Mean Girls Leads A Stale Box Office Weekend With No Major Movie Releases

Try not to trip over the tumbleweeds as you step into this box office update. For the third weekend running, the top five movies in domestic theaters will remain unchanged due to the fact that Hollywood, er, isn't releasing any movies right now. The No. 1 spot is a fairly tight race between musical comedy remake "Mean Girls" (estimated weekend total: $6.7 million) and Jason Statham-led action flick "The Beekeeper" ($6.4 million). 

There are no new wide releases this weekend. The only film making a theatrical debut is "Miller's Girl," starring Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega. According to The Numbers, it'll only be in around 500 theaters and is expected to gross less than $2 million.

Last weekend brought the meager offering of low-budget sci-fi movie "I.S.S.," which opened at No. 7 in the rankings, just behind "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom." But beyond a bit of jostling for position, the top five has remained unchanged since Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. January releases "Mean Girls" and "The Beekeeper" are in the top two spots, with December holdovers "Wonka," "Migration," and "Anyone But You" lingering just beneath them. The current drought is good for those movies, which are enjoying the lack of competition, but it's bad for theaters. Deadline reports that the overall box office this weekend will add up to a measly $59 million, down 19% from the same weekend last year.

There'll be more lean times to come. Last year, Hollywood studios banded together in an effort to hold out against dual strikes by writers and actors. The studios weathered the strike period itself fairly comfortably, surviving off completed movies that were already in the bank. But in 2024, the decision to effectively let the industry shut down for six months is already coming back to bite.

In 2023, the box office had just about recovered from the massive downturn of the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down theaters and film sets worldwide. Movies were back, baby! But then Hollywood's studios, united under the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), attempted to weather not just one strike, but two strikes simultaneously. The writers strike had been expected, with studios scrambling to get scripts finished before the deadline to negotiate a new Writers Guild of America contract. But the impact of the writers strike, which shut down around 80% of productions thanks to dedicated picketing and solidarity from other unions, may have been underestimated.

Then, in July 2023, writers were joined by actors when the AMPTP failed to reach a deal with SAG-AFTRA. This led to a near-total shutdown and the longest actors strike in Hollywood history: almost four months on the picket lines. Studios stayed away from the negotiating table for as long as possible, putting on a confident face and claiming in earnings calls that the strikes were having a minimal impact. In fact, the strikes had even temporarily boosted cash flow and profits thanks to the money saved from not making any movies. But financially speaking, that's sort of like a farmer boosting their short-term profits by not spending any money on planting crops.

The L.A. Times reported earlier this month that overall box office projections for 2024 are around $8 billion, down $1 billion (or 11%) from 2023. As an extra thorn in the shoe for studios, last year's money-saving production shutdowns are now this year's additional expenses. The cameras have started rolling again on pricey blockbusters like "Mission: Impossible 8" and the "Avatar" sequels just as box office revenue takes a sharp downward turn. Goodbye, f*** around era. Hello, find out era.