The First Third of 2024, Again

Deadline's Anthony D'Alessandro recently reported that in the four month January-April period the cinematic box office in 2024 ran 21 percent behind the preceding year--and that the summer was likely to see 2024 continue to run well behind 2023 that way. (Last summer the box office took in over $4 billion; this summer it may be lucky to get to $3 billion.) The result is that, with January-April over a half billion behind the preceding third for the year, and summer likely to mean the season being another billion short of last year, the $8 billion projection for 2024 we had at the end of last year.

And that, of course, is while remembering that 2023 itself was a very disappointing year, seeing as it did not the return of the box office to pre-pandemic levels but finishing up a third of the way down from the 2019 level that itself reflected a decade of erosion. The result is that 2024 is only confirming what last year seemed to suggest, namely the box office's stabilizing at a lower level, the pandemic-era collapse more or less enduringly reducing theatergoing--such that North Americans might now be expected to go to the theater just a couple of times a year now, as against the 3-4 times a year before the pandemic (never mind the 4-5 times that were the norm before the Great Recession).