The Movies Are Not As Back As You Might Think

 Last year, there was a lot of crowing that movies, thanks to Barbie and Oppenheimer, had returned to their place of cultural dominance. But this weekend’s dismal box-office numbers must be giving people who have been gleely predicting “the movies are back” some pause.

We have recovered from the blight of COVID—on March 15, 2020 LA mayor Eric Garcetti ordered the closing of all movie theaters– in Los Angeles! By April only one percent of all theaters nationwide were open. And we’re certainly long past that.

In 2020 theaters sold approximately 215 million tickets sold domestically, per The Numbers.

Each subsequent year saw a rise:

• 434 million in 2021
• 705 million in 2022
• 850 million in 2023

This means a whopping 75 percent increase since the nadir of 2020. Any industry—from purveyors of Big Macs to Chevys—would be ecstatic with such a gain.

However. . .in 2019 theaters sold 1.2 billion tickets sold. And in 2018 the number was 1.3 billion.

So while the recovery from 2020 is clearly notable, what is more telling is that ticket sales are only about 69 percent of what they were in pre-COVID 2019.

Or said another way, 31 percent of used-to-be movie-goers are now probably watching from their personal lounge chairs, not the ones that bear the incipient stickiness from slurped Cokes and popcorn debris.

And if the performance of movies in January 2024 is any indication of the remainder of the year, Hollywood is in a bad place.

The domestic box office in January was down 14.9 percent compared to January 2023, according to FranchiseRe.biz.

And pulling back the focus to the average of the Januarys in the three years prior to COVID (2020, ’19 and ’18), box office is down by 46.2 percent.

Imagine trying to get a loan from a bank when your income has declined 15 percent from what it was a year earlier, and nearly half from a few years back.

Talent may predicate the gears of Hollywood, but ample amounts of money great them.

And while on the subject of money, superhero movies cost a lot to make but put a lot of people in seats, or at least they used to put a lot of people in seats.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was the fourth biggest film in 2023. It cost an estimated $250 million to make. Staying with the metric of ticket sales (although as tickets cost approximately $10.50, it’s easy to do the math for grosses), theaters sold 34,092,670 tickets. Not great, but not bad.

But ’23 also brought Thanos-like disasters: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, costing some $200 million and bringing in 20,370,837 movie goers; The Flash, $220 million and 10,272,318 seats filled; The Marvels, $270 million to make and 8,022,712 tickets sold.

This means that Hollywood spent a combined—for all four movies—roughly $1.2 billion and put some 73 million people in theaters.

Compare those numbers with the top film in 2019, Avengers: Endgame, which cost some $400 million to make but brought in some 94 million domestic moviegoers: A third of the cost of 2023’s four superhero films and 22 percent more viewers.

This isn’t “superhero fatigue.” It’s superhero exhaustion.

Looking at the industry as a whole, Reuters, citing data from MoffettNathanson, an independent research firm for investors, reports that in 2024, due, in part to the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, there will be 90 films in wide release. There were 100 in wide release in 2023, so that’s a 10 percent decline right there.

Another factor that affecting Hollywood’s overall performance: the number of screens available to show movies.

According to the National Association of Theater Owners, in 2019 there were 41,172 screens—inside and drive-ins—in the U.S. That number fell to 39,007 in 2022.

Reuters cites a “longtime media executive and investor” who thinks that studios are releasing too few films for the number of screens. They quote him as saying the theater business is “teetering on disaster.”

While that existential threat may not exist for Hollywood as a whole, the overall pattern indicates that the business model that has long sustained the industry may not be entirely broken, but it is certainly cracked.

Being back isn’t what it once was.