2024 Is Looking Like an Ugly Year for the Box Office

While there were plenty of sobering misfires to go around at the 2023 box office ending in a $9 billion domestic result, 2024 is poised to be — brace yourself — significantly worse.

Last month, analytics firm Gower Street said box office grosses are expected to drop to around $8 billion, a figure that several studio distribution chiefs told TheWrap they are also projecting for the year.

Global grosses for 2024 will reach $31.5 billion, down 5% from the $33.4 billion in 2023, Gower Street said.

The biggest reason for the sharp drop is the decrease in wide releases due to the strikes, with Comscore estimating 89 films will be released in more than 2,000 theaters in 2024, compared to 100 in 2023. Theaters are staring down the barrel of January-February with no blockbuster films coming out at all, putting more pressure on March releases like Warner Bros./Legendary’s “Dune: Part Two” to pull them out of a drought.

There were supposed to be more films hitting theaters in the first half of the year, but the strikes have scuttled that. Disney, for example, has delayed the release of Pixar’s “Elio” and Marvel’s “Deadpool 3,” leaving “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” as its first major tentpole on Memorial Day weekend.

“What’s going to make 2024 even harder is that the financial support that NATO [National Association of Theater Owners] negotiated for theaters during the pandemic is long gone,” one studio distributor said. “We’re going to see another series of theater closures as there have still been a good chunk that have been surviving from month to month or quarter to quarter.”

When theaters reopened in 2021, the general hope and belief was that the box office would make a slow but steady recovery back to pre-COVID levels, provided the film industry could eventually get the number of annual title releases back up to where it once was. But that road back has hit a snag thanks to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, which shut down productions for a combined 191 days and forced major studios to delay multiple wide-release films.

Other films delayed until after 2024 include Paramount’s eighth “Mission: Impossible” film and Jordan Peele’s untitled fourth horror film.

The box office did show progress in 2023, as annual domestic grosses rose about 22%, from $7.36 in 2022 to just over $9 billion by the end of this past weekend.

But in 2024, the outlook is a film slate similar to 2022, when there were several large gaps created by the lack of finished material due to studio production backlogs caused by the pandemic. With exhibitors still not financially recovered from the COVID shutdown, hundreds of theaters in the U.S. and Canada that couldn’t draw enough business from that year’s hits like “Top Gun: Maverick” were forced to close, and not all of them were reopened under different chains.

It remains to be seen whether any locations belonging to the multinational chains will be a part of that exhibition downsizing. AMC Theaters has been fighting tooth and nail to keep every source of cash flow open, including via a $22.5 million stock swap completed on Dec. 29 and by making direct deals with pop stars like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé to distribute their concert films in theaters.

“To the prophets of doom certain that AMC would fail as a company and be forced into bankruptcy court in 2023: It is December 31, so we all know that YOU WERE WRONG,” CEO Adam Aron said in a defiant tweet on New Year’s Eve. “AMC is still here, still innovating, still blazing new trails.”

But AMC, along with the rest of the industry, will have to weather yet another long dry spell to kick off 2024. After a post-summer period where Warner Bros.’ “Wonka” has been the only film in the last five months to gross over $400 million worldwide, theaters are staring down the barrel of a January/February release slate with very few major films coming out.

Among the precious few new releases that might provide some modest market support are Blumhouse’s horror film “Night Swim” and Paramount’s musical adaptation of “Mean Girls.” Several awards hopefuls such as Searchlight’s “Poor Things” and MGM’s “American Fiction” will also expand nationwide.

February’s releases include Matthew Vaughn’s action comedy “Argylle,” released by Universal as part of Apple’s theatrical distribution strategy, and Sony’s “Madame Web,” the studio’s attempt to mine the depths of its Marvel character IP rights. But there’s no early-year blockbuster hit on the horizon like “Deadpool” or “Bad Boys For Life.” That will likely leave the industry waiting for the arrival of Warner Bros./Legendary’s “Dune: Part Two” at the start of March to break weeks of low gross totals.

In Q2 and beyond, the tentpole release schedule doesn’t look as strong on paper as it did in those halcyon years of 2018 and 2019, a two-year period when Hollywood, led by a seemingly unstoppable Disney, released 20 films that grossed over $700 million worldwide — with 14 of them topping $1 billion.

Films with potential to do $500 million or more

In 2024, there seems to be only one movie that is favored to hit that $1 billion mark: Universal’s “Despicable Me 4,” the next installment of Illumination’s flagship animation franchise.

For films that could top $700 million, the short list of films that may have the best chance of getting there come from the comic book genre, which got hit in 2023 with even louder claims of “superhero fatigue” than ever before. While Marvel and DC definitely can’t make money hand over first regardless of quality anymore, the two labels are sending in a pair of R-rated films that will surely get widespread turnout from young adults: “Deadpool 3,” a sequel that promises the return of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and “Joker: Folie a Deux,” the sequel to the highest grossing R-rated film of all time, with Lady Gaga joining as Harley Quinn.

Other films with the potential for $500 million-plus runs include Disney/20th Century’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” which will hope its CGI spectacle will generate word-of-mouth in the summer; Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” which could continue the recent hot streak for video game films next winter; “Inside Out 2,” a sequel that Disney and Pixar hope will get audiences out of the habit of waiting for their films to arrive on Disney+; and Universal’s “Wicked,” a film that could break the recent struggles of movie musicals with Ariana Grande leading an adaptation of a popular Broadway hit.

But the list of reliable moneymakers is not as long as before COVID, and to borrow a line from “Oppenheimer,” the chances of them underperforming are not “near-zero.”

“Audiences’ tastes are changing, and it’s more unpredictable than ever,” Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock said. “That’s not a good thing for studios and theaters at a time when they’re going to have fewer films than they hoped because of the strikes. Pandemic aside, this is the first time since 2006 that we’re not going to have the summer kick off with a big Marvel movie at the start of May.”

What signs of hope are there? There is always the hope of surprise, something 2023 had plenty of with the sci-fi horror movie “M3GAN” and monster film “Godzilla Minus One” having breakout genre success.

No one expected at the start of 2023 that “Sound of Freedom” and “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” would show up and outgross action films like “Fast X” and “Mission: Impossible 7” in North America. And while “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” were expected to be hits, “Barbie” wasn’t expected to match “Top Gun: Maverick” worldwide and “Oppenheimer” wasn’t expected to be the highest-grossing biopic ever released.

As we noted in our 2023 box office review, auteur-driven films, even on the franchise front, defined the year. And word-of-mouth became even more vital than it already was. While it’s no guarantee of success, the films that build momentum among audiences from “Barbie” to “Elemental” just kept rolling for weeks on end.

“Who expected films like ‘M3GAN’ and ‘Cocaine Bear’ to be big successes relative to their budget level,” Bock said. “Maybe it’s easier said than done, but Hollywood’s going to be a lot healthier if we can get more of these cheaper films that don’t blow up the charts but do well with a portion of the audience that doesn’t see ‘Fast & Furious’ or Marvel but comes back to theaters for something those $200 million, $300 million tentpoles don’t provide.”

Having not seen the movies to come this year, it is nigh impossible to say where the box office surprises will come from. Perhaps from “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho’s English sci-fi film “Mickey 17”? Maybe from the “John Wick” spinoff “Ballerina” starring Ana De Armas?

Or perhaps, like “The Eras Tour,” it will come from a movie that isn’t even on the slate yet. Tim Handren, CEO of regional theater chain Santikos and chair of The Cinema Foundation, says that based on his conversations with studios that he expects a few more unannounced films to be added to the 2024 calendar in the coming weeks. Sony and Universal made such additions recently with films like George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s “Wolfs” and the DreamWorks animated film “The Wild Robot.”

“I can’t say for sure how many more films are going to be added, but there’s still a chance our theaters could get north of 90 wide release films this year,” Handren said. “If — and I do mean IF — we get there, I think there’s a possibility that we could get to $8.5 billion for the year if enough films work out.”

Handren’s estimate is the highest that TheWrap heard from a studio or exhibition source this week, showing how the industry has largely accepted that the ripple effects of the strike will relegate 2024 to a down year rather than a step forward as they had hoped. But Bock hopes the production delays will bring more long-term changes on the studios’ part.

“I hope these delays give studios some extra time to really make changes where they need to, whether it’s in what films they greenlight or how they approach their top franchises,” said Bock. “There were a lot of movies like ‘Indiana Jones’ and ‘The Flash’ that just didn’t work, and audiences are showing that if these high-budget movies don’t work, they’ll abandon them fast.”

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