Hollywood is facing its bleakest year in three decades. Can these films save it?
By Nell Geraets
The Fall Guy was supposed to be a box office hit, similar to other films released around the same time of year like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Fast Five. But so far, the results have been middling, grossing only US$27.7 million over its opening weekend in the US – the worst start to Hollywood’s all-important summer season since 1995.
Its failure to meet expectations has put focus on the longer-term strength of the box office, amid a strike-affected slate and a lack of anything on the horizon like last year’s record-breaking Barbie and Oppenheimer.
The Fall Guy failed to meet box office expectations over its opening weekend. Could it be a canary in the coalmine?
This year’s box office is expected to be flatter compared to 2023, says executive director of Cinema Association Australasia Cameron Mitchell. This is largely due to disruptions caused by the now-resolved Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, which caused a string of productions to halt for about five months.
According to box office analysis site The Numbers, this year’s total US box office revenue (the key metric of Hollywood’s health) is projected to be about US$6.6 billion – about 27 per cent less than 2023 and nearly half of box office sales in 2018 and 2019 (the two years prior to pandemic shutdowns).
“There just aren’t as many new films this year,” chief executive of Palace Cinemas Benjamin Zeccola says. “First, production was interrupted because of COVID-19. Then COVID-19 lockdowns ended, but we almost immediately went into strikes. So, the momentum of filmmaking has not yet normalised, the usual number of movies are not being released and attendance is down.”
For example, films like Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 2, Captain America: Brave New World and the Dirty Dancing sequel were initially scheduled for this year, but are now slated for 2025 following strike delays.
Chief executive of The Hoyts Group Damian Keogh says 85 wide-release films premiered in 2017 compared to 67 in 2023 – about a 20 per cent drop. This number has fallen again this year to 64 wide-release films, as the industry grapples with strike interruptions.
“There’s always a level of unpredictability around how a movie is going to perform. But when you’ve got a deeper array of wide-release movies, there’s less volatility, less risk. If a couple don’t click with audiences, others will make up for it,” Keogh says.
Zeccola agrees, adding that it can take years to re-fill the pipeline, thereby normalising box office numbers. This delay could potentially have serious knock-on effects.
“We need strong box office revenue so that it gets ploughed back into production, creating a whole cycle of artistic creation and jobs in the arts,” Zeccola says.
Mitchell considers the 2024 box office a blip, one that the industry expects to fully recover from between 2025 and 2026. “Local and international studios have been adjusting their line-ups to ensure a solid slate in 2024 and beyond, and we expect to see over 120 films released in Australian cinemas between now and the year’s end.”
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is one of the films expected to perform well at the box office this year.
Some of these include highly anticipated titles like Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Deadpool & Wolverine, all of which are sequels that are expected to benefit from their popular existing brands.
Another encouraging element of this year’s upcoming slate is its variation in genre, Mitchell says, thereby attracting broader audiences.
While action and comedy continue to make up a healthy portion of the slate, including Bad Boys: Ride or Die and Venom: The Last Dance, there will also be a refreshing number of family-friendly releases. These types of offerings have been limited recently, but the second half of this year promises a string of PG films, including IF, The Garfield Movie, Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4 and Paddington in Peru.
“There are also the horror and thriller genres, which continue to thrive with The Watchers, A Quiet Place: Day One, Smile 2, Trap and others,” Mitchell says. “As of early May year-to-date, Australian box office has exceeded $302 million … The local industry is bullish about the coming three years.”
The Garfield Movie is one of several family-friendly titles scheduled for release this year.Credit: Warner Bros.
Though the number of wide-release films has decreased since 2017, Keogh notes that they aren’t the only type of content that can attract mass audiences.
“We’re certainly not short of content. We’ve had a lot of success in Australia recently with Indian cinema. Indian migration is number one in Australia now. So, we’ve got lots of different content coming down the pipeline.”
It’s this array of content that has helped elevate Australia to one of the top-10 global cinema markets. “Cinema is the number one out-of-home cultural entertainment activity in Australia. It’s a massively important industry for the country.”
So, once the pipeline is re-filled, the box office would presumably recover. However, it may not be that simple. The pandemic and strikes have been significant factors behind dwindling box office numbers, but the type of content released also matters, says chief executive of Melbourne’s Cinema Nova Kristian Connelly.
“Audience behaviour is guiding major studios to be less reliant on existing IP,” Connelly says. “While some original films haven’t generated the blockbuster returns of some [franchise] sequels, the cultural needle is being shifted by original stories’ pop culture success.”
Films based on original stories, such as Challengers, Anyone But You, or The Fall Guy may not perform as well during their opening weekends because they’re not tied to recognisable franchises. However, Connelly says they can perform well over time due to positive word-of-mouth.
The opposite is sometimes the case for reboots or sequels, where expectations can be high and not met. In its opening weekend Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire grossed over US$80 million in North America, but made 61 per cent less in its second week (just over US$31 million).
Considering the vast majority of major releases this year are based on existing IP, this could pose a problem for the overall box office. However, Zeccola says most of the sequels or reboots this year still have a degree of originality that he believes will still appeal to vast audiences.
“It has been about eight years since the first Inside Out, nearly a decade since the most recent Alien film, and 35 years since Beetlejuice,” he says. “They’re recognisable, but there’s a freshness to them. They’re not like a superhero movie that’s been churned out three times a year.”
Many of these films are expected to perform relatively well; however, Keogh says it remains impossible to know with certainty.
“There’s a whole art and science behind releasing theatrical movies. Sometimes they click, sometimes they don’t … It has been a rocky road the past few years, but we’re pretty confident about the rest of this year and even more so beyond that. We’ll survive until 2025.”
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