Went the Month Well? (And the Quarter?) The March 2024 Box Office

The box office receipts in January and February 2024 were significantly down from what they were a year earlier--the two months together down by perhaps a fifth relative to January-February 2023. A function of the lack of any Avatar-like holiday season hit, or even an Ant Man 3-like Valentine's/President's Day weekend release, to give the early part of the year a boost, it still threw more cold water on the hopes of some recovery of the box office toward its pre-pandemic norm.

Of course, many were more optimistic about March. That month had the second half of Denis Villeneuve's Dune, Kung Fu Panda 4, a new Ghostbusters movie and a Godzilla film opening. Of course, as I have been saying again and again, it is not just superhero films but franchise films of these types generally that have been suffering. Still, few have been ready to admit the fact, and anyway most professional commentators seem to be implicitly grading blockbusters on a curve (judging grosses they would have deemed mediocre pre-pandemic as brilliant successes now), and as it happens March 2024 did manage to beat out March 2023 with a gross of $753 million to $638 million, a decent 18 percent margin.

As a practical matter that still leaves the box office gross for the first quarter of the year well down from its predecessor (with just $1.612 billion as against the prior year's $1.722 billion), even before we consider year-on-year inflation (3.2 percent for the year, with this corresponding to the February 2023 to February 2024 period as wll).* Adjusting for the price rise works out to a first-quarter take down 9 percent from the prior year--all as the gross for the first quarter of 2023 was about 40 percent down from that of 2019, and halfway (48 percent) down from the 2015-2019 average.

Will things continue to improve from here on out? It is hard to say. If Godzilla was a decent performer on Easter weekend, it is a far cry from last year's The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a half billion dollar hit that did much to carry the month, the spring season, the year--all as I do not see any movie likely to be a hit on that extraordinary scale not only in April (indeed, Boxoffice Pro does not project even a single movie reaching the $100 million mark during the month) but the entire year's schedule. The result is that I expect April 2024 to look much more like January and February in relation to its predecessor than it would to March, as March's apparent improvement (which still left March 37 percent down from the pre-pandemic average) proves noise rather than signal--a matter of comparatively marginal money-makers being clustered together in between longer patches unrelieved even by hits on these modest terms.