Mersey.

I wonder if young Paul, a keen birdwatcher, ventured into this wilderness clutching his trusty The Observer’s Book Of Birds.

There, he may have spotted any number of waders — curlew, snipe, dunlin, black-tailed godwits.

What we do know is that his lifelong love of our feathered friends began in those days.

This helps explain the compositions dotted through his career such as Blackbird with The Beatles, Single Pigeon with Wings, Two Magpies with The Fireman and solo efforts Jenny Wren and Long Tailed Winter Bird.

To McCartney, his early rambles into the countryside represent humbler, simpler times before The Fab Four exploded on to the scene, before his storied life in the dazzling glare of publicity.

Sir Paul, 83, has called his 19th solo album The Boys Of Dungeon Lane . . . which is, as he suggests, a trip down memory lane.

He got the title from the lyrics of its first single, Days We Left Behind, released yesterday, a nostalgia-filled acceptance that he has a far longer past than future.

Intimate, beautifully sung with Macca playing acoustic guitar, bass, piano and harmonium himself (how does he do that!?), it is the first taste of a project that has been five years in the making.

“This is very much a memory song for me,” he says. “I was thinking about just that . . . the days I left behind.

“And I do often wonder if I’m just writing about the past — but then I think, how can you write about anything else?”

For McCartney, the song conjures up “a lot of memories of Liverpool. It involves a bit in the middle about John [Lennon] and Forthlin Road which is the street I used to live in. Dungeon Lane is near there.”

Paul was born on June 18, 1942, to his midwife mother Mary and salesman father Jim, and they moved with younger brother Mike to 20, Forthlin Road, Allerton, in the mid-Fifties from Speke, where they had lived since 1947.

We also know that Paul first bumped into John on July 6, 1957, at roughly 4pm, at a garden fete behind St Peter’s Church, Woolton.

In Days We Left Behind, he sings of the bond he formed with the lanky lad 20 months older than him: “We met at Forthlin Road/And wrote a secret code/To never be spoken.”

Continuing his reflection on the song, he says: “I used to live in a place called Speke which is quite working class.

“We didn’t have much at all but it didn’t matter because all the people were great and you didn’t notice you didn’t have much.”

As already mentioned, birdwatching was a hobby, one that required little cash and gave him a lot of pleasure “in the nearby woods and fields”.

A recent entry in Macca’s Spotify playlists, under the banner Sticking Out Of My Back Pocket, came accompanied by these musings . . .

“My mum had the midwife’s house on the edge of Liverpool, where we lived,” he says.

“It was where Liverpool just stopped and became deep countryside, so that was when I had the opportunity to do quite a bit of birdwatching.”

He particularly cherishes the moment he saw a “skylark rising into the sky, singing its sweet song”.

That unforgettable sight has found its way into Days We Left Behind, with its lines, “In the skies the skylarks rise/Above the sounds of war/Since that day I knew they’d stay/With me for evermore.”

All these decades later, he reflects: “And now because I live part-time on a farm [in Sussex], I’m able to see a lot of birds and I don’t need The Observer’s Book Of Birds quite so much as I did back then.”

McCartney’s new album promises to be one of the most personal, most autobiographical song cycles he’s ever recorded, while also finding room for up-to-date love songs dedicated to third wife Nancy.

Yesterday’s announcement states that it finds him in a “candid, vulnerable and deeply reflective mood, writing with rare openness about his childhood in post-war Liverpool, the resilience of his parents, and early adventures shared with George Harrison and John Lennon”.

I’m guessing here but songs yet to be heard, Momma Gets By and Salesman Saint, appear to be affectionate remembrances of mum Mary, who died when Paul was just 14, and dad Jim.

This is not the first time Macca has delved into his early years for songwriting inspiration.

I talked to him about the playful On My Way To Work, which appeared on his 2013 album, New.

He called it a “collection of memories all morphed together”, providing a fascinating glimpse into his life before Beatlemania.

“It’s about me going to my first job, before The Beatles took off, which was working on a lorry for a delivery company called Speedy Prompt Deliveries — SPD.”

McCartney described going to work on the council-run green and cream buses which led to him looking at risqué magazines like Parade.

“I’d go on the bus at some unearthly hour of the morning,” he said. “I might buy a magazine and look at the nudies. I was too young to be interested in the news!”

He remembered how hard-up kids like him ripped the fronts off cigarette packets and traded duplicates with their mates, instead of collecting “football cards or, like in America, baseball cards”.

“It was like, ‘I’ll swap you two Craven A for a Woodbine’. Then there were the posh brands because this bus route went from the centre of Liverpool to the outskirts.

“Posh people would be smoking Passing Clouds or Sobranies and packets of those were very prized.”

Another song, Queenie Eye, referenced a childhood street game from “1940s Britain”.

“It’s what we used to get up to before video games and that whole home entertainment thing,” he said.

“Someone would be elected to be ‘the one’ or the ‘queenie eye’. We’d all stand behind that person and he would throw a ball over his head and one of us would catch it and hide.

“Then we would all chant, ‘Queenie eye, queenie eye, who’s got the ball? I haven’t got it. It isn’t in my pocket!’ It was simple entertainment for simple minds but great fun.”

Now it is time to return to the 2020s and the creation of The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, the follow-up to his captivating lockdown album, McCartney III.

This time, we’re told we can expect “Wings-style rock, Beatles- style harmonies and McCartney-style grooves”.

The process began around five years ago when Macca met American live-wire producer Andrew Watt, known for his work with Ozzy Osbourne, Lady Gaga, Post Malone and The Beatles’ greatest Sixties chart rivals, the Rolling Stones.

Watt, I gather, “pulled a guitar” on his latest rock icon, who instantly happened upon a chord he didn’t recognise.

As the story goes, the ever- experimental McCartney changed one note, then another, until he had a three-chord sequence.

That led to his new record’s opening track, As You Lie There, which in turn set the ball rolling for the other 13 songs.

It’s remarkable that, as with McCartney III, he is credited with playing all the instruments himself across the whole thing.

It brings to mind how at ease this enduring music obsessive seemed as he suggested specific drum beats and fills to Ringo Starr in The Beatles’ Get Back documentary.

With Macca still touring and playing momentous shows like his 2022 Glastonbury epic, Days We Left Behind has been honed over half a decade when time permitted.

During that period, he even managed to introduce the Stones to producer Watt, who helmed their 2023 comeback album, Hackney Diamonds.

When McCartney was in Los Angeles working with Watt, he was brought in to play bass on Mick Jagger and Co’s punk blast, Bite My Head Off.

Upon its release, I spoke to Keith Richards who was made up over their special guest.

“Yeah, Macca just strolled in with his bass,” the guitar legend drawled. “I think the song reminded him of those times [in the Sixties]. Beatlemania was equally as bizarre as Stones mania.”

There’s a moment towards the end of Bite My Head Off where you can hear someone saying, “Come on Paul, play something”.

“That might have been me,” smiled Richards.

But this is all about Britain’s greatest living songwriter, Paul McCartney, and his new album The Boys Of Dungeon Lane.

Time is precious but when it comes to music and life, he’s still facing forward at 83 — even if he’s remembering a youth long ago when “in the skies, the skylarks rise”.