The Summer 2024 Box Office: How Did it Go?

How did the summer of 2024 as a whole go at the box office? The four month period saw theaters take in about $3.59 billion (and only marginally more, $3.62 billion, if they treat the summer season as having extended from the first Friday in May to Labor Day).

By contrast the figure was $3.95 billion in the summer of 2023, about 10 percent more before inflation.

This is a retreat, not an advance, for the box office. And given that the May-August gross in the pre-pandemic years of 2015-2019 averaged $5.4 billion in June 2024 dollars (even with the numbers skewed downward by how Marvel put out its big Avengers events in the last weekend of April rather than the first weekend of May in 2018-2019) it seems safe to say that this summer's gross was a third down from the pre-pandemic average in real terms. It is also the case that even more than the summer of 2023 the summer of 2024 was, to the extent that Hollywood managed at all, carried by just a handful of hits--the three biggest movies of the summer of 2023 accounting for 34 percent of that summer's gross (Barbie, Spider-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy taking in $1.33 billion of the summer's near $4 billion), but the three biggest of 2024 accounting for 44 percent of that summer's weaker gross ($1.6 billion of the $3.6 billion), testifying to how little business the rest of the releases did.

Of course, allowing that some will incline to the view that this was because this summer was a bit on the thin side where big movies were concerned--and I do not entirely disagree. Still, the summer still had Planet of the Apes, Mad Max and Bad Boys, for which there were some hopes (certainly Mad Max did a lot worse than its backers and cheerleaders thought it would), while some hoped for a lot more than they got from the original IF and the not-so-original Twisters--while it is worth remembering that if 2023 had lots of big movies many of them also proved big flops (most obviously The Flash, Indiana Jones and Haunted Mansion, all as to varying degrees Fast and Furious, Transformers, The Little Mermaid, Pixar and Mission: Impossible disappointed). Thus the explanation still leaves us facing the reality that Tinseltown is trying very hard to ignore--that if as Inside Out and Deadpool and Despicable Me demonstrate franchise movies can still make it big after all, only the most in-demand ones are likely to pay off big as films from the weaker franchises underwhelm in a market not what it used to be.

The result is that I stand by what I said earlier this year: within the existing structurally downsized market, rather than mindlessly milking any and every franchise with megabudgeted productions they would be obliged to choose their projects more carefully, and make them with an eye on the budget, with August's biggest in-month success, It Ends with Us, reaffirming that reading of the situation. Even now the movie is not of the year's top ten hits in North America (standing at #11 it can be expected to keep falling down the list as the year progresses)--but even if it did not have the makings of a "tentpole" there really was a sizable audience out there for the material, and between its low budget, and one might add its rather robust overseas earnings (the movie a far bigger hit there than Twisters, and the Quiet Place prequel), such that it may well prove one of its top ten profit-makers when Deadline presents its list next spring.