By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
Despite a 65% jump in Year-Over-Year (YOY) revenues, the North American box office is still down 33% from pre-pandemic revenues in 2019.
As the full picture emerged from the box office returns in 2022, it’s clear that not everyone has regained the habit of going to theaters for their film fix.
To be sure, there has been good news for the film industry, as blockbusters like Avatar: The Way of Water, Top Gun: Maverick and Jurassic World: Dominion all surpassed the $1 billion mark.
In particular, James Cameron’s Avatar sequel is a sign that the Hollywood blockbuster is far from dead. The film that debuted in London on Dec, 6 has already racked up more than $1.5 billion in ticket sales as of Jan. 6, even though it wasn’t released in the US until 10 days after its British premiere. (Figures from Box Office Mojo)
Tom Cruises’ epic Top Gun sequel fell just a touch short with $1.49 billion in receipts after a premiere on May 27, and Jurassic World: Dominion earned just over $1 billion, having debuted on June 10.
Marvel films have also done well over the past year, although not as well as in the franchise’s pre-pandemic period when it was going through the first story arc for the Marvel Comics Universe, culminating in the film Avengers: End Game.
Sequels Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness earned $956 million, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever earned $823 million, and Thor: Love and Thunder came in as the eighth highest grossing film at $761 million, just shy of DC’s The Batman at $771 million. One issue for these films, however, is that both Disney and Warner Bros. now have their own streaming services, so analysts believe some box office revenue was likely left on the table, as some potential theater goers opted to watch these films at home.
The only film in the top eight that was not a big budget, live action blockbuster was Minions: The Rise of Gru, which earned $940 million as the year’s fifth top grossing film.
The issue for theaters and studios is that, despite the success of these films, 2022 was still the third worst year for the North American box office since 2020, and trails 2019 earnings by 33%, and that is not even taking inflation into account.
A better metric is the number of ‘bums in seats’. Approximately 814 million tickets were sold in the US and Canada in 2022, which is at minimum 400 million fewer theater goers than in any year between 1995 and 2019, according to the tracking service The Numbers.
A major question for studios, but also for licensing companies, is whether the strategy of sending major releases into streaming either simultaneously or much earlier than in the pre-pandemic world will result in lower overall revenues, and also less brand loyalty in the past when major releases created a huge amount of market buzz.
In the streaming world, films compete with popular series, and while the blockbusters may still win out, the fate of other films that might have earned decent revenues in theaters is more in doubt, as they compete in an ocean comprised of literally thousands of titles.
From a licensing perspective, it also means that the number of views from streaming services have to be taken into account just as much as the box office numbers in order to ascertain which films will create the most draw for licensed products.
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