MIAMI BEACH — The COVID pandemic drove the cruise industry to a standstill, but numbers released Tuesday signal the years of comeback are officially over with more expansion on tap.

More than 31.7 million passengers took cruises worldwide in 2023, said Kelly Craighead, Cruise Line International Association president and CEO, speaking at the annual Seatrade Cruise Global conference at Miami Beach Convention Center.

CLIA is the lobbying group for member cruise lines, including Royal Caribbean, Disney Cruise Line, Carnival, Norwegian, MSC and most other major brands.

The pandemic shut down sailing from March 2020 with only a small number of ships coming back online 18 months later in summer 2021. Cruise lines didn’t return to full strength until partially through 2022, so it wasn’t until a full year of sailing in 2023 that the industry could get a real handle on just what the demand had grown to as people returned to vacation travel.

“We are an industry that’s resilient and thriving all around the world, breaking records in ways we might never have imagined,” she said.

The 2023 total is 2 million more than the industry had in 2019. CLIA projects 34.1 million in 2024 growing to 34.6 million in 2025. It’s still a miniscule chunk of the overall travel pie of more than 1.3 billion, but cruise’s share is growing.

She noted that surveys of travelers who would consider a cruise for a vacation are at an all-time high, noting that 82% who had previously cruised said they would cruise again, but more importantly, among those who had never sailed, 71% would consider it.

The youngest generations — Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z — are the biggest drivers.

The fleet for the growing demand continues as well, including the introduction this year of the world’s largest cruise ship, Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas.

She said CLIA member lines had more than 300 ships sailing globally for the first time in 2023, with 14 new ships that began sailing in 2023 and another eight expected before the end of the year. They have 88 new ships on order through 2028.

Already this year, both Royal Caribbean Group and Carnival Corp. announced major new ship construction deals, and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings added to that this week with its order of eight more vessels across its three brands.

The heads of those groups were on stage to discuss where the industry is headed and enjoy their recent success.

Carnival Corp.’s president and CEO Josh Weinstein put it in a way that gained plaudits from fellow panelists and others at the conference.

“The concept of pent-up demand for cruising is gone,” he said. “We have been cruising for three years, right? It’s over. This is natural demand because we all provide amazing experiences. We delivered happiness to literally 31 million guests last year. And people see it, they feel it.”

A big part of what cruising missed during the pandemic he said was that word-of-mouth promotion that is needed to convince people to try their product.

“We now have 31 million people getting off our ships and going home and telling their friends and family who have never cruised before, ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’ ‘This is amazing.’”

All of the leaders echoed the industry line that they offer a much better value than land-based vacations, but that the experience gap between the two has now shifted in their favor coming out of the pandemic.

“The appreciation for building memories with your friends and family coming out of COVID is at extraordinarily high levels,” said Jason Liberty, president & CEO at Royal Caribbean Group. “Also wealth transfer, right? Grandparents wanting to see that wealth transfer live, watching their kids and their grandkids experience that is also at an all-time high. … We have the secular trends of people buying less stuff, they want experiences. We’re in the experience business.”

Another bright aspect to the industry has been the spillover effect of all of the new ships since the pandemic, said Harry Sommer, president & CEO at Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd.

“Their new products are so extraordinary, and so much better than what was delivered back in ’15, ’16 and ’17, that it’s driving additional excitement for the entire industry,” Somer said. “When any new ship is delivered, no matter whether it’s part of our portfolio or the other portfolios, demand improves for all of us because it adds excitement to the industry.”

“Irena’s Vow” is a potent reminder that the world needs heroes — those brave enough to do what’s morally right even when the risks are great.

In theaters on April 15 and 16 via Fathom Events, the consistently compelling film is based on the true story of Irena Gut OpdykeI, who, during Nazi Germany’s occupation of much of Poland, put her life on the line in an attempt to protect a group of Jewish people from extermination. Astoundingly, she hid them right under the nose — literally under the feet — of a Nazi officer.

“Irena’s Vow,” which premiered in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, first existed as a play. Years after its 2009 debut off-Broadway, its writer, Dan Gordon, has adapted it for the screen, and, under the deft direction of Louise Archambault, the film is something greater in scale than a stage work performed in front of a camera.

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The movie is anchored by the measured performance of Sophie Nélisse as Irena, who also goes by Irene, and whom we meet in 1939 as she’s working as a nursing student at a hospital. Word arrives that Germany and Russia have divided the country.

“Poland is no more,” someone announces — moments before an explosion rocks the hospital.

Soon, like other Poles, Irena is spending her days contributing to the German effort.

“Work hard and no harm will come to you,” a Nazi tells her and others.

Work hard she does, but she isn’t cut out for factory labor and is reassigned as a domestic house laborer. She thrives in this new setting, where, along with cooking food that impresses the Nazis who dine there, her duties include supervising 12 Jewish workers in the laundry. She suspects many of them have exaggerated their tailoring skills to seem useful, and she assures them they all must do better for their sakes, as well as hers.

Because he’s been so impressed by her, Major Rugemer (Dougray Scott) informs her she is being moved again, this time to the villa into which he is moving and where he regularly will host parties for other high-ranking Nazis. She will be in charge of running the house.

Irena Gut Opdyke, portrayed by Sophie Nélisse, impresses Nazi officer Major Rugemer, portrayed by Dougray Scott, with her work early on in “Irena’s Vow.” (Darius-Irena Productions Inc.)

Shortly before this, she overhears an intimidating SS officer, Rokita (Maciek Nawrocki), tell Rugemer that soon no Jews in the sector will remain among the living. Already shaken by witnessing an act of near-indescribable Nazi heinousness in the streets, Irena decides she will hide her friends in the villa’s cellar, planning to make use of a brief window of time between when she gains access to it and Rugemer arrives to move them there.

From that moment through most of the rest of the film, as World War II rages on, “Irena’s Vow” is a largely nerve-wracking experience, as Irena and her friends face one challenge after another. To their credit, though, Gordon (“Passenger 57,” “Wyatt Earp”) and Archambault (“Thanks for Everything,” “One Summer”) never overdo it; as a viewer, you sense that most days in the characters’ lives are largely uneventful but that you are witnessing those that are anything but that. The film even contains moments of relative joy, such as when, early on in the precarious situation, the cellar dwellers help Irena prepare a feast for a party, Irena having insisted to Rugemer she needed no extra help in the house and needing to prove that to be the case.

Nélisse, whose film credits include “The Book Thief” and “47 Meters Down: Uncaged” but who may best be known for portraying the younger version of Shauna on Showtime’s “Yellowjackets,” does her finest work as Irena must portray an increasingly complex character and the situation around her evolves.

Sophie Nélisse’s Irena most play an increasingly complex role as “Irena’s Vow” progresses.” (Darius-Irena Productions Inc.)

Because the film is told from Irena’s point of view, “Irena’s Vow” does little in the way of character development when it comes to those whom Irena is hiding; we see them only when she is interacting with them. It is both understandable and a little disappointing.

As a result, one of the few other actors who gets to make much of an impression is Scott (“Deep Impact,” “Ever After: A Cinderella Story”). In his hands, Rugemer falls somewhere in the vast space between entirely loathsome and at least vaguely sympathetic.

We are treated to a couple of nice moments courtesy of Schulz (Andrzej Seweryn), who, many years Irena’s senior, imparts upon her some advice for navigating her new reality.

“You worry about you. You take care of you. You know only what you need to know,” he says, adding that she should be like a monkey — hearing nothing, seeing nothing and speaking nothing.

Fortunately for some, the real Irena — who, according to press materials for the film, was named by the Israeli Holocaust Commission as one of the Righteous among the Nations, a title given to those who risked their lives by hiding and saving Jews during the Holocaust, and the recipient of the Israel Medal of Honor — couldn’t live that way.

“Irena’s Vow” is a stirring tribute to her bravery.

‘Irena’s Vow’

Where: Theaters.

When: April 15 and 16.

Rated: R for some strong violence and brief sexuality.

Runtime: 2 hours, 1 minute.

Stars (of four): 3.5.

Editor’s note: This article was updated at 4:58 p.m. to correct the dates the film is slated to run in theaters.

 

By ALICIA RANCILIO (Associated Press)

Travis Kelce’s NFL off-season with the Kansas City Chiefs has been a busy one.

The Super Bowl LVIII-winning tight end is the host of a new game show called “Are You Smarter than a Celebrity?” for Prime Video, the streaming service confirmed Tuesday. Filming for the 20-episode season has already completed.

The premise is a twist on “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”, which debuted on Fox in 2007 and was hosted by Jeff Foxworthy. It also aired in syndication. John Cena hosted a 2019 revival for Nickelodeon.

In Kelce’s show, an adult contestant will be given 11 elementary-level questions where they can ask a classroom of various celebrities for help answering. The final question is from the 6th grade curriculum and is worth $100,000. Only one celebrity is allowed to talk through the answer to the last question with the contestant.

Kelce, who is dating music superstar Taylor Swift, said in a statement he grew up watching game shows and is “excited to be following in the footsteps of so many TV icons.”

This isn’t Kelce’s first TV gig. He starred in his own 2016 dating competition show for E! called “Catching Kelce” and hosted an episode of “Saturday Night Live” last year.

Truly this is the week for future shock — darkly compelling visions of a near-future that humankind can only interpret as a rejection letter, or a comeuppance for its determined lack of disaster prevention and preparedness.

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The narratively straightforward “Civil War” has some far-out company, in other words. Now at the Music Box Theatre, cowriter-director Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” imagines a world 20 years hence. Climate change, and presumed corporate and political resistance to changing with it, have led to ruinous air quality, unlivable for humans without enormous masks and sealed buglike visors. Human unemployment hovers around 67 percent, thanks to the workforce dominance of artificial intelligence. The world has been saved by AI, we’re told in passing, and is run with reliable calm by humanoid dolls calling the shots, unburdened by the pesky brain chemistry and volatility of human “affects.”

In the 2044 Paris sequences of “The Beast,” the protagonist, Gabrielle — one of three Gabrielles we come to know, two of them past incarnations from 1910 and 2014 — seeks something more fulfilling than simple (and by the movie, undefined) drudgery work, the kind of thing humans used to believe AI would handle. Gabrielle’s emotions prevent her viability for better-paying jobs. She faces a decision point: Should she undergo “purification,” a zeroing-out of the psychic residue of her past lives? Or is a life of real feeling, even if surrounded by a sea of neutral faces and frictionless blank spirits, the better option?

In her previous selves Gabrielle was a celebrated pianist in the time of the momentous Paris flood (1910), then a struggling actress adrift in Los Angeles (2014). In each of the film’s three intertwined eras, her passionate artist’s heart belongs to the same man, Louis (George MacKay). Like Gabrielle, he undergoes wholesale personality and destiny makeovers in each time frame. Yet a pervasive fear of imminent catastrophe prevents Gabrielle from seizing the day, and the life she truly wants. She’s the gender-switched equivalent to the male character of the screenplay’s origin, the 1903 Henry James novella “The Beast in the Jungle,” though Bonello and cowriters Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit pile their own fabulations atop fabulations, with imaginative impunity.

It all might’ve sunk under the weight of itself — if not for Léa Seydoux. No one in contemporary film expresses so much with eyes, voice, silence, small talk, whatever the moment requires, while repressing or hinting at so much more. Seydoux makes this trio of Gabrielles specific, droll and very moving, even when “The Beast” wanders a bit, or pulls from its various literary and cinematic influences — a little David Lynch, a little David Fincher, a lot of slightly curdled romanticism — to occasionally uncertain effect. MacKay’s good; Seydoux is excellent.

Bonello treats his layer cake of a movie as an occasion for a layering of genres. I found the 2014 LA narrative the least interesting, though certainly tension-building, since MacKay’s 2014 Louis is modeled after serial killer Elliot Rodger. For roughly 40 minutes of “The Beast,” we’re watching a virtual standalone thriller, with Gabrielle housesitting in a swank, cold glass domicile just begging for voyeurs, or worse. The dread that has dogged past versions of Gabrielle becomes manifest here, as MacKay’s incel stalker directs his lonely rage on women everywhere, anywhere.

This unbalances the movie, I think. And yet “The Beast” is an elegant cinematic achievement. Its devotion to the untamed territory of the human heart, its artfully discombobulating time and locale shifts, the shifting personae handled with marvelous fluidity by Seydoux; it takes you somewhere, and more than one somewhere.

“AI has become responsible and fair,” the 2044 Gabrielle is told by her unseen job interviewer, not human. Then, he adds: “And so human.” “The Beast” doesn’t need much in the way of digital imagery to create a strange new world; it’s enough to make Gabrielle audition for a phone commercial in a green-screen sound stage at the beginning (and later), where she pretends to see things she can only imagine. Later, Seydoux’s wearily reincarnated Gabrielle wanders the near-empty streets of the formerly beguiling City of Light, with only a stray deer for company. The sight is grimly amusing: tragicomedy. So is the telltale throwaway line early on, referencing Gabrielle’s childhood in America and her family’s abrupt return to France.

Why flee? Two words, which happen to be the title of the Alex Garland movie opening this week: civil war.

Is our civic, political and democratic collapse as dead certain as the movies are making it right now?

“The Beast” — 3 stars (out of 4)

No MPA rating (violence, some nudity, language)

Running time: 2:26

How to watch: Now playing at Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.; musicboxtheatre.com. In French and English with English subtitles.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.