If the January box office is any indication of how the rest of 2023 will play out, movie theaters should see a significant rise in business compared to last year — albeit still below what they saw before the pandemic.
Comscore data shows that the monthly total for the North American box office finished at $588.5 million, a staggering 50% increase from January 2022. The key driver, of course, was Disney/20th Century’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” with $222.5 million in domestic grosses that month.
But unlike last year when “Spider-Man: No Way Home” was the only serious moneymaker with smaller support coming from Paramount’s “Scream” revival, “Avatar 2” got more support from a wider array of new releases and holiday holdovers.