As my prior posts have made clear,
2023 box office closed on a very low note indeed, and
thus far 2024 has confirmed those who thought the year showed every sign of being an even weaker one for the film industry. Of course, box office watchers had
high hopes for the release of the second part of Denis Villeneuve's Dune saga, and the film seems to have lived up to their expectations that way,
taking in $81.5 million domestically and another $97 million internationally.
It is a very respectable gross indeed--by the standards of 2024, which more than two years after the normalization of the box office seemed to be getting underway (with such successes as
Venom 2,
the Bond film No Time to Die, and of course, the near $2 billion phenomenon that was
Spider-Man: No Way Home) the standard remains depressed, not least for what big sci-fi franchise spectacles like that one are expected to bring in. Just a few years ago an $80 million opening
would not have been thought reason for the makers of a near $200 million-budgeted sequel of this type to crow like this, let alone declare an end to a box office drought (even before the massive inflationary shock of recent years that has produced a full-blown cost-of-living crisis forcing many to reckon with
thelong-threadbare quality of their pretensions to being "middle class").
This was underlined for me by a
recent Deadline piece on Anyone But You. The article's title promises that it will explain how the film became a "global box office phenom" that once again demonstrates the continued viability of
a genre so many have written off, but again it is only a "phenom" according to a much reduced standard. The movie has barely crossed the $200 million mark
globally, in part because it is far short of $100 million
domestically, thus far taking in a $88 million. (For comparison purposes,
just consider what these films made domestically, and at yesteryear's far lower ticket prices.)
The reader and watcher of the entertainment press now has to keep such things in mind as the claqueurs go on claquing, even when there is not much to claque about.
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