The U.S. box office is down this summer, but not by that much
The Flash and Indiana Jones are disappointing, but the box office in general is barely down from last year
Aux News Spider-Man
The big headline in show business this summer, aside from the ongoing WGA strike and still-potential SAG-AFTRA strike that would pretty much prove that the whole industry is busted, is that there have been a bunch of surprising box office flops. There have been a fair amount of big hits, including relatively surprising ones like John Wick: Chapter 4 (which opened higher than every other movie in the franchise) and Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (which easily swung past its already high expectations), but good enough is never good enough for Hollywood is why The Flash failed, why Elemental failed, and why Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny has no chance but to fail because it was so comically expensive to produce.
But, according to Variety, Comscore’s data on this year’s box office isn’t quite so doom-and-gloom. Oh sure, things are worse than they were last year, but, like… barely? For the first half of summer, which Comscore says is May 1 to July 2, the U.S. box office made $1.88 billion. That’s compared to $1.91 billion last year, so it’s about a two percent drop, but that doesn’t seem particularly dramatic. It’s still $1.8 billion.
Then again, it is quite a bit down from the last pre-COVID summer in 2019, which Deadline says was on both “Viagra and steroids” in a mildly gross metaphor, when movies brought in $2.27 billion by this mid-summer point. But “things are worse now than they were pre-COVID” doesn’t seem like something to get too upset about. That’s what most things are like now. We were having a ball pre-COVID, getting all of our droplets on each other, washing our hands only a few times a day, spending several more millions of dollars on movie tickets. It was great.
Plus, there are three potentially huge movies coming in just a few weeks: Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One. It’s only apocalyptic if you subscribe to the bleak worldview that everything must make more than it made previously, which anyone who isn’t a brainless vulture capitalist can tell you is untenable. (Correction: It also might look bad if you’re the person signing checks for hundreds of millions of dollars to make an Indiana Jones movie, and that person can afford to take the hit by cravenly deleting things off a streaming service anyway.)
13 Comments
How many times can Tom Cruise save the entire movie industry?
As many times as needed. But MI:7 probably won’t capture the “Fox News’ favorite movie for some reason” market.Also… did I miss the memo where Oppenheimer is a guaranteed billion? It’s a historical film with a guy who has never really crossd into bankable leading man and Matt Damon looking like a poor man’s Jesse Plemons instead of the other way around.
I wonder what Fox News will say about Oppenheimer.
Maybe looking at specific windows gives a rosier outlook, but I don’t know how you can look at last year’s receipts and this year’s receipts and not see a huge problem. It’s even worse because one of the top movies from this year is actually from last year.
To be fair, one of the movies from last year is also from the year prior, but No Way Home is at #9, and still would be if it made what Avatar 2 made this year, even though it’s at #4 for 2023
Year-to-date, the 2023 box office is stronger than the 2022 box office by 20.7%https://variety.com/2023/film/news/box-office-2023-hits-misses-the-flash-super-mario-bros-1235654665/
Is the problem that these are 20 terrible movies?
I know the industry has been setting up the Barbie v. Oppenheimer weekend as a big clash, but I’m just not confident that it’s shaping up to be that much of a fight. I think Barbie will do well (it’s what I plan to see that weekend because it looks like bonkers summer fun), but I have never been quite sure of the market for Oppenheimer as a summer blockbuster. I have no doubt it will be a good movie. But is it the kind of movie that draws big summer crowds? I’m not so sure.
It’s a Christopher Nolan flick. It will destroy barbie at the box office
You’re entitled to your optimism, but I don’t share it. Oppenheimer isn’t like Nolan’s recent films. Because of its subject matter, it will have a decidedly smaller international draw than, say, Interstellar or Inception or Batman. Oppenheimer doesn’t star a big name (as much as I like Cillian Murphy). It’s a historical biography rather than a sci-fi or a superhero movie, and those are a harder sell. Unlike Dunkirk, which clocks in at a tight and tidy 106 minutes, Oppenheimer is going to be 3 hours long. All of these things work against Oppenheimer being a blockbuster. Maybe I’m wrong and it will make half a billion dollars in its first two weeks out. That would be fine. But it would also be bucking a whole lot of historical box office trends.
Oppenheimer should be a remarkable film but 3 hour, serious, historical biographies that need to make 450 million to break even are a tough job. Napoleon will be in the same boat. Neither will have very much international audience so they can be tremendous art but lose over 200 million.
And I don’t want people to think that I’m bagging on Oppenheimer. I also think it’s going to be good. I’m looking forward to seeing it. But its lengthy runtime makes me really prefer to see it at home where I can take breaks.
When the movies are this good, they can’t help but make money.
The issue is the cost VS box office and that is very negative. Disney is losing about 600 million on summer movies. WB is losing about the same and has two expensive possible losers still to come. Other studios are looking at big annual loses. As a business, Hollywood has a red VS black bottom line and not being black is the problem.