2024’s Strange (?) Box Office
The post-COVID movie box office continues to be very different from the pre-COVID one, but as of this year I’m not sure we can keep calling it weird? It seems like this is the year the “new normal” settled into place, especially without the gravity of “Barbenheimer” distorting everything.
Crack Domestic Yearly Box Office - Box Office Mojo open in a new tab and scan down that list. This year did a little worse than last year, a little better than the year before than, and compared to the rest of the pre-COVID era, worse than almost every other year of the 21st century, even without taking inflation and increased ticket prices into account.
As has become the standard, a bunch of movies that seemed like safe bets absolutely tanked, and a few movies everyone assumed would do “well but not great” absolutely blew the doors off the joint.
Mostly, I have the same opinion as I did about 2023’s strange box office, but in brief: I think movie theaters have found themselves charging a premium price for a non-premium product, and are doing that in a world where essentially every other movie ever made is easily available, and a whole lotta people spent the early pandemic building a home theater better than every mall screen from the 90s. Oh, and the pandemic still isn’t over, either.
As has been frequently said, there used to be both good stuff and crappy stuff, but the crappy stuff cost less. Now we live in an age where the crappy stuff mostly costs the same as the good stuff, and all the people who made crappy stuff don’t understand why they’re going out of business.
Speaking of crappy stuff, I sat down to start writing this as it became clear that Kraven was going to bomb harder than either Madame Web or Morbius, which is kind of breathtaking? Maybe bluesky will prove it really has the juice and has taken twitter’s old mantle by convincing Sony to let it bomb twice.
The movie I want to talk about, though, is The Fall Guy. I didn’t say anything about it after I watched it, because there wasn’t much to say! Fun movie, really enjoyed it, attractive charismatic leads clearly having a good time, fun stunts, good movie! Everyone here enjoyed it.
(It’s also got, in the form of that Miami Vice Stunt Jacket, maybe the single best example of “Chekov’s Gun” as structural device I have ever seen. If I was teaching a writing class I could do a whole session just on that.)
A decade ago, that movie would have done fine, not great, but pretty good, probably $150-200 mil domestic, about that overseas, respectable return on investment. You know, Mummy Returns business. Instead, not so much! ⌘-tabbing back over to Box Office Mojo, I see it landed at a positively abysmal $92 million, which would be pretty great for you or I personally but for a big tentpole is a full-blown disaster.
And I bring all this up because, as you can probably guess, I watched it on streaming on Paramount+ about a month ago, because there was absolutely no universe in which I was going to spend the price of a new Zelda to take four people to go watch it in a suburb theater with blown out speakers. Plus, you know, I could pause it so we could all reload on snacks at the halfway point.
I do want to sharpen a couple of points on my existing thesis. I said before that a lot of people spent the early pandemic building a good home rig, but what I really meant was most people over about 35 or 40: as such, the Boomers, middle-aged Gen-Xers and Elder Millennials all have nice home theatres, but the younger Millennials and below do not—and they want to get out of the house. In the twenty-teens, making movies for dudes in their 40s was great business. Now, that’s the worst possible demographic.
Between that, and the higher prices of not just movies but everything, and the fact that means that movies have competition in their price point they didn’t used to have. Oh, and there’s that whole pandemic thing. Folks are still going to movies, but I think they’re much more risk averse, on multiple dimensions. They’re much less likely to go see something unless they know it’s going to be worth it; not gonna risk it on a maybe bad movie you can watch on streaming in a few months anyway.
And, just to put my bonafides back on the table, there’s about a ten-year stretch starting in 1996 where I’m pretty sure I saw just about every movie released in American theatures, because you could still get tickets for five bucks and even if the movie was bad it was still the cheapest way to spend two hours on a weeknight. Now? Less so.
So the movies that hit it big seemed to mostly be either somewhere to take the kids for a couple hours, or big community events that everyone was going to see, and maybe sing along with. So, Wicked, Inside Out 2, and Deadpool did great, but everyone waited to watch Furiosa at home.
Worth pointing out that there was only one superhero movie this year and it made a zillion dollars, so that really feels like the right model for that genre going forward?
We also got a couple of full-blown disasters in the form of Megapolis and Joker 2. As far as the first of those go, I’m not nearly as big a fan of Francis Ford Coppola as most people who own the number of Criterion DVDs as I do but you know what I am a fan of? Deranged weirdos making art for an audience of themselves alone. From that perspective, if using your vineyard money to make the movie you wanted to make with the people you wanted to work with is failure, please let me fail too!
Joker 2 is the one I really rolled my eyes at. I mean, I’m broadly of the opinon movie studios should give piles of money to people with no oversight more often, not less, but Todd Phillips? Really? The guy who made that terrible Starsky & Hutch movie, and then the Hangovers? That’s the guy you hand the blank check to? Meanwhile, even fresh off Barbie, Greta Gerwig can’t even get Netflix to commit to releasing friggin’ Narnia in theaters? I can think of a lot of people I’d give $200 million dollars to before that guy.
I was reminded recently that for a stretch in the early 90s, John Carpenter had a deal where he could make any movie he wanted with no oversight as long as the budget came in under $3 million, the assumption being that at that price point, it didn’t matter what they did at the box office, the movies would earn their money back on home video. The theatrical release was, essentially, an extended advertising campaign for the VHS release.
The two movies he made under this deal were Prince of Darkness and They Live, which all things considered seems a pretty cheap total price for the best documentary ever made about the Reagan Administration.
Carpenter, by this point, had already directed at least five stone cold classics—Halloween, The Thing, Starman, Escape from New York, and Big Trouble in Little China—of which only Halloween did anything approaching “well,” but all of which had long and successful afterlives on home video.
That insight—that in a post-home video world, the theatrical release could just be advertising instead of the “real show”—feels more accurate now than it did even at the time. So, of course, we live in a world where the entire “home video” income stream has been absolutely burned to the ground by Netflix. The same Netflix that seems to have settled into a groove of making incredibly expensive unwatchable schlock.
Feels like we need more of of those Carpenter deals, and fewer huge checks handed to mediocre white guys. More cheaper movies that have a hope of paying for themselves with the long tail, and more movies you can bring your kids and sing along to.
All that said, my hands-down favorite movie of the year was Hundreds of Beavers and that was barely released. Which, is now streaming and out of disc, and I cannot recommend it harder. Do not watch a trailer, do not read about it, just scare up a copy and press play and go in cold, trust me.
This is where I’m supposed to type some kind of pithy conclusion, and I don’t really have one? It’s clear the whole industry is still inside a fractal series of upheavals that no one has figured out yet. And, you know, I like movies! I want them to keep making them, and I want people to make a living doing so. They all just, you know, gotta accept that it’s not 2019 anymore, and never will be again. Theatres have a different job now, and they have to figure out what that is.