How Will the Film Business Do in 2024?

Last year the recovery of the box office over the course of 2022 in spite of the comparative fewness of the really big releases (the colossal success of the Spider-Man, Top Gun and Avatar sequels, the $400 million+ grosses of Dr. Strange 2 and Black Panther 2, etc.) convinced me that all the year was lacking was the usual slate of such releases. As 2023 was thoroughly packed with likely-looking blockbusters I predicted that the year would see box office grosses return to the pre-pandemic norm.

Of course, this has not been the case. Yes, people went to the theaters--but where the big franchise films had led the recovery through late 2021 and 2022, in 2023 the franchise films just kept flopping, to the point of reversing the trend toward recovery. Indeed, between the beginning of May and the middle of July the box office in 2023, adjusted for inflation, was running behind the box office in 2022, when there were far fewer films out--with only Barbie and Oppenheimer's overperforming spectacularly in late summer enabling any recovery to continue, and even then only slightly, 2023 still looking nearly certain to fall significantly short of the pre-pandemic years box office gross-wise (with just $7.4 billion collected as of this writing, as against the over $9 billion had collected by this point in 2019, or the $11 billion it equals in today's dollars, working out to its being a third down, and little reason evident so far to expect this to change).

In short, the recovery has stalled, while a more fine-grained picture is suggestive of an even more dire situation than that in the degree to which the box office is being carried by a few hits; and those few, ever-more critical hits become harder to predict as very expensive films that seemed like winners (the more expensive for pandemic-related delays and higher interest rates on the money borrowed to make them) keep failing.

The result is that I find myself less optimistic about what 2024 has in store--precisely because it offers pretty much the same kind of release slate that had seemed promising in 2023, packed with the once likely-looking blockbusters that, because they are big, action-oriented franchise films cashing in on very run-down old brand names and run-down old themes, no longer seem so likely as they did just a few years ago. Scheduled for this year are three more Marvel Cinematic Universe movies (Deadpool 3, Captain America 4, The Thunderbolts), and a good deal more Marvel besides (Kraven the Hunter, a third Venom movie, a Spider-Man spin-off in Madame Web), as well as more Ghostbusters, Mad Max and Alien, more Planet of the Apes, more Godzilla and Kong, more Bad Boys, more Transformers, more Karate Kid--and even, decades after the originals, sequels to Beetlejuice and Twister and Gladiator. We have, too, a live-action prequel to the live-action adaptation of The Lion King, as well as more Inside Out and Despicable Me and Kung Fu Panda. We have a John Wick spin-off, a Mean Girls remake, an A Quiet Place prequel. We have . . .

I think this suffices to make the point. If this year is anything like the last, these movies will, on the whole, perform much less well than their backers hoped, with one big film after another flopping outright as audiences decline to pay for movies they never asked for. (Again, Gladiator 2? Seriously?) Meanwhile the compounding of the disruptions of the pandemic by the disruption of the writers' and actors' strikes (the last, still ongoing) will mean the gap between revenue and outlay is that much higher, all as the "China market" can less and less be looked to for salvation in the event of failure at home. For all that there may be a Barbie or an Oppenheimer in there that will provide relief to the studios' finances, but, even allowing that such successes are by their nature difficult to foresee, nothing here looks to me likely. (The best I can come up with is Joker 2, though even that one looks like it can misfire horribly--becoming New York, New York to the first Joker's Taxi Driver.)

The result is that 2024 is shaping up to be another bad year for an already horribly battered Hollywood. To some extent it was not wholly avoidable. Even were Hollywood's executives to have fully rethought this year how they invest their studios' money the release slate would not have changed--it typically being two years or more between the "green-lighting" of a movie and its hitting theaters, with things tending to run more slowly in the wake of the pandemic and its associated confusions, so that 2024 necessarily reflects the premises and choices of 2022, 2021 and even earlier. Still, if the remarks of Robert Iger and David Zaslav are anything to go by, I would not be overly bullish on the prospect of Hollywood changing its practice anytime soon.