"Hollywood's $9 Billion Year"--and the Year That Might Follow It

The press has been abuzz with talk of 2023 having been a $9 billion year for Hollywood.

This sounds better than it really is.

Every year in the 2015-2019 time frame broke $11 billion, while adjusting the sums for the highly inflationary years since puts their average at $14 billion. The result is that in actuality the North American box office gross was not quite two-thirds of the pre-pandemic year in real terms--and only a relatively slight improvement over 2022's gross (from about 54 to 64 percent of the pre-pandemic norm)--in spite of 2023 having had the first truly packed slate of would-be blockbusters since 2019. Indeed, the situation suggests something more troubling than a mere one-year shortfall--namely that Hollywood's model for generating hits increasingly looks broken, with one megabudgeted franchise film after another flopping hard, and the box office carried by idiosyncratic hits such as The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Barbie (the two by themselves selling almost 14 percent of all tickets sold during the whole year), as well as Oppenheimer, Taylor Swift: The Era Tour and Five Nights at Freddy's, while Marvel, the DC Extended Universe, Fast and Furious, the Transformers, Mission: Impossible, Disney-Pixar animation and even Indiana Jones (to say nothing of second-stringers like Shazam and The Expendables) flopped, flopped and flopped again.

All of this bespeaks a Hollywood studio system on very shaky ground indeed--with 2024 looking no better, and indeed, even Establishment industry publications prepared to acknowledge that it is set to look worse, with an already stalling box office recovery going into reverse, with a Deadline piece predicting that 2024, between its thinning slate and viewer sentiment, could pull in just $8 billion. This would, of course, not just be a $1 billion drop, but work out to a lot more films than came out in 2022 making no more in real terms than the movies of that year managed to do collectively. It is the last thing Hollywood needs--and indeed I find myself wondering just how much more the studio system can take before the end of the pretense of "recovery" and "business as usual."