The biggest Thanksgiving weekend in box office history has led to the biggest post-Thanksgiving weekend ever, setting up the U.S. box office for a big finish that could lift 2024 totals to $8.5 billion and get it into spitting distance of 2023.
It’s a stunning rebound, considering how miserable grosses were for much of the first half of the year. What was expected to be a year in which the box office recovery would take several steps back has instead turned into a year in which that recovery only hit a minor speed bump.
“Our projection coming into this year was $8 billion — that would have been about a 10% decline from last year,” Daniel Loria, SVP of content strategy and editorial director at Boxoffice, told TheWrap. “To start the year expecting to be so far behind and then to end up being just a few percentage points behind is remarkable considering what was being written about the box office when ‘Furiosa’ came out.”
By the end of May, annual grosses reached only $2.59 billion, down a steep 24% from the pace set in 2023. After this weekend, that deficit has shrunk to just 5.9%. And the latest projections from Gower Street Analytics have the final total for the year reaching as high as $8.6 billion, which would be roughly 3% down from last year’s $8.9 billion total, and up from the flat $8 billion Gower had projected prior to the start of the year.
Before the summer, the box office had little to hang its hat on, as production delays caused by last year’s strikes left theaters with far fewer films to screen. The only exceptions were a strong March lifted by Warner Bros./Legendary’s “Dune: Part Two” and the animation record-opening weekend of “Inside Out 2” in June.
But movie theater executives have been publicly asserting since the pandemic that the fundamentals of their business are sound, and that they only needed studios to give them more films in order to climb out of their multiyear slump. Once the frequency of new releases shot up in the second half of 2024, those assertions were validated.
The lion’s share of the credit goes to the studios that have been at the top of the charts for the past two weekends: Disney and Universal. Disney leads the way this year with $1.82 billion in domestic grosses and a 24% market share, with Universal close behind with $1.62 billion and a 20% share.
Of course, they got there in different ways. Disney had a pair of summer megahits in “Inside Out 2,” with an animation record $652 million domestic, and “Deadpool & Wolverine,” with an R-rated record $636 million. “Moana 2” won’t quite reach those heights after its $52 million second weekend. But it has already grossed $300 million after two weekends and should contribute at least another $175 million more by the end of December.
Universal, meanwhile, hasn’t had any films reach the $500 million-plus range, but the studio has spread its grosses around to more films with five $100 million-plus grossers. Illumination’s “Despicable Me 4” currently leads the way with $361 million, though “Wicked” will soon pass that with $320 million and counting. “Twisters” ($267 million), “The Wild Robot” ($142 million) and “Kung Fu Panda 4” ($193.5 million) are also major moneymakers.
Warner Bros. suffered a high-profile letdown with “Joker: Folie a Deux,” but still got theaters through the strike drought with the help of Legendary Pictures and their pair of hits, “Dune: Part Two” and “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.” Warner also had a fall hit with “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” that allowed the theaters to avoid an end-of-summer slowdown.
In total, there have been 20 films released this year with $100 million or more in domestic grosses, with Sony’s “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” and “It Ends With Us” as well as Paramount’s “A Quiet Place: Day One” among the additional standouts. Once Disney’s “Mufasa” and Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” arrive on Dec. 20, that number should grow to 22 films, just two shy of the $100 million+ film total accumulated in 2023.
And there’s still a chance that Amazon MGM’s action comedy “Red One,” which is falling short of its $250 million budget but has still grossed $85 million in North America, could bring that count to 23.
“It’s worth remembering that ‘Red One’ was initially going to be a streaming film. ‘Moana 2’ started as a Disney+ series,” Loria said. “Instead, they’ve brought money to theaters that they wouldn’t get otherwise. It shows how there’s always surprises that we don’t see looking at the release slate at the start of the year, and that makes it hard to predict how much improvement we could see in 2025.”
But barring another industry-derailing event, there will be improvement. Just as importantly, there will also be clean data that theaters and studios can use to determine what sort of films are still theatrically viable, after the pandemic permanently changed audience viewing interests, which studios tried to adjust to in different ways as they heavily invested in streaming.
In this time of uncertainty, every legacy studio in Hollywood has taken a different approach. But the one thing they all seem to agree on is that a return to a theatrical-first model is needed. Still, it remains difficult to determine whether the theatrical market has audience support for the wide range of non-IP-based films that helped push the box office to $11 billion-plus per year prior to the pandemic.
Hollywood is still at least a year away, and likely longer, from having enough data from the moviegoing public to get answers to those questions.
