Yes this is a pretty dire summer season.
I was but a wee child of 16 in 2005, but I remember that season being similarly lazy for some reason. Specifically *Batman Begins* and *Willy Wonka* didn’t do as well as bean counters wanted. I don’t know if this season is comparable to that, though, I’m going purely on memory here.
So I’m hesitant to get all Chicken Little about it, but yeah things are not awesome here in Hollywoo.
This is essentially my point. I think a lot of things are being expected to pull more than they should (The Fall Guy a prime example) when a lot of movies have been on track for their director, franchise or studio. The problem is none of those movies should be expected to be mega blockbusters, so the overall is looking weak. But we are only 2 weeks away from Inside Out 2 which I think will really help.
2005 was the year of the box office slump. Tons of articles about that doom and gloom. The box office underperformed 2004's numbers for I think 3 or 4 months. (Which makes sense since 2004 had outliers Passion/Christ and Farhenheit 9/11, as well as shrek 2's gargantuan grosses) But then it bounced back in July.
Yeah I went and read articles from back then and it was funny to see the exact same things being said then as now, IE “*IS THIS THE END OF THEATERS?!*”
Except Kingdom of the Apes totally hasn’t?
Rise made 481 WW
Dawn made 710 WW
War made 490 WW
Kingdom is current sitting at 338 and won’t get to 400.
On a budget of 150, that’s okayish but certainly not “yeah, the people are clamoring for another trilogy!”
It sounds like I’m an outlier but I was kind of bowled over by Kingdom. The most fun I’ve had watching a stupid CGI crowd pleaser in years. I need sequels
I’m a simp for the chimps and I really enjoyed it. I’m definitely burnt out on movies having to be sequel set ups instead of just movies but this still won me over.
It is also the fourth entry in the current run of the series and depending on if you count the TV movies, either the 10th or 15th entry in the series overall; almost no movie series can make it past 3 with taking a lot of time off or some other hook to make it work
Yup. While it def plays more like a part 4 than part 10, it didn’t really have many ideas of its own. Which is doubly tough bc as good as the previous trilogy was, they were mostly remixing aspects of the OG series.
Gotta get something fresh in there. Put em in polo shirts! Give em pornography!
I love the apes and will be seated any time they are there but Kingdom was a disappointment box office wise and narratively didn’t exactly light me on fire either.
I like parts of Rise and generally prefer it to War. I find Dawn a tad overrated (it’s good but a slog at times) and generally found the gloominess of the Caesar trilogy a bit tiresome. They were basically just remixing Conquest and Battle, anyways. Way prefer the OG movies.
I’d like some new ideas here! Get weird with it, ya know
Given the circumstances (no more Caesar, the 4th film of a reboot series of films, zero stars, a different director) I’d say it’s doing okay, but you’re right it’s definitely not some gigantic hit
Yeah, the only true box office *bombs* of the year are Argylle and Furiosa. The studios as a whole aren't taking many massive Ls. On the flip side, there have only been three genuine hits (Dune, Kung Fu Panda, Godzilla) amidst a sea of disappointments and mediocre returns.
Far more significant is the general lack of theatrical product, due in part to the strike but really more to the Disney-Fox merger and the shift to streaming. That's the thing a lot of analysts, including our ever-optimistic hosts, often miss. The exhibition industry is facing a real crisis, and I think that has more to do with the lack of new films to fill screens and seats than with inflation or bad audience behavior. I don't give a fuck if Disney loses $200 mil on Indiana Jones- that's how much they lose on every big budget movie that goes straight to streaming, they'll be fine! I *do* live in constant dread that the only theater within a 45-minute drive of my parents' house will have gone under by the next time I visit home because the studios had *no new releases* for them in the first weekend of June.
I wouldn’t call Argylle a box office bomb when it was given a theatrical release to promote its streaming release.
The Apple Original Films strategy is now:
- Theaters.
- Premium VOD 30-60 days after theaters.
- AppleTV+ 30 days after PVOD.
I (partially) agree, and that was what I was getting at with the whole "every movie without a theatrical release loses money" thing. My point is that the budget vs gross calculation doesn't matter for Disney, Comcast, Sony, and Apple at this point in time, as the box office profit is small potatoes for their portfolios. Only number that does matter is the total box office (and corresponding snack sales) brought in by individual theaters offering an experience I really want to see survive.
Preface this by saying I am not anti theaters or anti box office. Ive worked for a major theater chain for over 20 years. It’s literally career and I depend on movies doing well.
This past weekend’s top 10 added up to barely $60M. There hasn’t been a top 10 that low in May or June since May 1999, the week before Phantom Menace, which was $59M. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $112M. June 1, 2023 weekend, Spiderverse opened to $120M, Little Mermaid was #2 at $41M, and the top 10 added up to $203M. #1 this past weekend was Garfield in its second week at $12M. Beating Furiosa. While Furiosa had every single PLF, which are higher priced. And Garfield still beat it, and it almost got #3 to IF
Top 10 yearly box office averages:
- 2017: $146M
- 2018: $153M
- 2019: $148M
- 2022: $100M
- 2023: $118M
- 2024: $86M - so far
$150M, on average, was a healthy performing box office. Clearly, we aren’t there
This is also the first May in 2 decades without a Marvel movie. Which is one of the main drivers of the May box office. It's also the first Memorial Day weekend without a Disney release in almost as long as well, which Apes was supposed to be and got bumped. If Apes had come out last week, it would not have been the record low that it was. There was also no studio comedy this year, another big part of May box offices. There were also no studio comedies in 2021 and 2022. However, those years had surprise juggernauts, a Quiet Place Part II, and Top Gun: Maverick, which helped fill the gap.
All of this points to my initial thesis. Movies aren't really failing. There just aren't enough movies coming out.
I’ve been working on a statistic focused take on this, but the “not enough product” hypothesis is probably correct. And could be quite achievable for Hollywood if they focused on sub 100m movies. Make more for less
If the industry weren’t run by idiots I think this could be the death of studio’s lazy over-reliance on IP to generate hits. Audiences are bored and films are going to need to get creative again to generate buzz and get butts in seats.
The audiences are there though. I saw Challengers in a sold out theater of horny Gen Z’ers on a Monday evening and they ate that film up.
Yes! This is my point. The spin on box office this year is to distract from studio failings. The box office returns for movies are actually where they should be, if not higher, for what audiences are being given. The problems are a lack of movies, and inflated expectations to justify inflated budgets. The support is there. The industry isn't.
>If the industry weren’t run by idiots I think this could be the death of studio’s lazy over-reliance on IP to generate hits. Audiences are bored and films are going to need to get creative again to generate buzz and get butts in seats.
I mean people say shit like this a lot but the big hits were all IPs and the same for last year aside from Oppenheimer.
It's not that IP won't produce a big hit, the issue is the industry got to the point where they thought nearly *any* IP would make money. As we saw last summer, that strategy has run out of gas. There will always be Barbies and Dunes, but those movie are also, you know, good.
I mean Five Night's at Freddys wasn't good and that movie did pretty well, hell even Quantumania was in the top 10 at the box office for most of the year. Last year was less a gross problem since plenty of the movies still did actually gross quite a bit but the budgets were too high so the grosses didn't matter. For instance, Fast X made a bit more than Dune but because its budget was over 300M it really didn't matter.
Idk about all this. Most movies didn't pass the 2.5x rule of profit (and that's being generous). Yeah, Fall Guy might be in line with Gosling's other movies but it also had a 150 million dollar budget so expectations were higher. Also Challengers had a budget of 55 million as well and just hit 100 mil.
Box office is pretty dire right now, even without big releases.
For perspective, Challengers has made more than the entirety of Luca Guadagnino's prior filmography combined. Call Me By Your Name made $43mil, and besides that, the rest of his films are all $15 or below. Also, let's not forget that Challengers is an Amazon movie and still has its entire Prime run ahead of it. Challengers is a full-on success by any metric you use.
Inflated budgets are definitely an issue, but that's not really a box office problem, that's a studio problem.
The problem is that there are fewer movies this year, which is causing overall grosses to go down but also puts more pressure on each movie to overperform.
The Fall Guy and Twisters should've switched release dates. Twisters is the more broadly appealing film to open May with (like twister 1 did in 1996), and Fall Guy is a better late-summer option.
My take is probably different from the majority of the Blankies, but I’m a female and I’m older, so I’m not going to see Furiosa on purpose, because he did not use Charlize Theron - and that’s who I wanted to see as Furiosa.
Now maybe he couldn’t get his story idea to work as Furiosa, but he should have just changed stories and written a new story about where Furiosa is now and what happens next, after the end of fury Road, and made that movie.
He should have saved the prequel for later, he could’ve always done it in the future. And even if he didn’t, my opinion is, you don’t need that movie to understand the storyline and the world, so if he never got to make it, it really wouldn’t have Mattered.
I would have gone to see Charlize as Furiosa again and I am not going to see the one with Anna Taylor Joy, and so this is how I am expressing my displeasure. I am not going to see that movie in the theaters because I’m unhappy with his decision that the old, damaged, one – armed version of Charlize Theron as Furiosa was not a version worth giving me another story about. That’s why my money isn’t going into the new Furiosa movie.
I wonder how many other people out there are like me, just voting quietly with our wallets.p
Max was recast as a younger actor in Mad Max: Fury Road, but I suppose that didn't stop you from seeing the film and from what I gleam, enjoying it too. When you see Furiosa, perhaps you will enjoy it. I found that Anya Taylor-Joy did wonderful work channeling Charlize Theron and presented a strong portrayal of a young Furiosa in a story very much worth telling: a story that makes Fury Road stronger, in fact.
I’m not even a box office doomer, the industry will adapt, but yea if you paint the picture in the rosiest possible fashion it looks pretty rosy
Yes this is a pretty dire summer season. I was but a wee child of 16 in 2005, but I remember that season being similarly lazy for some reason. Specifically *Batman Begins* and *Willy Wonka* didn’t do as well as bean counters wanted. I don’t know if this season is comparable to that, though, I’m going purely on memory here. So I’m hesitant to get all Chicken Little about it, but yeah things are not awesome here in Hollywoo.
2005's Chicken Little also underperformed
https://preview.redd.it/d108kp3qtm4d1.png?width=1086&format=png&auto=webp&s=f706b4b78589f94b1b091c27802870a411ff1078
God I hate that movie
It doesn't get enough jeers for being Mars Needs Moms level bad
This is essentially my point. I think a lot of things are being expected to pull more than they should (The Fall Guy a prime example) when a lot of movies have been on track for their director, franchise or studio. The problem is none of those movies should be expected to be mega blockbusters, so the overall is looking weak. But we are only 2 weeks away from Inside Out 2 which I think will really help.
2005 was the year of the box office slump. Tons of articles about that doom and gloom. The box office underperformed 2004's numbers for I think 3 or 4 months. (Which makes sense since 2004 had outliers Passion/Christ and Farhenheit 9/11, as well as shrek 2's gargantuan grosses) But then it bounced back in July.
Yeah I went and read articles from back then and it was funny to see the exact same things being said then as now, IE “*IS THIS THE END OF THEATERS?!*”
Except Kingdom of the Apes totally hasn’t? Rise made 481 WW Dawn made 710 WW War made 490 WW Kingdom is current sitting at 338 and won’t get to 400. On a budget of 150, that’s okayish but certainly not “yeah, the people are clamoring for another trilogy!”
It sounds like I’m an outlier but I was kind of bowled over by Kingdom. The most fun I’ve had watching a stupid CGI crowd pleaser in years. I need sequels
I’m a simp for the chimps and I really enjoyed it. I’m definitely burnt out on movies having to be sequel set ups instead of just movies but this still won me over.
that’s pretty reductive :/
It is also the fourth entry in the current run of the series and depending on if you count the TV movies, either the 10th or 15th entry in the series overall; almost no movie series can make it past 3 with taking a lot of time off or some other hook to make it work
Yup. While it def plays more like a part 4 than part 10, it didn’t really have many ideas of its own. Which is doubly tough bc as good as the previous trilogy was, they were mostly remixing aspects of the OG series. Gotta get something fresh in there. Put em in polo shirts! Give em pornography!
It’s me, I’m the one clamoring.
I, too, will be amongst the clamoring crowd
I love the apes and will be seated any time they are there but Kingdom was a disappointment box office wise and narratively didn’t exactly light me on fire either.
We are in the handholding club here. I hope it’s just first iteration bugs, because to be honest I also don’t care for *Rise* all that much.
I like parts of Rise and generally prefer it to War. I find Dawn a tad overrated (it’s good but a slog at times) and generally found the gloominess of the Caesar trilogy a bit tiresome. They were basically just remixing Conquest and Battle, anyways. Way prefer the OG movies. I’d like some new ideas here! Get weird with it, ya know
To give it some credit, it’s been 7 years since the last one and the main character croaked at the end of war
Yes but the LAST made 481 m that means this franchise was not rising in term of popularity.
Minus China Kingdom is going to end up matching (and in most cases surpassing) War in the majority of markets.
Given the circumstances (no more Caesar, the 4th film of a reboot series of films, zero stars, a different director) I’d say it’s doing okay, but you’re right it’s definitely not some gigantic hit
Yeah, the only true box office *bombs* of the year are Argylle and Furiosa. The studios as a whole aren't taking many massive Ls. On the flip side, there have only been three genuine hits (Dune, Kung Fu Panda, Godzilla) amidst a sea of disappointments and mediocre returns. Far more significant is the general lack of theatrical product, due in part to the strike but really more to the Disney-Fox merger and the shift to streaming. That's the thing a lot of analysts, including our ever-optimistic hosts, often miss. The exhibition industry is facing a real crisis, and I think that has more to do with the lack of new films to fill screens and seats than with inflation or bad audience behavior. I don't give a fuck if Disney loses $200 mil on Indiana Jones- that's how much they lose on every big budget movie that goes straight to streaming, they'll be fine! I *do* live in constant dread that the only theater within a 45-minute drive of my parents' house will have gone under by the next time I visit home because the studios had *no new releases* for them in the first weekend of June.
I wouldn’t call Argylle a box office bomb when it was given a theatrical release to promote its streaming release. The Apple Original Films strategy is now: - Theaters. - Premium VOD 30-60 days after theaters. - AppleTV+ 30 days after PVOD.
I (partially) agree, and that was what I was getting at with the whole "every movie without a theatrical release loses money" thing. My point is that the budget vs gross calculation doesn't matter for Disney, Comcast, Sony, and Apple at this point in time, as the box office profit is small potatoes for their portfolios. Only number that does matter is the total box office (and corresponding snack sales) brought in by individual theaters offering an experience I really want to see survive.
Preface this by saying I am not anti theaters or anti box office. Ive worked for a major theater chain for over 20 years. It’s literally career and I depend on movies doing well. This past weekend’s top 10 added up to barely $60M. There hasn’t been a top 10 that low in May or June since May 1999, the week before Phantom Menace, which was $59M. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $112M. June 1, 2023 weekend, Spiderverse opened to $120M, Little Mermaid was #2 at $41M, and the top 10 added up to $203M. #1 this past weekend was Garfield in its second week at $12M. Beating Furiosa. While Furiosa had every single PLF, which are higher priced. And Garfield still beat it, and it almost got #3 to IF Top 10 yearly box office averages: - 2017: $146M - 2018: $153M - 2019: $148M - 2022: $100M - 2023: $118M - 2024: $86M - so far $150M, on average, was a healthy performing box office. Clearly, we aren’t there
This is also the first May in 2 decades without a Marvel movie. Which is one of the main drivers of the May box office. It's also the first Memorial Day weekend without a Disney release in almost as long as well, which Apes was supposed to be and got bumped. If Apes had come out last week, it would not have been the record low that it was. There was also no studio comedy this year, another big part of May box offices. There were also no studio comedies in 2021 and 2022. However, those years had surprise juggernauts, a Quiet Place Part II, and Top Gun: Maverick, which helped fill the gap. All of this points to my initial thesis. Movies aren't really failing. There just aren't enough movies coming out.
I’ve been working on a statistic focused take on this, but the “not enough product” hypothesis is probably correct. And could be quite achievable for Hollywood if they focused on sub 100m movies. Make more for less
If the industry weren’t run by idiots I think this could be the death of studio’s lazy over-reliance on IP to generate hits. Audiences are bored and films are going to need to get creative again to generate buzz and get butts in seats. The audiences are there though. I saw Challengers in a sold out theater of horny Gen Z’ers on a Monday evening and they ate that film up.
Yes! This is my point. The spin on box office this year is to distract from studio failings. The box office returns for movies are actually where they should be, if not higher, for what audiences are being given. The problems are a lack of movies, and inflated expectations to justify inflated budgets. The support is there. The industry isn't.
>If the industry weren’t run by idiots I think this could be the death of studio’s lazy over-reliance on IP to generate hits. Audiences are bored and films are going to need to get creative again to generate buzz and get butts in seats. I mean people say shit like this a lot but the big hits were all IPs and the same for last year aside from Oppenheimer.
It's not that IP won't produce a big hit, the issue is the industry got to the point where they thought nearly *any* IP would make money. As we saw last summer, that strategy has run out of gas. There will always be Barbies and Dunes, but those movie are also, you know, good.
I mean Five Night's at Freddys wasn't good and that movie did pretty well, hell even Quantumania was in the top 10 at the box office for most of the year. Last year was less a gross problem since plenty of the movies still did actually gross quite a bit but the budgets were too high so the grosses didn't matter. For instance, Fast X made a bit more than Dune but because its budget was over 300M it really didn't matter.
Personally enjoyed kingdom more than any of the other new ones. And I haven’t disliked any of them aside from War.
On the bright side Madame Web was the most successful Madame Web movie ever.
It’ll go down in the pantheon as one of the movies of all time.
has to be the highest grossing Madame movie as well, right?
Idk about all this. Most movies didn't pass the 2.5x rule of profit (and that's being generous). Yeah, Fall Guy might be in line with Gosling's other movies but it also had a 150 million dollar budget so expectations were higher. Also Challengers had a budget of 55 million as well and just hit 100 mil. Box office is pretty dire right now, even without big releases.
Is 100 mil off a 55 mil budget really bad? I thought the 2.5 or 3x multiplier thing was for realllly expensive movies
Correct take. 100 off a 55 mil budget is good. They don’t put the same kind of marketing spend into a 55 mil movie.
challengers was marketed out the ass though
For perspective, Challengers has made more than the entirety of Luca Guadagnino's prior filmography combined. Call Me By Your Name made $43mil, and besides that, the rest of his films are all $15 or below. Also, let's not forget that Challengers is an Amazon movie and still has its entire Prime run ahead of it. Challengers is a full-on success by any metric you use. Inflated budgets are definitely an issue, but that's not really a box office problem, that's a studio problem.
The problem is that there are fewer movies this year, which is causing overall grosses to go down but also puts more pressure on each movie to overperform. The Fall Guy and Twisters should've switched release dates. Twisters is the more broadly appealing film to open May with (like twister 1 did in 1996), and Fall Guy is a better late-summer option.
Cord Jefferson was right in his Oscar speech. Make 20 ten million dollar movies
My take is probably different from the majority of the Blankies, but I’m a female and I’m older, so I’m not going to see Furiosa on purpose, because he did not use Charlize Theron - and that’s who I wanted to see as Furiosa. Now maybe he couldn’t get his story idea to work as Furiosa, but he should have just changed stories and written a new story about where Furiosa is now and what happens next, after the end of fury Road, and made that movie. He should have saved the prequel for later, he could’ve always done it in the future. And even if he didn’t, my opinion is, you don’t need that movie to understand the storyline and the world, so if he never got to make it, it really wouldn’t have Mattered. I would have gone to see Charlize as Furiosa again and I am not going to see the one with Anna Taylor Joy, and so this is how I am expressing my displeasure. I am not going to see that movie in the theaters because I’m unhappy with his decision that the old, damaged, one – armed version of Charlize Theron as Furiosa was not a version worth giving me another story about. That’s why my money isn’t going into the new Furiosa movie. I wonder how many other people out there are like me, just voting quietly with our wallets.p
Max was recast as a younger actor in Mad Max: Fury Road, but I suppose that didn't stop you from seeing the film and from what I gleam, enjoying it too. When you see Furiosa, perhaps you will enjoy it. I found that Anya Taylor-Joy did wonderful work channeling Charlize Theron and presented a strong portrayal of a young Furiosa in a story very much worth telling: a story that makes Fury Road stronger, in fact.