The Last Third of 2024 at the Box Office: A Few Thoughts

At the start of 2024 the expectation was circulating in the media that bad as 2023 had been for Hollywood (with an epic string of big-budget flops leaving the box office gross down more than a third from the average seen in the pre-pandemic years of 2015-2019 in real terms), 2024 would be even worse, finishing up about another billion dollars down from what 2023 managed, significantly due to the thinning of the year's release slate by strike-related delays.

The early part of the year certainly bore out the expectations as one movie after another managed only weak grosses. By the end of May (a May which opened with The Fall Guy and saw the year's biggest flop up to that point, Furiosa) 2024's box office gross was running $900 million behind that of 2023 at the same point. In spite of the spectacular debut of Inside Out 2 things were even worse a month later, the year $1 billion behind--and by the end of July, over $1.2 billion behind.

However, the five months since have seen the year close the gap, with the help of a strong August (largely thanks to Deadpool & Wolverine picking up $300 million that month, accounting for over a third of the whole theatrical take), a surprisingly strong September (the Beetlejuice sequel's quarter of a billion accounting for 42 percent of the month's receipts), and then after an admittedly weak October things really picking up in late November and December, especially relative to 2023's particularly lousy holiday season. Where that period saw Captain Marvel 2, Aquaman 2, Wish and the remake of The Color Purple all flop, as Ridley Scott's Napoleon epic and The Hunger Games prequel added to the list of big-budget underperformers (so that with a gross barely north of $200 million Wonka was the champion), Moana 2 and Wicked both look like they will finish up with about twice what Wonka managed (both having broken the $400 million barrier as of December 31). All that meant that where in November and December the box office gross was just $1.3 billion in 2023, in 2024 it was a comparatively robust $1.86 billion, these two months alone closing the gap by over half a billion dollars.

Still, even if the situation is not so dire as it was looking at mid-year, when the trend threatened a gross in the $7 billion range, the end result still confirms the prediction we saw at the start of the year of a marked drop in the take over the twelve month period as a whole. As of December 31 the gross for 2024 was a bit under $8.54 billion, as against the $8.91 billion figure for 2023, and the $9.25 billion it is in inflation-adjusted November 2024 dollars (which works out to a real-terms drop of about 8 percent).

The box office figure for 2024 also affirms the reading of the data from 2022 and 2023 as indicating the contraction, and increasing fickleness, of the American movie market to a degree demanding some hard thinking and bold decisions on the part of Tinseltown's executives. Of course, given sheer inertia (it can be years between the greenlighting of a movie and its hitting theaters, even when there aren't delays of the kind seen in 2023), the release slate of 2025 represents the thinking of a period before 2023's disasters, rather than any rethinking of Hollywood's filmmaking. After all, we have (just to cite the most obviously relevant offerings)

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 . . . Zootopia 2 from Disney . . . live-action adaptations of animated classics [with] Disney releasing such versions of both Snow White and Lilo & Stitch . . . 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.

Will people come out for all of this stuff the way the Suits who greenlit it all must be hoping, or will we see the kind of epic string of colossal flops we did back in 2023? The box office-watcher may have an interesting time following how things go--maybe more interesting than they will watching the all-too-familiar stuff of the movies themselves.