The August 2024 Box Office

August was, by 2024 standards, a fairly good month for the North American movie box office--only the second month this year to overtop the gross of the corresponding month in the prior year, after March. Just as in March this was principally attributable to the success of a single film--the second part of Dune in March, and Deadpool & Wolverine in August, with the latter film's contribution the more striking. Deadpool, after all, came out the month before, and had the first six days of its spectacular-from-the-first run before August 1, during which it took in $280 million (about as much as the second Dune movie made in its whole run), before accounting for over a third of the month's entire box office revenue. (For comparison purposes consider that where Deadpool accounted for 35 percent of the gross, even that savior of the summer of 2023 Barbie the year before managed just 28 percent.)

This is partly a matter of Deadpool's real draw, but also the lack of other really big successes in late July, and certainly in August (which probably helped the already seemingly played-out Despicable Me 4 and Inside Out 2 add $80 million or so to their takes over those weeks, all as Twisters picked up a little more than that, but not much more). After all, the adaptation of the hit video game Borderlands failed just as badly as the buzz said it would, as did the attempt to relaunch the Crow franchise, while if Alien: Romulus will probably break the $100 million barrier it will not be by much. Indeed, the only performer in the lot I would count as worth much of a fuss in any commercial sense, and that mainly relative to its low cost, is It Ends With Us, the $25 million budgeted adaptation of the Colleen Hoover film likely to approach $150 million before it is finished in theaters.

The result is that, with Deadpool and other July releases doing so much to carry the box office (including a Despicable Me 4 bespeaking the franchise's being past its peak, and a Twister movie a far cry from the phenomenal success of the 1996 original) and the successes of August's own releases mainly that by a lower standard, "fairly good" is a very different thing from "sensational." August 2024's final tally of $892 million is just a bit better than the $813 million North America's movie theaters grossed in August 2023--about 10 percent better before inflation, maybe 6 percent after it when those figures are in, while if one removed the highest grosser from each month (cutting Barbie out of August 2023 just as they cut Deadpool out of August 2024) they would find that August 2024 was actually a weaker month than its 2023 counterpart (the gross down by 4 percent in real terms, perhaps). Meanwhile, even with Deadpool's help, if August 2024 bested August 2023, it would seem to still be well down from the $1.08 billion or so August averaged in June 2024 dollars, with just 83 percent of the 2015-2019 average for the month--an improvement over the figures for past months, like the atrocious 43 percent of the pre-pandemic norm seen in May, but all the same, no grounds to imagine business is returning to pre-pandemic levels, precisely because hits like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine do not grow on trees, however much Disney acts as if they do just that.