Now, in the middle of 2022, reports of the death of theaters seem greatly exaggerated. Audiences have returned to the Cineplex for hits like “Top Gun: Maverick,” The Batman” and “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” and there’s hope in Hollywood that these movies are the rule, not the exception, for the rest of the year. .Cinemas should be struck by another lightning bolt this weekend when “Thor: Love and Thunder,” the latest Marvel movie, hits cineplexes. Starring Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman as the God(s) of Thunder, it’s expected to have a $150 million North American debut.Thursday night, the film earned a strong $29 million.
“Theaters have seen a renaissance of sorts this year, with traditional blockbusters — sequels, superheroes and slashers — leading the box office brigade,” Jeff Bock, senior analyst at entertainment research firm Exhibitor Relations, told CNN Business.
Yet despite the optimism, the industry has yet to fully bounce back. Streaming remains a powerful alternative, inflation is squeezing disposable income, and the second half of 2022 has a dearth of potential blockbusters.
Where are we
The domestic box office has earned nearly $4 billion so far this year, according to Comscore ( SCOR ) . That total is up 243% from the same period last year, but down 33% from pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
This year’s box office numbers present something of a Choose Your Own Adventure. A 33% decrease can be seen as disappointing, but it can also be seen as a success considering the last two years.
A great example of this dichotomy is “Top Gun: Maverick”.
The biggest film of the year so far, in which Tom Cruise reprises one of his most iconic roles from the 1986 classic, has brought in $575 million in North America — or roughly 15% of this year’s total domestic box office.
This is excellent news for the industry, but should one film account for so much of the domestic box office? Bock called “Maverick” “a box office anomaly that happens maybe once every decade.”
There were other hits, of course, big money from franchises like Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Universal’s Jurassic World: Dominion, as well as unexpected newcomers like A24’s trippy Everything Everywhere All At Once. which made nearly $70 million domestically despite being a smaller, lower-budget film.
So even though the 2022 box office has recovered, it still has a long way to go before it reaches its normal state. But can it get there?
Where are we going
“As we move forward, the box office outlook is starting to focus minimally on pandemic concerns and mostly again on strength of schedule,” Sean Robbins, principal analyst at Boxoffice.com, told CNN Business.
He noted that summer films such as Thor, Jordan Peele’s upcoming horror film No and the Brad Pitt-led Bullet Train have the potential to “maintain healthy momentum.” However, Robbins admitted that there isn’t “a lot of built-in content for the audience to open from August to mid-October.”
In recent years, original films have struggled to find a significant audience. If movies like the rom-com “Bros,” the mystery “Don’t Worry Darling” starring Florence Pugh and Harry Styles and others can find an audience, it could make it through the holiday season.
If theaters can hold on until the holidays, 2022 ends the year with sequels to two of the highest-grossing films of all time.
The long-awaited “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is scheduled for November. The latest is December’s Avatar: The Last Airbender , director James Cameron’s first film since the original Avatar in 2009, which has a worldwide total of $2.8 billion. Can ‘Wakanda Forever’ match the box office of the original without Chadwick Boseman, who played the title character and died tragically in 2020? And will “Avatar” still find an audience 13 years later? The answers are unclear, but bet against Marvel Studios and Cameron — the director of multiple blockbusters like Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Titanic — at your own peril.
Bock, the analyst at Exhibitor Relations, believes that blockbusters will continue to “tear away at the box office” and that this year will “overall probably be considered a big success given the titles left on the release calendar.”
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