It was Memorial Day weekend in the US, a three-day weekend that often signals the start of summer. For film fans, though, Memorial Day is usually a big movie weekend, dominated by a blockbuster release.
Well, not this year. 2024 is the worst Memorial Day box office in almost 30 years, excepting 2020 when theaters were closed due to COVID. The blockbuster release is Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, with a family offering on deck, too, in the form of The Garfield Movie. Furiosa was estimated to open with $40-45 million over the expanded three-day frame, but fell short, earning only $32 million—a dismal result against a $168 million budget. Garfield did comparable business with $31.1 million. For comparison, last year The Little Mermaid opened with $118 million, and in 2022, Top Gun: Maverick reset the record with $160 million.
This comes on top of an already grim 2024 domestic box office, which is predicted to fall short of last year’s $9 billion (the best since the pandemic). Naturally, people are gnashing their teeth and rending their clothes, trying to figure out who or what is to blame. Sony exec Tom Rothman says ticket prices need to come down, making movie-going more affordable. Over the weekend a lively debate played out on social media, in which a lot of people pointed out that the average ticket price is currently $12 (and change), and accounting for inflation, ticket prices haven’t actually changed much since the 1970s, just plus or minus a dollar either way.
But that ignores the fact that wages haven’t increased, either, which means that $12 is taking a bigger bite out of people’s pockets than it was 40 years ago. Also, $12 is the average, not even the mean ticket price. $12 is a pipe dream for a prime-time ticket in a major market. In Chicago, $12 is a matinee price at some theaters. A primetime ticket for a standard screening (no IMAX or other premium large format) runs $16-18 depending on the theater. IMAX and other PLF screenings are north of $25. I checked a suburban IMAX screening of Furiosa and for a primetime ticket, it was $15.50. The regular screening was $12.
And still! That’s not counting ancillary costs like concessions, parking, babysitters. Some people can’t go to the movies unless they hire a babysitter. For others, concessions are part of the experience. Sure, you can go to a matinee, take public transport, not buy any snacks, and MAYBE pay $12, but that presupposes you don’t have kids. If you’re a family, even matinee prices can rack up quickly, let alone going during primetime hours. So yeah, Tom Rothman has a point, there needs to be more flexibility on ticket prices, BUT ALSO on other prices, like concessions. And I KNOW theaters make most of their money on concessions, but if you can fill your theaters, you make it up on volume, not unit price. Concessions are so expensive in part because theaters AREN’T selling out regularly.
But there are still other factors in play. For Furiosa, specifically, it’s a two-fold hit. One is that prequels typically don’t play as well as sequels. There’s less of a sense of urgency, and as is the case here, beloved actors aren’t reprising beloved roles, so the audience draw is further lessened. Second, Mad Max: Fury Road wasn’t a smash hit. We are NOT talking quality—the movie is a classic as a piece of cinema. But as a piece of business? Fury Road took in $380 million, barely breaking even against a $150 million budget. Not a home run!
So the expectation that Furiosa would be a Memorial Day hit rested on the cultural cache of Fury Road, but that movie is barely above “cult classic” level. It’s too well known for cult status, but nor is it a film with a robust fandom. I think there’s a disconnect between how cinephiles think of Fury Road and how casual movie-goers do—they don’t—which led to a disconnect in expectations.
And in the larger context of 2024’s faltering box office, there are still more factors at play. The “return to normal” feeling that fueled 2022 has faded, and we are back in a pre-pandemic position in which most people simply do not go to the movies that often. By the end of the 2010s, the average movie-goer only saw 2-3 films in theaters each year. That has not magically changed in the years since.
If anything, the behavior is probably worse, because the pandemic taught people to live without movie theaters, and theaters themselves have done nothing to reverse that. Going to the theater is still a largely sh-tty experience, and that HAS to be addressed. Hollywood could release banger after banger—arguably they have done that this year!—but if people KNOW the experience involves poor image quality, bad sound, and dirty theaters, they simply won’t pay for that subpar experience.
And then there’s the Marvel of it all. Or rather, the “superhero fatigue” of it all. I’m still not on board with that term when Deadpool & Wolverine is poised to be one of the year’s biggest films—we’ll see once that movie actually comes out—but in the 2010s, superhero movies provided a reliable bolster to the box office. There were multiple entries every year, and more were hits than flops. I am not saying this was a GOOD thing; culturally, it definitely wasn’t. But again, we’re talking business. And superheroes were good business.
But now those movies are floundering, audience loyalty might be wavering. But there’s nothing to replace it, in terms of mega-blockbuster box office. Tom Cruise is not going to crank out a Top Gun movie every two years. There is currently no Barbie sequel in the works. There will be a third Dune movie, but who knows how far away it is—and that franchise isn’t a billion-dollar earner, either. It’s not that billion-dollar movies can’t happen, they can, as we saw with Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie last year, and Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Jurassic World Dominion in 2022.
Going back to 2019, though, NINE of the top 10 movies for the year earned over $1 billion, and four of them were superhero movies (counting Joker, which is superhero-adjacent). In 2018, five of the top 10 earned $1 billion or more, four of which were superheroes, with six of the top 10 films overall featuring superheroes. There was an appetite for something specific in the 2010s, and maybe it’s fading in the 2020s, but so far, audiences haven’t clearly signaled what they’re hungry for instead.
“Originality” you might say, but the box office isn’t bearing that out. So far, the top films of the year are all franchise entries. Original films are doing okay, at best, especially when paired with lower budgets, like Civil War and The Beekeeper. Worse and scarier for the long-term landscape, “audience” films like The Fall Guy and Furiosa aren’t breaking through, suggesting audiences don’t want that, either. We don’t want superheroes, we don’t want action movies, we don’t want comedies—what do you want?!
I truly do not have an answer, except that this will get worse before it gets better. If audience tastes are changing, it’s going to take a minute to clearly identify what people want and start making those movies. Also, the experience of going to the movies has to get both better AND cheaper, two things that don’t usually go hand-in-hand. For a couple of years, the pandemic made people think movies only had one enemy, but now we’re being reminded of problems that existed long before coronavirus, and there still aren’t any good answers.
Attached: Anya Taylor-Joy at the F1 Monaco Grand Prix on May 26, 2024.
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