What Does it Really Mean When They Say That the Global Box Office Rose 31 Percent in 2023?

Discussing the post-pandemic box office as a whole I have focused on the U.S. box office, because of the abundance of detailed time series relevant to it, and my long familiarity with them, as well as the abundance of conveniently available analysis to its interpretation.

That does not exist for the global box office, a larger, more complex, less well-covered topic.

The result was that the Deadline report that the global box office saw a 31 percent jump in 2023 over 2022 got my attention. Was it possible that the U.S. was an anomaly, that there was a stronger recovery abroad?

Alas, on close inspection the biggest chunk of that surge is the recovery of the Chinese box office from its extremely depressed state in 2022--this 83 percent surge in that one market accounting for a rough third of the global increase. Cut China out of the picture and you get only a 20 percent rise in the rest of the world. That still sounds pretty impressive--except that this was exactly what we had in the U.S.--the jump from a bit under $7.4 billion collected in 2022 to $8.9 billion collected in 2023--that meager margin of improvement relative to the post-pandemic pattern--itself a gain of 20 percent (indeed, 21 percent), before the inflation that was not even counted here.

The result is that the report seems to me another case of a headline that sounds a lot better than the reality, and only confirms the impression that the box office, and with it the prospects of the studios and their movies, have stabilized at a significantly below pre-pandemic level (while in combination with what Hollywood's movies actually made in that country, China's outsized part in the "recovery" is a reminder of how little business Hollywood can expect in that market). Of course, that same scarcity of data about the global box office implies that more caution is warranted in any judgments about that, though I do not think that this year is likely to change the assessment.

* The box office tended toward $14 billion in 2023 dollars over 2015-2019.