The 2023 Box Office in Review

Back in 2023, looking at the prior year's track record with qualified successes such as Venom and No Time to Die, and the indisputable blockbuster that was Spider-Man: No Way Home; and the current year's Top Gun 2, Avatar 2 and Marvel films (Dr. Strange 2, Thor 4, Black Panther 2, which if suggestive of Marvel being past its peak still took in $1.2 billion domestically); it seemed to me that the box office was returning to its pre-pandemic norm, more or less--that people were for the most part going to the movies again in the same fashion as before, to see essentially the same films as before, to go by how the big franchise films led the way, and indeed claimed an even larger share of the box office gross than they had prior to the pandemic. Indeed, it seemed to me that if the real box office gross in 2022 was not much more than half the norm for the years 2015-2019 (about 54-55 percent of the figure) this was a matter of the release slate in 2022 being relatively thin, with 2023's being packed with blockbusters likely to take the box office the rest of the way back to the pre-pandemic average, or close to it.*

Alas, 2023 proved a big surprise that way. Yes, the recovery continued, but only to a very limited extent, the gross, adjusted for inflation, a little less than two-thirds of the 2015-2019 average; with this connected to the way that those big franchise films that had led the recovery through late 2021 and 2022 began to consistently disappoint.** Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was only a slight underperformer that will, in the end, be one of the year's bigger successes--but movies like The Flash, Indiana Jones 5, Captain Marvel 2, Aquaman 2 put in performances that, from the perspective of their franchises, were the equivalent of Solo: A Star Wars Story's crashing and burning back in the summer of 2018, while other films like Fast and Furious 10, Transformers 7 and Mission: Impossible 7 did not do much better than that (the last, a series low). Indeed, the box office ended up being carried not by the franchise films but by more idiosyncratic successes--The Super Mario Bros. Movie in the spring, and Barbie and Oppenheimer in the summer (and in its own way, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse too), while the absence of hits on that scale meant that the recovery slowed significantly in the fall. (Where for the first eight months of the year the 2023 box office was in real terms 20 percent higher than in the equivalent period in 2022 in the last four it was just 8 percent higher--and would have been worse for lack of such modest but helpful surprises as Five Nights at Freddy's and the record-breaking concert film Taylor Swift: The Era Tour.)

In short, Hollywood remains a very long way from its old grosses, while its method for ever getting there is very much in question now, given that the traditional would-be blockbusters are not bringing in people like they used to do in a manner not seen since the decline of the historical epic and the musical way back in the '60s, and at the same time smaller films are getting to be a tougher sell generally (the audience rejecting not just The Flash but Blue Beetle). Naturally, the road ahead in 2024--a year which offers a franchise blockbuster-heavy slate similar to 2023--does not promise much better, the more in as the pattern of franchise failure is more firmly established (recall that back in February 2023 even an Ant-Man 3 could pull in $200 million domestically, which seems like a real longshot now), and a good many important releases by the strikes of 2023 uncompensated by the bumping of some of 2023's movies into 2024 (so that this year Hollywood will have to do without the grosses of Marvel's Captain America 4 and The Thunderbolts, Mission: Impossible 8, the live-action Snow White adaptation and even Avatar 3). Additionally, admitting that such things are by their nature surprises, anything that has even a whiff of potential Barbie-like success about it (with the consequences of that already demonstrated by the weak grosses of these past four months) seems absent. The result is that I anticipate no great improvement in 2024 over 2023. Indeed, there might even be a fall in the gross from this year's level, as the offerings discussed here fail to tempt audiences back to the theaters to even the extent that they managed to do so last year.

Still, I see no turnaround in studio practice anytime soon, while I expect that the claqueurs of the entertainment press will for the most part grade everything on a curve as they encourage everyone to look on the bright side of things.

* A bit under $7.4 billion in 2022, adjusted for 2023 values the gross (I refer here to the "in calendar" gross as reported by Box Office Mojo, with whose numbers I am working here) was $7.6 billion--against the $14 billion average for 2015-2019 when one makes a similar adjustment for inflation.
** The gross in 2023 was $8.9 billion, about 64 percent of the $14 billion 2015-2019 average.