Hollywood Faces Dramatic Twist in 2024 Box Office

It is no secret that 2023 was not a great year for movies and especially the box office, but experts are predicting 2024 will be even worse for Hollywood.

Despite making somewhat of a comeback following the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw moviemaking and butts in cinema seats grind to a halt for almost two years, analysts are predicting a 10 to 15 percent downturn in revenue this year.

There may even be, shock horror, no films that crack the $1 billion mark in 2024 at the global box office. Only two films achieved that honor in 2023, the unexpected blockbusters of Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. The third-highest gross film, which cracked $952 million and surprised many, was Oppenheimer, a Christopher Nolan epic about the man who helped build the A-bomb dropped on Japan in World War II.

In 2023, the domestic box office brought in a little under $9 billion, which is about a 21 percent jump from the year before but comes nowhere near the pre-pandemic times when clearing $10 billion and even getting close to $12 billion was standard. All figures are based on numbers from Box Office Mojo.

"Domestically, I'm expecting a little over $8 billion in 2024. This would mark an obvious decline from 2023's $9 billion, but it's largely attributable to a lighter release slate that lacks obvious event-level films," Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at Boxoffice Pro and founder of The Box Office Theory, told Newsweek.

"Looking further ahead, the industry's most significant rebound yet now looks to hopefully occur in 2025."

Among the experts forecasting a downturn this year is Daniel Lora, senior VP of content strategy for Boxoffice Media, and he explained to Newsweek why the industry is preparing to navigate the "choppy waters" ahead.

"It has to do with output," he began, adding that the months-long writers' and actors' strikes affected the 2024 release schedule, ergo fewer films hitting cinemas and less money coming in via ticket sales.

"This is going to be the year Hollywood recalibrates as both the impact of the pandemic and strikes starts to settle down."

Last year was also a bit of a shocker for the box office because the usual Hollywood behemoths such as Marvel and its parent company Disney underperformed, at least by their standards. In fact, Marvel recorded its worst opening weekends on record with The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and for the first time since 2015, Disney was not the highest-earning studio in the world. It also missed out on having a movie in the top three, which was something that had not happened to the Mouse House since 2011.

The downturn in what was once a guaranteed blockbuster could be a result of the fact that audiences are fatigued with the familiar content studios are producing year in and year out. It's all well and good to argue that studios need to get more creative, but the movies coming out this year would have been planned years in advance and the Hollywood strikes made it impossible for the studios to respond flexibly to audiences' changing tastes.

"They won't be able to do anything about it, so they're just going to subject us to the same output," Alexander Ross, a visiting researcher and fellow of Branford College at Yale, told Newsweek.

"There's been such a glut of everything ... and they're just providing us with more action and banging more superheroes into one movie, which is frustrating and just kind of annoying."

Despite some movie fans' boredom with the creations churned out by the major Hollywood studios, that doesn't mean 2024 will not see some major blockbusters; they might just not come from the expected source, such as Marvel or Disney. It's because of this unexpected factor that many of the analysts Newsweek spoke to were reluctant to say with certainty that 2024 will have no $1 billion movies.

"At this point last year, I don't think any of us predicted Oppenheimer ... to have the output of success it did," Lora said. "What I'm saying is, when it comes to blockbusters, we see that audiences surprise us in ways that we'd never be able to be prepared for."

But Lora can understand why some people are predicting zero billion-dollar blockbusters in 2024, because "the predictable blockbusters of yesteryear," such as a Marvel, Pixar or DC film, aren't hitting like they used to.

"But that doesn't mean other films weren't stepping up to bat ... there is a demand for a blockbuster, but the blockbuster tentpole of 2019 will not have the same impact as it did," he says. "We saw that with Barbie."

So, what are some of the movies that might crack the billion-dollar ceiling this year?

"The standout candidates are the Deadpool and Joker sequels, though there's always a chance something surprises or over-performs," Robbins explained, while Lora also suggested Despicable Me 4 could have a shot.

Deadpool 3 sees Ryan Reynolds return as the sardonic superhero, but what is making the movie a hotly anticipated release is Hugh Jackman making his return as Wolverine and joining his "frenemy" Deadpool on the silver screen.

Joker's follow-up includes the much-talked-about addition of pop star Lady Gaga and was the highest-grossing R-rated movie to make more than $1 billion. In fact, while some sceptics have argued Deadpool 3's R-rating may affect its ability to earn $1 billion, Lora explained that the rating is not really a cause for concern anymore.

"The concept of R-rating has changed a lot over the past six years ... and while an R-rating making $1 billion is still a hurdle to clear, different countries have different classification systems," Lora said.

When predicting which movies will make $1 billion, understanding the international market is critical. But most importantly, whether a movie can break a billion at the box office depends almost entirely on how it fares in China.

"A lot of those movies that have hit the billion-dollar mark in the last 10 years wouldn't have done so without the Chinese market performance," Lora said.

Lora's take is reflected in the problems Disney has faced in China, where in 2023, it suffered a number of flops, including the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid and the country's banning of Marvel titles for three years. But it's not only Disney having woes in China. There's a lot of Hollywood content struggling in China because audiences there are embracing locally made content. A rising sense of patriotism and the Chinese feeling berated during the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe have seen them turn away from Western media content.

"U.S.-China relations are at a low ebb, patriotic passions [are] running high, debates about the appeal or utility of Western culture for China are as salient as ever," Jonathan Sullivan, director of China Programs at the University of Nottingham in England, told Newsweek in June.

Despite fewer films hitting the screens this year, there are ways Hollywood studios can still ensure they will continue to make big money.

One way is to infuse a fresh supply of movies into cinemas consistently across 2024 or making an event out of a release, such as people in their thousands dressing in pink to attend Barbie screenings. This phenomenon was even credited regarding the film's success by Barbie actress Margot Robbie, in her winning speech after the film won the award for box office and cinematic achievement at Sunday's Golden Globes.

"The 'I must go and see watercooler movie' such as Jaws or Star Wars barely exists anymore," Ross who also authored The Evolution of Hollywood's Calculated Blockbuster Films: Blockbusted, explained.

He suggests cinemas and studios need to work together to also look at "the whole experience of the entertainment they provide," such as special event screenings that create a sense of community, such as Taylor Swift's fans coming out in their millions to watch the concert movie of her record-breaking Eras Tour.

Lora also insists that an individual movie's success is not solely based on its own laurels but is very much dependent on the overall tidings of the industry and release schedule.

"Moviegoers' options on a week-to-week level really help to raise and keep the market dynamic. A stale market where a big movie only comes out every three weeks makes it really difficult to keep [the box office] performing at a high level," Lora said.

Despite the predicted box office downturn in 2024, it's not all doom and gloom in Hollywood and this is certainly "not the new normal," Lora added.

The surprise blockbusters of last year, such as Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, as Lora pointed out, were not "scrappy upstarts" that came out of nowhere. They were driven by major studios with decent budgets and strong marketing campaigns, which helped turn them into big hits.

Just because movies might not make as much in 2024 as in previous years, it's not such a big deal, according to Lora, who said, "$1 billion is not a bill of health in the industry," and that, in fact, Hollywood is doing just fine.