2024 movies: Lessons from a turbulent year at the box office

AP:

Movie ticket sales took a bit of a hit in 2024. The annual domestic box office is expected to end up at around $8.75 billion, down more than 3 per cent from 2023, according to estimates from Comscore.

It’s not as dire as it was in the pandemic years, but it’s also not even close to the pre-pandemic norm when the annual box office regularly surpassed $11 billion.

This is the year the business felt the effects of the Hollywood strikes of 2023, the labour standoff that delayed productions and releases and led to a depleted calendar for exhibitors and moviegoers. And yet it’s not as bad as it could have been.

“This has been a really incredible comeback story for the industry,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “Just a couple of months ago, it was a question of whether we would even hit $8 billion for the year.”

Hollywood continues to learn lessons about what moviegoers really want. Here are the biggest takeaways from 2024.

The strike fallout was real

The Hollywood strikes might have ended in 2023, putting productions back into full swing and sending stars out on the promotional circuit again — but the ripple effect of the work stoppages and contract standoffs showed their real effects on the 2024 release calendar.

The first two quarters were hit hardest, with tent poles pushed later in the year ( Deadpool & Wolverine, for one). With no Marvel movie kicking off the summer moviegoing season, the box office was down a devastating 27.5 per cent from 2023, right before Inside Out 2 opened in June.

The PG rating (and animation) ruled

Sequels and franchises dominated the top 10 movies of the year, as has often been the case in the past 15 years. But, this year, films carrying a PG rating did especially well, starting with the biggest movie of 2024: Inside Out 2, which also became the biggest animated movie of all time, not accounting for inflation.

Family films with a PG rating — including Despicable Me 4, Moana 2, Wicked, Kung Fu Panda 4, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Mufasa and The Wild Robot — grossed more than $2.9 billion this year, accounting for around 33 per cent of the annual box office, according to Comscore.

The Disney impact

After a quieter 2023 and several years without a film at the very top of the charts, the Walt Disney Co came back roaring in 2024 with three of the top five movies of the year: Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine and Moana 2. In mid-December, it crossed the $2-billion domestic mark.

“It’s a different industry when Disney commits to theatrical releases,” said Daniel Loria, an executive at the movie data and analytics trade The Boxoffice Company.

Looking at ‘flops’ a different way

Every year has high-profile flops and disappointments, and this was no exception. Sony had a rough go with its Spider-Man adjacent titles like Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter. Universal had higher hopes for The Fall Guy, as did Warner Bros for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Joker: Folie à Deux.

Then there were the filmmaker-driven (and financed) passion projects that failed to take off, like Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.

“It’s a reductive way of thinking about those passion projects,” Loria said. “Those movies didn’t come out with huge expectations, meaning theatres didn’t clear out the house and give them three auditoriums per site in hopes for money to come in.”

Nostalgia and the allure of a re-release

Re-releases of movies in theatres that are also widely available in the home thrived this year. Some of the biggest successes included Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, Coraline and The Phantom Menace.

“It just shows our industry once again that audiences truly understand the difference between a communal, big screen theatrical experience that they crave even on films that they’ve had the opportunities to see in the home,” Nolan said in December.

Viral marketing moments

As silly as it sounds, this is the year the novelty popcorn bucket became a star. It started with the accidentally suggestive Dune: Part 2 creation, which Deadpool & Wolverine latched onto in a less accidental way. More recently, the Nosferatu coffin buckets have been fetching high resale prices.

2025 looks bright

“There's been a huge amount of box office generated in the last six weeks of the year,” Dergarabedian said. “This is the best opening act 2025 could have.”