A Few Thoughts on the Box Office in 2024 (So Far)

As I remarked in a recent post the January 2024 box office has been, to put it mildly, disappointing for Hollywood. Rather than improving on last year as might have been hoped in a situation of continuing "recovery," adjusted for inflation gross ticket sales were down 18 percent from January 2023--and indeed, down by at least half compared with the pre-pandemic average (2015-2020).

Yes, half.

Part of the story, admittedly, is that the holiday season preceding it was very weak, the recovery in revenues evident in the spring and summer slowing greatly in the fall as franchise films (Captain Marvel, Aquaman, etc.) continued to fall flat with audiences, but, in spite of overperformance by hits like Five Nights at Freddy's and Taylor Swift's concert film, none of them grew into a Super Mario Bros. or Barbie (or even Oppenheimer or animated Spider-Man)-scale event of the kind adequate to rescue the season. Indeed, the highest-grossing movie to come out in the last five months of the year was actually Wonka, which (on the way to merely sputtering past the $200 million mark) collected about $63 million in January--as against the $283 million that Avatar 2 collected the same month the year before (after having already taken in $400 million in the last days of December).

However, it was also a matter of January's offerings being less than thrilling for the public. The highest-grossing January release by far, the remake of Mean Girls, is exemplary. The original 2004 Mean Girls collected some $86 million at the domestic box office--equal to $140 million when adjusted for December 2023 prices. As of its fourth weekend in domestic play, with not much further to go, the new version has made less than half that ($66 million).

Also indicative of the situation is what has come thus far of the attempt of a very cash-hungry Disney desperate for some success in its traditional domain of animated feature film after these last terrible years to exploit January's long being a good time for rereleases by putting out the three big Pixar movies that lost their chance at a big theatrical gross due to the pandemic. Soul, the first in the schedule, had its release back on January 12, in a not insignificant 1,360 theaters.

The movie made a million dollars--almost.

Not almost a billion, almost a million.

This bodes poorly indeed for the next film in the queue, the culture war-stoking Turning Red (due out Friday), all as February has already proven dismayingly January-like. This weekend the megabudgeted ($200 million+) Argylle, which may have come from Apple+ but really only makes financial sense as a blockbuster, came out with low expectations, and failed to meet them. (Boxoffice Pro projected $20-$30 million in its long-range forecast. The movie took in a mere $18 million.)

Looking at the film I am reminded that while it is not a franchise movie of the kind that have been flopping left and right since about this same time last year one of the reasons why we had so many franchise films in the first place was because it had in this crowded, post-star, market become so difficult to get people to the theaters to see non-franchise films, even when they are big action movies.

That gross is a reminder, too, that if the difficulties of Argylle's particular genre are still getting less attention than those of the superhero film, the "spy-fi" action-adventure genre (as we already saw with the waning salability of James Bond, and the underperformance of the latest Fast and Furious and Mission: Impossible films last year) is likewise running out of steam, the boom that began in the '90s now going bust.

Alas, given what is evidently in the pipeline this is far from being the last such disappointment--all as Madame Web seems set to fix attention back on the superhero genre's troubles as it continues the genre's trend of falling grosses, and contribute to a weak February following the weak January the year has already seen.