Disney (and others) at the Box Office - Current State of Affairs

[DKampy]

I saw that movie in a theater once, the day it came out. That was enough.

Agreed… as a fan of the original trilogy… that was one of my biggest disappointing theater experiences

 

[Animaniac93-98]

Fall Guy allegedly cost $220-$230 million in combined marketing and production costs after tax deductions

It's projected to open with $28 million domestically.

 

[Casper Gutman]

Fall Guy allegedly cost $220-$230 million in combined marketing and production costs after tax deductions

It's projected to open with $28 million domestically.

More and more the box office seems to have little to do with film quality. Fall Guy is a very well reviewed film with great promos and two big leads and it’s underperforming. Godzilla x Kong was a badly reviewed sequel that significantly outperformed the much better reviewed earlier films in the franchise. We can all list more really good films that underperformed over the last couple years (Dungeons and Dragons is a sore spot for me) then we can list films that earned what they deserved.

I don’t actually think audiences have gotten any more irrational, but I do think that the larger discrepancy between the box office of the far fewer real hits and the rest of Hollywood’s output is highlighting that irrationality.

I’d still bet on Deadpool & Wolverine, Despicable Me 4, and PROBABLY Inside Out 2 as sure hits. Other than that, who knows? Even low-budget horror is struggling mightily in 2024. Anyone who says they know for sure what’s happening at the box office is probably pushing an agenda.

 

[Animaniac93-98]

Fall Guy is a very well reviewed film with great promos and two big leads and it’s underperforming.

I want to see it at some point, but I'm not in a rush. That seems to be the sentiment for a lot of movies these days.

Deadpool and Wolverine looks to be the only movie with "I have to see this now" hype.

 

[Tony the Tigger]

More and more the box office seems to have little to do with film quality. Fall Guy is a very well reviewed film with great promos and two big leads and it’s underperforming. Godzilla x Kong was a badly reviewed sequel that significantly outperformed the much better reviewed earlier films in the franchise. We can all list more really good films that underperformed over the last couple years (Dungeons and Dragons is a sore spot for me) then we can list films that earned what they deserved.

I don’t actually think audiences have gotten any more irrational, but I do think that the larger discrepancy between the box office of the far fewer real hits and the rest of Hollywood’s output is highlighting that irrationality.

I’d still bet on Deadpool & Wolverine, Despicable Me 4, and PROBABLY Inside Out 2 as sure hits. Other than that, who knows? Even low-budget horror is struggling mightily in 2024. Anyone who says they know for sure what’s happening at the box office is probably pushing an agenda.

This is not new. That’s why blockbusters historically were not reliable Oscar contenders.

I think it’s a lot simpler: going to the movies used to be an afterthought as far as expenses go. Now it’s a big commitment of money. More theaters sell food, so your kids or your date expect food, which is a relatively new thing. It’s $50 for a couple just getting large popcorn & drinks, let alone a meal. So people are more picky about which movies to see in the theater.

 

[Wendy Pleakley]

This is not new. That’s why blockbusters historically were not reliable Oscar contenders.

I think it’s a lot simpler: going to the movies used to be an afterthought as far as expenses go. Now it’s a big commitment of money. More theaters sell food, so your kids or your date expect food, which is a relatively new thing. It’s $50 for a couple just getting large popcorn & drinks, let alone a meal. So people are more picky about which movies to see in the theater.

I think it's a lot of things.

Poor audience behaviour is a big one. You invest time and money and it's a gamble whether or not you'll be seeing cell phones everywhere.

My local theaters have very few "basic" showings. So many are VIP 19+, D-Box, 3D, laser ultra, and anything else that adds to the ticket price.

Personally, the food thing isn't an issue. Eating a burger in a movie theater is just annoying. I don't bother.

As an adult with disposable income I'm okay paying for the popcorn. My closest theater does free refills on large size so I at least make a point of bringing a full bag home.

 

[brideck]

I think it’s a lot simpler: going to the movies used to be an afterthought as far as expenses go. Now it’s a big commitment of money. More theaters sell food, so your kids or your date expect food, which is a relatively new thing. It’s $50 for a couple just getting large popcorn & drinks, let alone a meal. So people are more picky about which movies to see in the theater.

From a sheer ticket price perspective (for the average ticket), I don't think they've really gone up much (when fixed for inflation and/or compared to median household income, etc.) over the last 30 years. The plusses for format or food (which people somehow feel obligated to shell out for these days) definitely do make a difference, though.

I think the problem really just is a value proposition at this point. People pay less for a whole month of their favorite streaming service (barring a few exceptions) than they do for a single ticket to a movie. That's because streaming services cost way less than they should thanks to their commodity scale pricing more than anything else. But once you teach people that a thing doesn't have much of any value anymore, it becomes really hard to convince them to even pay the same amount they were before.

I go to a ton of movies these days, but that's only because I do AMC A-List, which is comparable enough to streaming service rates. Prior to its existence, I probably went to 30 or so movies a year, which was already an outlier on the high side.

 

[Ghost93]

I think it's simply that streaming has devalued the theatrical experience for many. Once people suddenly got THOUSANDS of movies available "for free" with a subscription, it made both going to the theater and renting a film feel too much. The short 45 day theatrical windows helped condition audiences to "wait for streaming."

Of course, studios are FINALLY realizing that streaming isn't nearly as profitable and you can't really justify spending $200 million on a movie that's meant to go straight to streaming. Initially, it was worth streamers spending a fortune on expensive shows as they were trying to lure more people to the service. But now most streaming services have kind of maxed out on the amount of people they can get to join, so all they are trying to do now is retain subscribers.

I think audiences will suffer from the streaming pivot in the long run. They want lavish, $200+ million movies but they don't want to pay for them. Eventually the movies they claim to want to see will stop being made.

 

[TalkingHead]

Deadline’s box office updates read like ministry of propaganda reports. Couple days ago they said “some people” now think the summer season begins at the end of July with Deadpool 3’s opening. You can’t make this stuff up. Pretty obvious there’s concern the industry won’t rebound after this year. Plenty of reasons why but bottom line is moviegoing is becoming more of a niche activity, which means less money.

 

[Ghost93]

Deadline’s box office updates read like ministry of propaganda reports. Couple days ago they said “some people” now think the summer season begins at the end of July with Deadpool 3’s opening. You can’t make this stuff up. Pretty obvious there’s concern the industry won’t rebound after this year. Plenty of reasons why but bottom line is moviegoing is becoming more of a niche activity, which means less money.

I think you may have misinterpreted the tone of the Deadline article. The way I read the report, that wasn't meant to be a positive "July is the new May" spin, but rather a bleak "theaters won't see old-fashioned summer blockbuster numbers until July" forecast of despair.

 

[Tony the Tigger]

Once people suddenly got THOUSANDS of movies available "for free" with a subscription

How is that different from HBO, SHO, etc? Other than the on demand aspect, which they all now have.

It’s all the same, just repackaged with new delivery systems.

 

[TalkingHead]

I think you may have misinterpreted the tone of the Deadline article. The way I read the report, that wasn't meant to be a positive "July is the new May" spin, but rather a bleak "theaters won't see old-fashioned summer blockbuster numbers until July" forecast of despair.

Given the Deadline’s commitment to spin, I took it as lowering expectations for the next month, the Deadpool cavalry is on the way to save the day kinda thing. Guess they’ll decide what they meant after Apes opens.

 

[brideck]

How is that different from HBO, SHO, etc? Other than the on demand aspect, which they all now have.

It’s all the same, just repackaged with new delivery systems.

I think the difference is really in scale. Numbers are hard to find, but it looks like HBO only had around 35m subscribers at its peak in the 2010s, which is less than half of what Netflix boasts today. It's entirely possible that HBO subscribers back then were also less likely to go to the movie theater, but it represented a smaller proportion of the potential movie-going audience.

There's also the new compressed time frame for releases. What's the soonest a movie would get to HBO? 6 months? I never was a subscriber, so I have no idea.

 

[Wendy Pleakley]

I think it's simply that streaming has devalued the theatrical experience for many. Once people suddenly got THOUSANDS of movies available "for free" with a subscription, it made both going to the theater and renting a film feel too much. The short 45 day theatrical windows helped condition audiences to "wait for streaming."

Of course, studios are FINALLY realizing that streaming isn't nearly as profitable and you can't really justify spending $200 million on a movie that's meant to go straight to streaming. Initially, it was worth streamers spending a fortune on expensive shows as they were trying to lure more people to the service. But now most streaming services have kind of maxed out on the amount of people they can get to join, so all they are trying to do now is retain subscribers.

I think audiences will suffer from the streaming pivot in the long run. They want lavish, $200+ million movies but they don't want to pay for them. Eventually the movies they claim to want to see will stop being made.

Home entertainment systems have contributed as well.

60+ inch televisions are affordable.

It's not as good as the theater, but it's not terrible.

The disparity between a theater and watching a movie on a 32 inch CRT television is long gone.

 

[BrianLo]

Fall Guy allegedly cost $220-$230 million in combined marketing and production costs after tax deductions

It's projected to open with $28 million domestically.

Oh wow, I had this one increasingly pegged at doing well. Theatrical really is drying up horrendously.

I think we're going to see increasing amalgamation and reduction in how much is theatrically pushed. Maybe a world where the only three blockbuster producers left are Disney, Universal and WB+++.

 

[Tony the Tigger]

I think the difference is really in scale. Numbers are hard to find, but it looks like HBO only had around 35m subscribers at its peak in the 2010s, which is less than half of what Netflix boasts today. It's entirely possible that HBO subscribers back then were also less likely to go to the movie theater, but it represented a smaller proportion of the potential movie-going audience.

There's also the new compressed time frame for releases. What's the soonest a movie would get to HBO? 6 months? I never was a subscriber, so I have no idea.

There wasn’t just HBO. There were several different options, just like now there is Netflix, Disney, Paramount, Apple, etc. each with their own incomplete slate of programming.

Same stuff, different packages.

 

[Disney Irish]

There wasn’t just HBO. There were several different options, just like now there is Netflix, Disney, Paramount, Apple, etc. each with their own incomplete slate of programming.

Same stuff, different packages.

The major difference in my opinion, which you sort of glossed over, is back then with cable it was more "appointment television", you had to wait until what you wanted to watch came on HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, TMC, etc. Now everything is available at your fingertips with almost no wait.

In my opinion its also no coincidence that ticket sales started to go down when DVR and OnDemand became more widely available in the early-mid 2000s.

 

[Disney Irish]

Oh wow, I had this one increasingly pegged at doing well. Theatrical really is drying up horrendously.

I think we're going to see increasing amalgamation and reduction in how much is theatrically pushed. Maybe a world where the only three blockbuster producers left are Disney, Universal and WB+++.

This is why some of us have been banging that drum for awhile now that theatrical is not going to come back in any major way anytime soon if ever.

 

[TP2000]

Elemental has actually sold many more tickets than Kung Fu Panda 4: globally $496,444,308 versus $454,964,521. Perhaps Kung Fu Panda 4 will ultimately outsell Elemental, but as things stand, it’s incorrect to say the former is more popular than the latter.

This weekend's box office is of note because Kung Fu Panda surpassed Elemental at the overseas box office as of yesterday. More countries will report in their box office by Tuesday, but the Sunday first-pass data shows this...

But what really fascinates me is that Kung Fu Panda did that with a production budget less than half of what Disney spends! Where does all that Disney/Pixar money go? And why does Burbank/Emeryville keep doing it, over and over again?

Movie Comparison: Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024) vs. Elemental (2023) vs. Wish (2023)

Domestic box office comparison between Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024) and Elemental (2023) and Wish (2023)

www.the-numbers.com

 

[TP2000]

Here's the first pass at weekend box office, gang! It will be updated more accurately tomorrow afternoon.

The First Omen dropped 600 theaters this weekend. Now in 400 theaters, and seems to be headed to a $20 Million domestic box office by the time it leaves theaters in mid May.

The Numbers - Weekend Box Office Chart for August 2, 2024

Weekend Domestic Box Office Chart for the weekend of August 2, 2024

www.the-numbers.com