2023 box-office lessons: Audiences sought comfort, skipped spectacle

LOS ANGELES – Hollywood’s movie factories run on conventional wisdom – entrenched notions, based on experience, about what types of films are likely to pop at the global box office.

In 2023, audiences turned many of those so-called rules on their heads.

Superheroes have long been seen as the most reliable way to fill seats. But characters such as Captain Marvel, the Flash, Ant-Man, Shazam and Blue Beetle failed to excite moviegoers.

Over the weekend, Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom, which cost more than US$200 million (S$265 million) to make, arrived to a disastrous US$28 million in ticket sales in North America. Overseas moviegoers chipped in another US$80 million.

In the meantime, the biggest movie of the year at the box office, Barbie, with US$1.44 billion in worldwide ticket sales, was directed by a woman, based on a very female toy and spray-painted pink – ingredients that most studios have long seen as limiting audience appeal.

An old movie-industry maxim holds that women will go to a “guy” movie, but not vice versa.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie collected US$1.36 billion, a second-place result that also stunned Hollywood; studios have a troubled history with game adaptations.

Oppenheimer, a three-hour period drama about a physicist, rounded out the top three, taking in US$952 million and contradicting the prevailing belief that, in the streaming era, films for grown-ups are not viable in theatres.

“Without question, change is afoot – audiences are in a different mood,” said Mr David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box-office numbers.

“The country and the world are not in the same place. We’ve had seven years of divisive politics, a severe pandemic, two serious wars, climate change and inflation.

“Moviegoers seem less interested in being overwhelmed with spectacle and saving the universe than being spoken to, entertained and inspired.”

Comscore, which compiles box-office data, projected on Dec 24 that North American ticket sales for the year would reach about US$9 billion, a 20 per cent increase from 2022.

The average price for an adult general admission ticket in the United States was US$12.14, up from US$11.75, according to EntTelligence, a research firm.

Worldwide ticket sales are expected to exceed US$33 billion, an increase of 27 per cent, partly because of a surge in Latin America.

Hollywood’s climb back from the pandemic is expected to stall in 2024.

With fewer movies scheduled for release – studio pipelines were disrupted by the recent strikes – ticket sales will decline 5 to 11 per cent in 2024, depending on the market, according to projections from Gower Street Analytics, a box-office research firm.

Reading box-office tea leaves is like pontificating about symbolism in works of fiction: Any halfway plausible theory works. But studio bosses need something, anything, to guide them as they make billion-dollar judgment calls for the seasons ahead.

Here are five takeaways from this year.

1. Moviegoers want comfort

People reach for nostalgia in times of stress, and movies that reminded audiences of the past – while also managing to feel fresh – have been succeeding.

Barbie, The Little Mermaid, Wonka and the retro-feeling Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem allowed people to revisit their childhoods.

Insidious: The Red Door hit pay dirt by bringing back the franchise’s original stars.

Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny could have tapped nostalgia to become a hit. Instead, a huffing and puffing Harrison Ford, 81, simply reminded Indy fans that they, too, are getting old.

Dial Of Destiny cost Disney US$295 million to make and took in a flaccid US$384 million.

2. Art films have a pulse

Sophisticated dramas with modest budgets and aimed at older audiences have been showing signs of life after two years in the box-office intensive care unit.

The streaming era has forever shifted the bulk of prestige film viewing to the home, analysts say. But theatres found a modicum of success in 2023 with offerings such as Past Lives, a wistful drama with some Korean dialogue, and Japanese film-maker Hayao Miyazaki’s animated The Boy And The Heron. The bespoke Asteroid City managed US$54 million.

Early box-office results have also been promising for Oscar-oriented films such as Poor Things, a surreal science-fiction romance, and American Fiction, a satire about a writer who puts together a fake memoir that turns on racial stereotypes.

3. Bigger is not better

For the past decade, Hollywood has kept audiences interested in sequels by making each instalment more bloated and often nonsensical than the last.

That strategy may need rethinking. It is just too expensive, analysts say, especially with Chinese moviegoers souring on American blockbusters.

Fast X, the 10th movie in the Fast And Furious series, cost an estimated US$340 million and took in US$705 million worldwide, including US$140 million in China.

By comparison, Furious 7 in 2015 cost US$190 million and collected US$1.5 billion, including US$391 million in China.

Increasingly, franchise sequels and spin-offs need to feel fresh to succeed.

Lionsgate, for instance, delved deeper into the High Table underground crime organisation in John Wick: Chapter 4 and introduced Hunger Games fans to a new storyline and cast in the prequel The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes. Both movies were hits.

Lionsgate even revived its Saw horror franchise by shifting the narrative back in time.

“Each of those movies did something different than the prior,” said Mr Adam Fogelson, vice-chair of the Lionsgate Motion Picture Group. “It wasn’t just ‘spend more, make it bigger, make it louder and cram in more action’.”

4. Some audience patterns remain intact

Horror continued to be a reliable performer, with Five Nights At Freddy’s and M3gan starting new franchises for Universal and its Blumhouse affiliate. Together, the two films cost US$32 million. They collected a combined US$469 million.

Also notable was The Nun II, which cost Warner Bros about US$38 million and took in US$268 million.

Superheroes may be down, but they are not out. Marvel’s rollicking, well-established Guardians Of The Galaxy series returned for a third chapter and generated US$846 million against a US$250 million budget.

Sony’s bold, anime-influenced Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse cost an estimated US$150 million and collected US$691 million.

5. Stars matter

The conventional wisdom in Hollywood has been that movie stars are essentially part of the past. A celebrity name above the title no longer carries that much weight with ticket buyers. The underlying “intellectual property” is what fills seats.

People pay to see Barbie, not Margot Robbie.

Except that Mattel and various studios tried for at least 20 years to turn the toy into a live-action movie star. It took Robbie in the role, and Ryan Gosling as Ken, to finally make it happen.

Other movies that benefited from star power in 2023 included Wonka, with Timothee Chalamet, and Creed III, anchored by Michael B. Jordan.

Stars do not have heft? Try telling that to the producers of Gran Turismo, Haunted Mansion, Dumb Money and Strays, all of which disappointed at the box office and arrived when their casts were barred from promoting their work because of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists strike. NYTIMES