Action Still Rules the Box Office

The Marvels‘s opening weekend was abysmal: $47 million for a film with a reported budget of $250 million. And the second weekend of the MCU winter tentpole movie was even worse at the box office. While it isn’t necessarily the case that any movie is going to make its nut its first time out, it is somewhat ironic that the budget for 2018’s Captain Marvel, which introduced Brie Larson as the plucky, otherworldly superheroine, had a budget of $152 million and its domestic opening weekend take was $153 million. That’s got to hurt the execs at Disney who think that Marvel characters not only defy gravity on the screen, but at the box office, too.

Don’t cry too many tears for Bob Iger, et al.: the company bought Marvel in 2009 for four billion and has raked in an estimated $18 billion since.

It almost seems as though the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been dominant on screens since 2008’s Iron Man, according to numbers from The Numbers, the Action category that the analysis firm includes Marvel movies as well as movies including Avatar and Jurassic World, in 2008 Action accounted for 16.9 percent of the market—behind Comedy at 20.5 percent and way behind Adventure, which was at 30.9 percent.

While Comedy has slipped significantly in market share since 2008—it hit its nadir, 3.8 percent in 2020—the Action category didn’t pass Adventure until 2017, when Action was 29.9 percent of the market and Adventure 24.7 percent.

In other words, it took nine years to get to the top.

And because there’s no such thing as a sure thing, in 2020 Action was down to 21.6 percent of the market and Adventure was at 35.4 percent.

2021 saw another reversal of fortune, with Adventure down to 17.2 percent and Action WAY up at 50.9 percent. There is something to be said for the popularity of Spider-Man.

Things got even better for Action in 2022, when the genre hit 53.3 percent of the market and while Adventure maintained its second-place position, it only eked up a single percentage point, to 18.2 percent.

Perhaps having had more than half of the movie market last year led to great expectations for The Marvels. But as we know, that was not to be. And The Numbers projects that for 2023 Action will be down to 34.9 percent. While that still puts it in first place, estimates expect Adventure to be up to 19.4 percent, just a percentage point increase, but going back in the right direction.

In fact, that is one of the most interesting aspects of The Numbers numbers: It projects that nearly every other category except Action—including Drama, Comedy, Thriller/Suspense, and Horror—is moving upwards.

However, there is something to consider vis-à-vis the potential to garner good returns, which is something that was a considerable concern to both the Writers Guild and SAG AFTRA: artificial intelligence.

In the cases of the contracts for both, the concern was, for obvious reasons, the protection of the writers and of the actors. No one who writes scripts for a living wants to be replaced by a chatbot, nor does an actor want their performances based on a high-fidelity animation modeler.

On average, the film budget for a script is in single percentage digits. Depending on the actors, the budget for their work is across the board, but 30 percent is a good rule of thumb figure. So there is still more than 50 percent related to other aspects, and when you’re looking at an Action movie, much of the cost involves things like visual effects. While Hollywood has long been ahead of the curve in terms of using tech—remember how quaint it seemed when we saw clips in 2009 of the Avatar actors wearing unitards covered with balls for purposes of motion capture—not a day goes by without some sort of technical advancement that makes the capabilities go up and the costs—direct or indirect—go down.

According to The Numbers the top grossing movie in the Action category between 1995 and 2023 is Avatar. Its inflation-adjusted gross is $1,064,124,576. (Avengers: Endgame is second at $986,754,117.)

Adventure films also do quite well, with the number-one film during the same time period was Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, which has an inflation-adjusted gross of $1,163,816,804.

In either case—Avatar or The Force Awakens—is it the visuals or the acting that made the difference? The first five minutes of either of those movies answers that question.

People can talk about “superhero fatigue” at great length, but the Industry, which is interested in making money as all industries are, cannot overlook the facts that Action and Adventure combined account for 54.3 percent of the market and that while movies in those categories may be expensive to make, they can also make a lot of money.

While some think that a genre like Horror makes a better financial bet, consider this: The Numbers calculates that between 1995 and 2023 Hollywood released 823 Horror movies, earning a total box office of $14,749,010,371.

During the same period it released 1205 Action movies, with a total box office of $56,675,430,675.

Which means that the average takes (i.e., box office divided by number of movies) are:

• Horror: $17,900,000
• Action: $47,000,000

Where do you think Hollywood is going to place its chips?