A maverick Hollywood producer once compared the brutal commercial reality of releasing a film to leaping out of a plane.
“Not unlike a parachute jumper, a picture gets one shot — if it doesn’t open, it’s dead,” proclaimed Robert Evans, the producer of movies including The Godfather and Chinatown.
By that analogy, the record so far in 2024 is proving particularly deadly. This year’s box office total is on track to finish about 25 per cent — or $800 million — down on last year and 40 per cent below pre-pandemic levels.
The latest projections came after the box office recorded its worst Memorial Day weekend in 43 years when adjusted for inflation. Ticket sales between Friday and Monday were estimated at $128.3 million — down from just shy of $205 million for the same period last year, according to Comscore data.
Hopes for holiday weekend success had been pinned on Furiosa, a Mad Max prequel starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth. The film cost a reported $168 million to produce and many had expected the action film to ignite the summer movie-going period.
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However, George Miller’s film grossed an estimated $32 million over the weekend in North America, only a million more than The Garfield Movie.
Other films to have under-performed this year include the critically panned superhero movie Madame Web (given ★☆☆☆☆ by The Times), Ryan Gosling’s action flick The Fall Guy (★★☆☆☆) and the animated IF (★★★★☆).
Michael Niederman, a professor of cinema and television arts at Columbia College Chicago, said this year’s ticket sales were “astonishing”.
“People are just not going to the movies,” he said. He believes Hollywood has a serious problem because young people are not as inclined to buy tickets to the cinema as their parents were, with audiences trained to wait for a film to arrive on Netflix or Disney Plus instead of going to the cinema.
“It is very apparent that an entire generation of young people — who were often the rock of summer blockbusters, going back all the way to Jaws, the first summer blockbuster — just don’t go to movies,” Niederman said, adding that Hollywood was facing increasing competition from other forms of entertainment.
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“If they don’t find a way to make movies more accessible, particularly to young people, it will become something akin to going to see a play,” he said.
Sean Baker, who won the top prize at the Cannes film festival last week with his dark comedy Anora, echoed those fears in France when describing the state of cinema as “very scary”.
David A Gross, who runs the film consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research, said Hollywood’s flagging box office fortunes could be traced back to the pandemic and strike disruptions. Actors and writers walked out for months last year in a battle over pay and conditions, grinding Hollywood to a halt, while cinemas were closed for months during Covid and many filmgoers are yet to return.
“It’s starting to sound like a worn-out excuse, but it’s true,” Gross said. “It takes 18 to 24 months to plan, produce and release the biggest studio movies, and that process was frozen for most of the pandemic and strikes. It will take another year to settle down and see where we land.”
Gross expressed hope that this summer’s release schedule could harbour a breakout hit, perhaps by the likes of Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4 or Deadpool 3.
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“We need it, but they’re more difficult to anticipate — there’s no way to know when they’re going to come,” he said, noting that few predicted the level of blockbuster success by Barbie and Oppenheimer last summer.
But he said the state of the box office was “sobering”, adding: “The first five months of the year have dug a hole.”
What was the last film you saw in the cinema — and was it worth it? Share your thoughts in the comments
