The Summer Movie Season of 2023: Has the Recovery Continued?

With Labor Day behind us it seems that the summer movie season of 2023 has run its course, making it possible to start evaluating the season as a whole--not least in regard to the film industry's post-pandemic financial recovery.

Let us take as the beginning of the time frame relevant to such a judgment what Box Office Mojo reports as the first $4 billion summer (and as it happens, the moment of the Great Recession in whose shadow we have lived ever since), 2007. Put in terms of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' tentative calculations about inflation, it was equivalent to a $6.1 billion gross in 2023 dollars (in which all subsequent figures will be presented). As it happens the figure was high, but not really exceptional for the period, the average for the seven-year 2007-2013 period about $6 billion a year (with 2013 itself a peak for the time span covered, with some $6.2 billion grossed). However, the numbers trended downward from there, with the norm for 2014-2019 (and 2015-2019) $5.3 billion, and the figures for 2018 and 2019 $5.3 billion and $5.1 billion respectively.

By contrast the years since saw a collapse in 2020, and a slow recovery since, with the relevant figures presented below:

2020-$83 million
2021-$1.96 billion
2022-$3.53 billion
2023-$4.03 billion

Considered in such terms one can say that 2023, the highest summer gross since before the pandemic, equaled about three-quarters of the norm for the 2014-2019 summer movie seasons (as against the mere 2 percent made in 2020, the two-fifths made in 2021). The implication is that the recovery has mostly already taken place--especially when we consider the extent to which grosses were already declining before the pandemic, implying that even without the pandemic we might have expected grosses in the 2020s to be a little lower than their 2014-2019 level anyway (as streaming and other alternatives continued their erosion of the theatrical release's draw).

Meanwhile, as the improvement is less dramatic than before, certainly to go by the difference between the 2023 and 2022 seasons (when year-on-year inflation-adjusted grosses went up by a seventh) and that between the 2022 and 2021 seasons (over which span of time the gross almost doubled) it seems that progress is slowing down. The result is that it may be a long time, if ever, before we see a $5 billion+ (real terms) movie season again, the more in as the summer itself testifies to problems the industry faces besides the shock to moviegoing habits, the loss of a percentage of venues, etc.. There is the plain and simple fact of, as superhero fatigue and the piling up of the flops this summer showed, Hollywood's being wedded to a model of moviemaking that is farther along the path of diminishing returns than we realized, such that where (for all my reservations and doubts about that model's continuation) I still expected that 2023's plenitude of franchise films was going to make the movie season "normal" again, they have had the opposite effect, giving us one underperformance after another, adding up to an unprepossessing total. Indeed, the 2023 May-June period saw movies take in less money at the American box office than they had in the same period a year before, a reversal of the trend toward recovery rather than its continuation, while it seems the far-above-expectations success of those more anomalous late July releases Barbie and Oppenheimer that saved this summer.* Alas, hits like that cannot be mass-manufactured--and as we watch the studios press ahead with their fantasies of a rebooted DCEU and Marvel Phase Six as they enlist artificial intelligence specialists while the writers walk the picket lines, they seem to have no intention whatsoever of making movies any other way.

* As of September 4 Barbie had made $612 million, and Oppenheimer $311 million, the two movies by themselves accounting for 23 percent of the whole season's $4.03 billion take, even as they still have a little way to go. Putting it another way Barbie singlehandedly outgrossed The Flash ($108 million), Fast X ($146 million), Transformers 6 ($157 million) and Mission: Impossible 7 combined ($171 million), while more than tripling the gross of Indiana Jones 5 ($174 million).