The Contraction of the American Box Office: Likely Implications

Considering what we have seen in 2023 and 2024 it can seem as if the American film market may have stabilized at 50-70 percent of its pre-pandemic level in real terms (Americans now going to the movies somewhere around 2-3 times a year instead of 4 as they used to do).

Of course, that leaves the matter of the makeup of that box office--how the gross is likely to be distributed among particular films.

Going by such successes as Spider-Man: No Way Home, the Top Gun and Avatar sequels, The Super Mario Bros Movie, and Barbie, it seems that the biggest movies still have the potential to do as well as they ever did. However, if the ceiling is as high as ever it would seem that the public is less easily drawn out for a new round of the same old thing and hits thus more difficult to produce, with this easier to explain if one remembers how Disney was doing in the mid-'10s. Back then Disney all but regularized the billion-dollar hit (billion in deflated, pre-pandemic, dollars) by focusing on a slew of franchises and brands that could be counted on to deliver such hits with regularity (Marvel, Lucasfilm/Star Wars, Pixar, along with live-action adaptations of its animated classics), and exploiting them with, if far from perfect competence, sufficient competence to rack up more wins than losses. (In 2018 Disney had Solo--but it also had Avengers 3 and Black Panther and Incredibles 2, and more modestly also Wreck-It-Ralph 2 and Ant-Man 2--and 2019 was better still.) Alas, in 2023 the same strategy saw the routinization not of billion-dollar grosses but megabuck disappointments (as seen with Captain Marvel 2, and Lucasfilm's Indiana Jones 5, and Wish, and The Little Mermaid, and Ant-Man 3, with even Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Elemental, if profitable at least, more qualified successes than before).

I thus expect a more volatile box office, perhaps a bit less top-heavy than before because there is less room at the top (far from having nine billion-dollar hits the way 2019 did, 2024 may not even see one, with all that means for the concentration of grosses at the top of the chart), though the broader consequences rest on whether the studios can rise to the challenge of the more difficult market--for instance, making some unexploited genre as popular with filmgoers as the superhero genre has been for the years 2000-2022.

Given everything we know about the people in charge I would not advise holding one's breath in anticipation of such an outcome.