Rethinking the Pandemic's Legacy for the Movie Business

Early in the pandemic my expectation was that the blow to an already fragile film business--the disruption of a much-weakened and eroding habit of film-going, the shutdown of many theaters, the increasing shift of even big-budget original content to streaming--would make recovery slow and full recovery unlikely (especially given that, as we have seen, the pandemic never went away). In late 2021 and early 2022 my view changed somewhat, such successes as Spider-Man: No Way Home (an $800 million hit in North America alone just as the latest mutation of the COVID-19 virus was running wild) made it seem as if not so much had changed, with the successes of Top Gun 2 and Avatar 2 in particular the following year giving the impression of a return to normal underway--and I suggested that the packed release slate of 2023 would see the box office normalize that year, since all 2022 had seemed to me to lack was the usual quantity of releases, and especially of near-sure-fire franchise sequels among them.

Of course, it did not work out that way. The movies came, of course, but the recovery of the box office that looked so dramatic between late 2021 and the spring of 2023 stalled out badly in the summer, suggesting that the continuation of the recovery much past three-quarters of the pre-pandemic level of business would be a long, slow process--the more in as to the extent that people were going to the theater they were not doing it for the same movies as before. Where in 2021 and 2022 we saw the usual sort of blockbusters lead the way--big franchise action films like the Marvel, Top Gun and Avatar sequels--2023 saw such films consistently underperform from Ant-Man 3 forward, and time and again flop catastrophically over the summer, with the process exemplified by the receptions to The Flash and Indiana Jones 5, and less dramatically, the newest Fast and Furious, Transformers and Mission: Impossible films. Rather it was more idiosyncratic hits that led the way--The Super Mario Bros. Movie in the spring, Barbie and Oppenheimer in the late summer period--with these accounting for a disproportionate share of the box office as the distribution of ticket sales became ever more "top-heavy." (Where in the early 2000s the top ten films of a given year accounted for 23 percent of that year's North American box office gross, and it was more like 34 percent in 2015-2019, in 2023 so far it seems to be just under 50 percent to go by the Box Office Mojo's numbers.*)

The result is that I think my earlier, more pessimistic appraisal was the more accurate--and that Hollywood will have that much tougher a time ahead of it as, with streaming proved no substitute for theatrical revenues, those revenues come to depend on an ever smaller share of hits and, in comparison with the past years when Disney flourished by ruthlessly exploiting the viability of Star Wars, superheroes and animation (both new animated movies and live-action adaptations of its old animated classics), the movies once counted on to be winners fail to deliver, while those likely to truly be winners are ever harder to identify.**

* The calculation is based on the site's "calendar gross" rather than "in-year release" figures (some $3.4 billion grossed by the top ten films against the year's overall gross of $6.9 billion).
** Exemplary of that situation seven of the ten highest-grossing movies of 2019 were Disney productions of exactly these kinds (Star Wars 9, Avengers 4, Captain Marvel, Toy Story, Frozen 2, Lion King and Aladdin), while Disney's Marvel coproduced an eighth movie on the list (Spider-Man: Far From Home), with the top six all Disney productions (of the seven previously mentioned, all but Aladdin), a truly astonishing preponderance, while every one of these broke the billion-dollar barrier globally (at a time when a billion dollars was more like $1.2 billion today, and therefore that much more substantial an achievement).