The Summer Box Office 2022: A Commercial Consideration

Labor Day has come and gone, marking the end of summer, and making it possible to appraise the season in full.

Doing so it looks like there were no big surprises since the last post on the subject--the box office is recovering, but not all the way back to normal, with a particularly weak August underlining the fact. In 2022 dollars the average take in that month in 2015-2019 was a little over $1 billion. By contrast the August of 2022 took in less than half that much ($467 million). Added to the preceding months this made for a take of about $3.4 billion for the May-August period--as against $5 billion or so in a typical year after one adjusts the old figures for inflation.

In short, the box office revenue remained at least a third down from the usual for the four month period. (I emphasize "at least" because in so many of those prior years a mega-release in very late April took in as much as hundreds of millions that would have ordinarily been counted as part of May's take--not a factor in 2022.) However, it seems worth reiterating that this seems a reflection of the year's weaker than usual slate--not least in the season's having had a mere four big live-action action-adventure blockbusters rather than the usual eight or more, three of which turned out to be less than the performers some might have hoped for because of their various disadvantages. The two of those four belonging to the Marvel Cinematic Universe bespoke the decadence of a franchise already heavily mined for more than a decade. (Thus was it with the self-referential Dr. Strange 2--the plot of which may have more bound up with a small-screen annex of the saga than was a good bet for what had to be a general audience entertainment, while as with so many worn-out series' Thor proved self-parodying enough to likewise leave many less than pleased.) Meanwhile the third installment in the second Jurassic Park trilogy ended that once-mighty saga with a whimper rather than a bang.

The small number of films meant that not only was there less of what people expect to see in the summer but that the roll-out had run its course by early July with Thor 4's debut--where in other years it continues down into late July and often early August (one reason why August 2022 was so lackluster compared with its predecessors, not least the August of 2016 that had such a big boost from the early August launch of Suicide Squad). Of course, those films could have benefited from the lack of competition by their individually getting that much more custom than they would have in a more crowded summer--but this likely only really happened for one of them, Top Gun 2, to go by the extraordinary legs that added so powerfully to its take (the movie making $42 million in its third month of theatrical play, which counted toward its mighty $700 million haul by Labor Day, almost four and a half times what it took in over its holiday weekend debut in an extreme rarity these days). Again that movie proved that single films can still be hits on as grand a scale as in the pre-pandemic period, but all the same, there is that gap in the earnings--if plausibly because Hollywood's release schedule, after all the chaos to which production and distribution has been subject, and all the disappointments of 2020 and 2021, has not yet caught up with the readiness to go to the movies (I think, quite understandably).

Still, it seems plausible that the summer of 2023, which looks like it has the first really "normal" summer release slate since 2019 (Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Fast and Furious 10, Transformers 6, Indiana Jones 5, Mission: Impossible 7, Captain Marvel 2, Meg 2--plus new DC Comics-verse movies about the Blue Beetle and the Flash, not counting animated superhero epics that include a Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse sequel and yet another big-screen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, the opposite of the pattern in a live-action version of the animated classic The Little Mermaid, etc., etc., etc.), could, in the absence of further disasters, bring in the kind of overall gross to which the studios and theater chains have grown accustomed.

And of course, coming on top of the other virtually indistinguishable films squeezed into the preceding four months (more Marvel films in Kraven the Hunter and Ant-Man 3, another DC film in Shazaam 2, John Wick 4, yet another attempt to make a hit movie out of Disney's Haunted Mansion ride, another Super Mario Brothers movie three decades after the virtually forgotten first attempt), and the four months to follow (from Marvel Madame Web, a reboot of Blade and a sequel to Aquaman; a Willy Wonka prequel, a sequel to the recent Ghostbusters sequel, a fourth installment in the rebooted Star Trek series, a Star Wars film from Taikia Watiti, etc., etc., etc.), it will give those who are weary of the torrent of sequels and prequels, remakes and spin-offs abundant opportunity for, as Fred Costanza might call it, "the airing of grievances."

Those so inclined of course have my deepest sympathies--and may feel entirely free to do such airing in the comment thread.