The January 2024 Box Office: How Did the First Month of the Year Go for Hollywood?

As noted here, 2023 went much less well for Hollywood than many thought it would at the start of the year--in large part due to the rejection of many tried-and-true-seeming franchises and even genres (the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other superhero films, Disney animation, etc.).

Did the first month of 2024 provide any relief?

As it happened, in current dollars the gross was well down from that of January 2023 ($494 million versus $584 million), but one may argue for the prior year's January having been boosted by the behemoth that was Avatar 2--which took in so much in 2023 that it is actually #7 on the list of the year's highest-grossing in-calendar releases. Still, one can point out that it has been the norm for December to have really big movies still cleaning up in January, with the point underlined by what we find when we look at the average in the six year 2015-2020 (January 2020 included here because even if things changed just a little later that year that month at least went like a normal, pre-pandemic January), which had the grosses to show for it. Here are those grosses adjusted for December 2023 prices (change from which to January 2024 prices we can assume as negligible for the purposes of this calculation):

January Box Office Grosses, 2015-2020*
2020--$1.07 billion
2019--$993 million
2018--$1.19 billion
2017--$1.215 billion
2016--$1.346 billion
2015--$1.322 billion

In the above figures we can see a downward trend--but one can argue for 2015, 2016, 2017 having been really exceptional due to the surprise success of American Sniper and the particularly high grosses of the first two of the new Disney Star Wars films. Moreover, even January 2020 (which improved on January 2019 by almost 8 percent in real terms) was a more than billion dollar month in today's prices, with a gross at least twice as high as what January 2024 managed. The result is that one can see the January box office as down by not just 18 percent in comparison with 2023 (adjusting for inflation), but down by at least half from the pre-pandemic norm, with just 40 percent of the average January gross seen in 2015-2020 (circa $1.2 billion).

These are very discouraging numbers--underlining just how rough the year ahead could be for the battered movie industry.

* Current dollar data from the Box Office Mojo, adjusted using the Consumer Price Index.