The 2024 Box Office Is Off To A Rough Start – And It Won't Get Better Any Time Soon

To say that 2024 is off to a slow start at the box office might be a bit of an understatement. We've had small moments worth celebrating, such as the "Mean Girls" musical representing yet another movie that was originally going to go direct-to-streaming only to become a theatrical success story. But by and large, both studios and (more importantly) theater owners don't have much to be optimistic about right now. 

According to Comscore, the overall domestic box office for this year is down 10% compared to this same point in 2023, and sadly, it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. The majority of the relative success stories that we've seen this year thus far were holdovers from 2023, with "Wonka" recently crossing $500 million worldwide and Sony's "Anyone But You" crossing $100 million after a very slow start. This year's new releases are doing well in some cases, but it's not enough to make up for a generally sparse release calendar. The "Mean Girls" musical and "The Beekeeper" are no substitute for a broad-appeal, four-quadrant blockbuster.

So, why the downturn? In short, much of it has to do with the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild strikes last year. The strikes shut down Hollywood for months on end, which delayed many movies that were originally planned to be released in 2024. Plus, movies like "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom" have underperformed against expectations, which led to less money from 2023 releases in the early part of the year. By comparison, "Avatar: The Way of Water" made a boatload of cash last year despite being released in late 2022. Granted, January can often be a slow month for the box office, but unfortunately, this underwhelming performance isn't going to be isolated to one month.

There are no meaningful wide-release movies coming down the pipeline in the last week of January, with only Lionsgate's "Miller's Girl" and other smaller releases to give theaters anything to showcase. Unfortunately, we've got more like "I.S.S." (which opened to just $3 million this past weekend) to look forward to. The next big, blockbuster-level release coming our way is Matthew Vaughn's "Argylle," which hails from Apple Studios and boasts a star-studded cast. But its box office prospects are uncertain and it is presently difficult to imagine the original, comedic spy thriller doing summer blockbuster numbers. That is what theaters sorely need right now.

The next remote shot at that will come on February 14 when Sony's superhero flick "Madame Web" arrives. But, as we've seen in recent months, superhero movies are no longer as automatically bankable as they once were. Presently, this one feels more like "Morbius" than it does "Venom." Unless "Bob Marley: One Love" becomes the next "Bohemian Rhapsody," or unless "Lisa Frankenstein" becomes the next "M3GAN," we're not going to see a surefire hit until March 1 when "Dune: Part Two" hits theaters.

March, admittedly, looks much better with other likely hits such as "Kung Fu Panda 4" and "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire" also on the release schedule. Not to mention "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire," which recently moved up its release date by a couple of weeks. Even so, the pressure is now on those movies to over-deliver, given how product-starved the first two months of the year have been. It's an ugly situation that may have ugly consequences.

Theater chains like AMC and Regal hardly managed to weather the pandemic. This new trend is a downturn the industry can ill afford. AMC is saddled with debt and Regal's parent company went through bankruptcy. Smaller theater chains or one-off arthouse theaters don't have the luxury of being part of a giant corporation to endure another down year. Many of these theaters have been struggling as is. If the latter chunk of 2024 isn't much, much better, this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back. 

This is all tremendously disappointing given that 2023 saw domestic ticket sales top $9 billion for the first time since the pandemic began. That was a marked increase over 2022, when sales topped out at $7.5 billion, and 2021, when sales didn't even hit $4.5 billion. The point is that the industry has been — slowly but surely — on the mend since the disaster that was 2020. Now, we've hit a pretty major speed bump that is going to threaten to upset the apple cart once again.

The other problem is that studios have begun to realize the pitfalls of streaming and are now doubling down on theatrical distribution in many ways as an important revenue driver in the future. Sadly, because those same studios are now failing to provide a steady stream of product to theaters in 2024, the theater chains they rely on may well not be in good health come 2025. Optimism is tough to come by at the moment, but we can only hope that it's not as bad as some analysts have been projecting.

We spoke more about this on today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which you can listen to below:

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