Moviegoers dealt originality a setback in 2024, sequels took nine of US box office’s top 10 slots

LOS ANGELES – In 2023, Hollywood’s creative community was celebrating the apparent decline of corporate, paint-by-numbers sequels and remakes. Blockbuster ticket sales for movies such as Oppenheimer, Sound Of Freedom and Barbie had shown – or so it seemed – that audiences were finally hungry for fresh stories.

You could almost hear the relief emanating from franchise-fatigued writers, directors and producers. Everything Everywhere All At Once, the wildly inventive Oscar-winning art film that broke out in cinemas in 2022, had not been a fluke.

However, mass moviegoing swung squarely back to the predictable in 2024, with sequels filling nine of the top 10 slots at the North American box office. They were Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4, Deadpool & Wolverine, Moana 2, Dune: Part Two, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Kung Fu Panda 4, Twisters and Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire.

Wicked, a song-by-song adaptation of the first half of the long-running Broadway musical, was the only top 10 outlier, counting as original, if only by a witchy whisker.

Those hit franchise movies and others – the fourth chapter in the Bad Boys series, the 10th Planet Of The Apes instalment, Gladiator II – drove ticket sales in the United States and Canada to an estimated US$8.75 billion (S$11.9 billion) for the year, according to Comscore, which compiles box-office data.

Theatre owners are thrilled: Despite a shortage of major movies in the first half of the year – a result of two union strikes – 2024 ticket sales are expected to fall only 3 per cent from 2023.

Higher ticket prices propped up the 2024 total, analysts said.

Over the weekend, Sonic The Hedgehog 3 was the No. 1 box-office draw. It collected about US$38 million for a two-week domestic total of US$138 million.

The big-budget prequel Mufasa: The Lion King was a close second with US$37 million, lifting its domestic total to US$113 million.

In 2025, studios will parade out Superman, Karate Kid: Legends, Jurassic World Rebirth, a live-action Lilo & Stitch, Freakier Friday, The Naked Gun, Avatar: Fire And Ash, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and at least 33 other major franchise sequels, reboots and remakes.

Hollywood has not given up on originality though.

Sony Pictures released a handful of originals in 2024 and found a hit in the drama It Ends With Us, which took in US$149 million in North America. DreamWorks Animation was encouraged by the US$143 million in domestic ticket sales that The Wild Robot achieved in autumn.

In the months ahead, Warner Bros will notably release original films from directors Ryan Coogler (Sinners, being marketed as “a new vision of fear”), Paul Thomas Anderson (a still-untitled crime thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio), Bong Joon-ho (Mickey 17) and Joseph Kosinski (F1, a big-budget racing movie).

The problem is that Americans tend to say one thing and do another. They complain that Hollywood does not make enough original films, only to stay home or go elsewhere when studios call their bluff. Over the past year, the moviegoing masses rejected originals such as Fly Me To The Moon, Argylle and Megalopolis.

To be fair, all of those films received soft-to-poor reviews, diminishing their appeal. For the most part, however, originals with terrific reviews did not break out, either.

Challengers, Conclave, Anora and The Substance” – each championed by critics, each available in at least 1,000 theatres – took in a combined US$147 million in North America. Civil War and Longlegs were indie hits, but neither grossed anywhere near the US$100 million mark.

To compare, Inside Out 2 collected US$653 million.

In May, Universal released The Fall Guy, a well-reviewed action comedy starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt that cost at least US$200 million to make and market. It was the first time in 19 years that Hollywood’s all-important summer season did not start with a superhero or a sequel.

The Fall Guy shared a name and some basic DNA with a television drama that ran on ABC from 1981 to 1986. But the movie’s story was entirely new.

Ker-thud: Opening-weekend ticket sales added up to US$28 million in North America, the worst start to the season since 1995. NYTIMES