The summer box office- has there ever been a rockier journey? From a June that appeared to deliver a firm no through a July that was set on fire, it’s been a wild ride. But after the stellar performances of the past few months, the $4B prediction for the domestic box office is back on the cards. Brandon Blake, expert entertainment lawyer with Blake & Wang P.A, unpacks the figures- and the strange journey that got us here.
Ups and Downs
There’s one thing you can say for certain about this year’s box office. Very little of it has played to expectation. We have a tiny indie movie like Sound of Freedom pulling in more than predicted giants like Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones. We have two polar opposites (Oppenheimer and Barbie) boosting each other’s profiles massively. We have had unanticipated hits, and much anticipated flops. There’s only one thing we do know for certain. Even if the May-Labor Day period falls short of that $4B benchmark, it will be by less than $25M. And that’s a fantastic leap up over the post-pandemic figures to date.
This should deliver a whopping 27% increase on 2022’s figures. If that could be maintained, that would point to a $9.5B box office for the year. Still lagging behind 2019’s $11B (about $13B today), sure, but a massive catch-up no one really believed we’d see. Of course, with the uncertainties of the strike climate still swirling, that’s far from a guarantee in itself.
Accounting for the Numbers
From this fantastic performance, however, we don’t really have a repeatable pattern. Barbenheimer, as the two films have come to be called, accounts for just short of a quarter of the overall summer box office, a formula that’s unlikely to be repeated in coming years. Did anyone predict Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse doubling its 2018 counterpart’s takings? And no one saw Sound of Freedom coming. Plus we’re willing to bet the chances of another breakout indie hit raking in $180M are reasonably low.
Perhaps the real lessons of this year lie in looking for more than formulas, however. This summer delivers a harsh lesson. There’s only so many sequels and franchises that can keep public interest. Most of this season’s ‘flops’ and underperformers come from this category, which Hollywood has been mining like mad since the pandemic. Instead, we see fresh IPs and films with real ‘bite’ take their place- most originally predicted to underperform on their eventual takings.
For the most part, those sequels and reboots also came with flashy marketing budgets that didn’t take off. While no one would call Barbie, for example, a small marketing budget, much of its success came from a viral capturing of the imagination, not flashy campaigns. Same for the smaller successes.
So while the $4B box office may actually happen, there’s some key lessons to learn from how we got there. Flashy, too-expensive franchise titles are becoming an underperforming market. The real interest lay in variety, non-franchised films with something different to offer the moviegoer. If we’re to take any lesson at all from this summer, it’s that trim budgets and varied offerings have a better chance of driving box office figures then the same thing watched endless ways. Let’s hope the 2024 box office runs with that, instead of trying to replicate this year’s successes the same way.