What Do the Hits and Flops of 2024 Say About the Box Office Today? And in 2025?

At the end of 2023, the first year with a slate of "big" releases thought really comparable to what we took for granted pre-COVID-19, it seemed that there were clear conclusions to be drawn about the North American box office. In particular it seemed that moviegoing had contracted structurally (per capita ticket sales in North America fallen from 3+ to 2 a year), and the big-budget franchise movies of the kind Hollywood favors have become less reliable earners, amid a business changing so that the pursuit of profitability favors lower-budgeted movies pitched at an enthusiastic built-in audience (Five Nights at Freddy's, The Eras Tour), and more novel fare generally (Barbie, Oppenheimer, in its way the animated Spider-Man movie).

By contrast as 2024 draws to a close the picture looks to me more ambiguous. Yes, as I said, Hollywood was eager to refute any such reading of the trend, and clung so hard to the thought that Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine would validate that hope, and then when they had their success took it as a green light to greenlight more, More, MORE! of the same old, same old (in the wake of Inside Out 2's success announcing new Shrek and Ice Age animated films, and as filmgoers flocked to Deadpool's latest, a relaunch of the Avengers).

Still, one may wonder at the meaning of the success of even those two particularly big successes, given the weakness of the recent competition, especially in this summer season--and in the case of Deadpool, the extreme idiosyncrasy of the offering. (The movie is, on certain admittedly not very ambitious terms, a subversion of the superhero film rather than a conventional movie of the type, which was so overflowing with crowd-pleasing gimmickry that in this case fans were more friendly than critics to its beating of audiences over the head with its postmodernism.)

So does it go with other movies, with, for example, Beetlejuice 2 and Wicked each as easily testifying to public responsiveness to something a little different from what they commonly get these days (a now rare high concept comedy with a quirky supernatural theme, a similarly rare big splashy musical) as they do "more franchise movies" of the conventional kinds. All of this seems to me the more the case given that, even with the slate thinner than in most years, the more mediocre performers afford some confirmation of the tendency. Thus did Deadpool win big--but response to the year's other superhero movies proved faint (with Madame Web flopping hard and Venom 3 disappointing). Meanwhile the new editions of Twister, Bad Boys, Planet of the Apes, Alien, Ghostbusters, etc. succeeded only by a more modest measure, far from proving that there is the kind of vast appetite for big franchise films that still seemed present in the years before the pandemic (all as Mad Max provided the summer a really big-budgeted flop, and Gladiator may do the same for fall). At the same time, providing positive affirmation of last year's lessons about pursuing narrow but deep appeal on a budget, It Ends with Us will probably come in way ahead of many of its more stereotyped and bigger-budgeted rivals when the folks at Deadline consider the "most valuable blockbusters" next spring.

This seems to me something to keep in mind as we look ahead to next year, which looks to be packed with the conventional kinds of would-be blockbusters in the same way that 2023 was, and most pre-pandemic years were as well. Just to name the most obvious contenders we have four really first-rank superhero movies, including three Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films (Captain America 4, the new Fantastic Four, and reclaiming the first weekend in May for the MCU, The Thunderbolts), and James Gunn's Superman movie--as compared with the one such superhero movie we got this year. There will be more animation (Zootopia 2 from Disney, Elio from Disney's subsidiary Pixar) and live-action adaptations of animated classics (Disney releasing such versions of both Snow White and Lilo & Stitch, and Universal presenting a live-action version of its more recent success How to Train Your Dragon). There will be more of James Cameron's Avatar saga (Fire and Ash), more Jurassic World (Rebirth), and more spy-fi from the Mission: Impossible franchise (the second half of 2023's Dead Reckoning), while I think the second half of Wicked stands comparison with this crowd to go by how the first half has done with theatergoers.

My guess is that in spite of all that we will see the same level of moviegoing we have in the 2022-2024 period, and the big movies of this more crowded roster splitting up that shrunken take. Where more specific outcomes are concerned, I do have a few to offer:

* I have a hard time picturing all three Marvel Cinematic Universe films being the kind of solid hits we saw in Phase Three that is the only thing that will banish the less happy memories of the franchise's last five years (indeed, I expect leeriness of the revamped Captain America, hesitations about the obscure Thunderbolts, skepticism about a third try with the Fantastic Four). The result is that talk of "Marvel fatigue," and "superhero fatigue" will continue (especially if Superman also does poorly, a not unlikely prospect given DCEU's track record and the incompatibility between Gunn's sensibility with the Superman mythos).

* I expect that Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning will not improve on the performance of its predecessor, which was the lowest-grossing installment in the series to date. Indeed, the combination of the annoying decision to split one movie into two (Hollywood has to know people hate this, but must suppose it sells the second ticket often enough to more than make up for it), combined with the bumping of the initial release date to make for a two year gap between installments of the declining franchise, can easily see it do worse, making it the new lowest-grossing installment to date. The result is that, even if we don't talk about the very evident "spy-fi fatigue" Hollywood faces along with the superhero fatigue (in the declining grosses for James Bond, Fast and Furious, etc.), we will have more proof that spies, like superheroes, just aren't what they used to be here.

* Jurassic World: Rebirth, the second reboot of (and fourth installment in) the Jurassic Park franchise in less than a decade, may easily find audiences sated--the more in as a downward trend has been evident in the grosses of the prior films. (Adjusted for inflation Dominion's $376 million in North America in 2022 was less than half Jurassic World's $652 million in 2016.) The result is that I can see a lot of folks giving this one a pass as well, at least enough to confirm the decline in enthusiasm.

I will also add that I have little expectation that these three franchises, for which the international market has been so important, and for which China had been so important in the heyday of Hollywood in that market, will find no relief there. And the likelihood of undeniable underperformance, or outright flop, in some of these cases and in others (again, it is a pre-pandemic slate being released into a post-pandemic market, that larger number of would-be blockbusters chasing the same number of ticket-buyers) will make 2025 look more like 2023 than it will 2024--at least, to those willing to admit the fact, who may not be many. Indeed, even if 2025 proves to be as packed with box office disasters as the catastrophic year of 2023 I suspect that Hollywood's response will be to dismiss any trend ("I don't wanna hear about no superhero fatigue!") as its officers and their courtiers in the media speak only of errors in the making of individual films they will attribute to the Artists and not the Suits (as their verbiage evokes that stupid and supercilious phrase, "the adults in the room"), and look forward to the same strategy delivering better results in 2026, because they haven't heard about that definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. While in the wake of the shocks, reversals, disasters of the past decade making any guess about 2026 seems rather a bold thing, I suspect that it too will not go the way they hope it will--but that their memories will not extend back this far, and they will hope the same goes for everyone else.