How Did January Go at the Box Office?

As remarked here previously 2024 was a terrible year for the box office, weaker even than 2023, with this largely a matter of the first half of the year or so before, from June forward, a number of major hits came to the rescue (the sequels to Inside Out, Despicable Me, Deadpool, Beetlejuice and in the fall, Moana 2 and Wicked especially, the $2.8 billion collected by which six films represented a third of the whole year's box office gross). January had been especially weak, taking in about 40 percent of the 2015-2019 average in real terms, in part because the slate of holiday releases that normally help carry the box office in January was so tepidly received--all as the month's new releases failed to draw moviegoers to the theaters. (Thus, as Aquaman 2, the Color Purple remake, the Hunger Games prequel and the rest underperformed horribly did Wonka, with a mere $200 million, prove the holiday season's box office champion, while the month's supposedly most promising release, the musical remake of Mean Girls that nobody asked for, fell flat.)

The fall season of 2024 having been rather more robust (with four films at least roughly matching Wonka's gross, and Moana 2 and the musical Wicked doubling it) one might wonder if January did better. It was an improvement, but not much of an improvement. The January 2024 box office take was just a little under a half billion dollars (with $496 million), while the January 2025 box office has gone just a little over the mark, sufficiently little that year-on-year inflation (about 2.9 percent) left it only very marginally better than the prior year's performance (its $544 million total really just a scarce 6 percent improvement, leaving January 2025 with about 42-43 percent of the 2015-2019 average for the month).

Even granting how little is expected of January this was an inauspicious start to a year which, more like 2023 than 2024 in this respect, will sorely test Hollywood's tendency to "business as usual."