At first glance, the $3.6 billion the studios earned from the summer domestic box office would seem like bad news given that receipts dropped 11% from last summer’s “Barbenheimer”-fueled $4 billion season.
But despite a sluggish start, Disney/Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” set theaters ablaze and helped put last year’s strikes in the rearview mirror. Now the industry is poised to enjoy the kind of consistently high business in the second half of the year that exhibition and studio executives have promised.
“There are very few films where we might ask, ‘What happened here?’” Boxoffice editor Daniel Loria told TheWrap. “All of the major titles that came out this summer either delivered as expected or, like ‘Inside Out 2,’ strongly overperformed, and the one month that was poor business can be attributed to the lack of a major franchise in Marvel that usually starts the summer.”
The year-to-year fall-off at the box office can be almost entirely attributed to the poor start theaters endured in May. 20th Century’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” was the only modest tentpole success, while Universal’s “The Fall Guy” and Warner Bros.’ “Furiosa” flopped despite positive reception. Domestic totals for May fell to $550 million, roughly half of the $1.07 billion in 2019 and the worst total for that month since 1998.
June and July also saw slight year-over-year drops, but they were more in line with the typical ebbs and flows that the market sees based on what films are on offer rather than because of blows to the production pipeline.
“Inside Out 2” lifted June to a $965 million total that was only 3.8% down from 2023. July, while not reaching the $1.36 billion that “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” produced for theaters, still hit $1.18 billion thanks to “Despicable Me 4,” “Twisters” and the record-breaking “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
August closed out with an impressive $890 million, the best total recorded for the month since 2016. While late July releases led the box office in August as it usually does, the month still yielded two $100 million-plus hits with Sony’s “It Ends With Us” and 20th Century’s “Alien: Romulus.” That’s a huge step forward given that summers since the pandemic have ended with a lack of substantial moneymakers.
That was made possible thanks to the studios tailoring films that didn’t have “Inside Out”-esque four-quadrant appeal to their specific audiences with marketing signals boosted by theaters. Sony, for example, ran a heavy ad presence for “It Ends With Us” during the Paris Olympics, reaching out to female audiences who weren’t being serviced by the action blockbusters and colorful family films dominating the market.
Theaters also benefited from films like “Twisters,” which found success as an alternative to “Deadpool 3” by marketing its thrills and on-location shooting in the heartland of America directly to rural moviegoers, allowing it to stand out as its own unique form of big-screen spectacle.
Meanwhile, a pair of horror films on opposite ends of the franchise/indie spectrum found their own ways to stand out. The “Alien” series made its Disney debut, winning over longtime fans with director Fede Álvarez’s devotion to practical effects and sets while introducing the longtime franchise to a new generation. On the flipside, there was Neon’s “Longlegs,” which became the distributor’s highest-grossing film ever simply through an effective digital media campaign and word-of-mouth based around Nicolas Cage’s horrifying performance.
When films like these stand out, they give theaters a higher baseline of revenue and that trickles down all the way to the staff, who will be needed to handle that increase of in-demand screenings.
“From an exhibitor perspective, films like ‘It Ends With Us’ and ‘Twisters’ are so vital. It’s what keeps the industry from longer slumps and is the difference for a lot of theater workers about whether there will be enough moviegoing demand for them to get more hours,” Loria said.
An accurate forecast
That consistency is something that has been lacking from the box office since theaters reopened in 2021. COVID-19 variant outbreaks hampered 2021, production backlogs affected 2022 and strike delays hurt 2023 and the early part of 2024.
It is only now that the film industry can look ahead to a marketplace with something resembling a normal rate of releases.
Executives like AMC Theatres CEO Adam Aron have been promising their shareholders for months that a second-half surge was coming. In the second quarter of 2024, AMC suffered an 84% drop in adjusted EBITDA and a $32 million loss during a time when early summer blockbusters usually yield a profit.
But by the time that earnings report came out, AMC had already posted an all-time best EBITDA thanks in large part to “Inside Out 2,” and had seen a huge windfall in July from “Deadpool 3” and “Despicable Me 4.” That’s why Aron said during the AMC earnings call that he was “ecstatic” despite the poor Q2 numbers.
“We knew 2024 was coming,” he said. “We correctly predicted and previously publicly disclosed that moviegoing in general would be weak in the early months of 2024 because production delays caused by the prolonged writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023 with decreasing number of movies that will be ready for theatrical release early this year.”
By the end of May, Aron continued, the impact of the 2023 strikes was finally over. “And it is as clear as a bell right now that the box office has started its big upwards climb.”
That ascent back to so-called normality will give studios and theaters a lot more information about what the long-term outlook for theatrical moviegoing is going forward.
But the full picture won’t be clear until the end of 2024. A loaded September slate that includes films like “Transformers One,” “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” and “The Wild Robot” will provide much more momentum from audiences. “Beetlejuice 2” is tracking for an opening weekend of $80 million-plus — higher than the $82.5 million opening weekend of “Dune: Part Two” — with a $100 million-plus start within the realm of possibility.
Disney goes from zero to hero
The theatrical industry has one studio to thank above all others: Disney. In 2023, the studio saw several tentpole films like “The Marvels” and “Wish” flop theatrically. Now, after being absent from the first quarter of the year due in good part to strike delays, Disney has returned to dominance with a 42% market share for the summer. A good part of that has come from “Deadpool 3” and “Alien: Romulus,” two films made possible by the 2019 20th Century Fox acquisition.
“If it hasn’t already been obvious, there’s no getting back to pre-pandemic business without Disney,” Loria said. “We saw at the start of the summer how the industry fares without a Disney tentpole performing at a high level, and we saw how quickly everyone’s fortunes changed in June.”
