Michael Cieply: The film box office is getting more and more heavy and requires very careful post-production

As my colleague Anthony D’Alessandro noted, local movie box offices, starved by overlapping strikes, are likely to be cut by a billion dollars by 2024.

So here’s a question worth pondering: Would the movie industry be healthier if most of these cuts happened at the top?

A lawsuit must be filed.

One of the most notable distortions accompanying the simultaneous introduction of Covid restrictions and a streaming revolution in recent years has been the acceleration of the trend towards extreme top-loading at the box office.

In 2023, these were the three highest-grossing films Barbie, The Super Mario Bros. MovieAnd Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, including approximately $1.6 billion in ticket sales. Assuming revenue of about $9 billion this year, Anthony’s initial estimates were that just three films accounted for 17.8 percent of the total in domestic theaters.

To put this in perspective, this figure is slightly lower than the share taken by the top three in the previous three years with the impact of Covid-19, when the three top-grossing films accounted for an average share of 22.5 percent, based on numbers collected by BoxOfficeMojo.com.

But this is still significantly higher than the box office share of the top three in earlier, healthier years.

In the five “normal” years between 2015 and 2019, a period with monster hits like Black Panther And jurassic worldThe top three only averaged about 14.5 percent of the box office, and in none of those years did they reach 2023’s share, let alone those of the super-big Covid years.

And again, based on BoxOfficeMojo.com ticket sales totals over the past five years, from 2010 to 2014, we saw the top three — even with an increase of Avatar And The Avengers– averaged just 10.9 percent of the total box office. This means that last year’s top three together had a 63 percent higher share than the top three twelve years ago.

For whatever reason – the disappearance of lower and mid-tier films, the disappearance of older viewers, the extreme concentration of interest through social media – audiences have been driven to a small number of films at the top while the lower tiers languish. .

Do a slightly more arcane calculation and you’ll find that last year — after subtracting the top three’s grosses — about 580 films shared the remaining $7.4 billion, an average of $12.7 million per film. While this number doesn’t mean much on an individual basis, given the extremely wide range of budgets and ticket sales in the industry, it’s telling to see that a larger group of around 650 films in 2010, for example, averaged . of approximately $14.5 million. This is about 14 percent more than last year’s average, even without taking inflation into account.

This causes the cash register to distort: ​​it is much heavier at the top and much lighter at the bottom.

This makes it harder for almost everyone to do business despite streaming income. And if the pruning is right now, it might be best if the overgrown parts are trimmed again.