IndieWire’s box-office guru Tom Brueggmann tends to be pretty spot on in his assessments. His latest piece makes the shocking claim that theater audiences shrank by nearly half in the last 4 years.
The box-office totals for 2022 ended a little under $7.4 billion domestically, falling short of the December 2021 projections. That’s a shortfall of somewhere between 20 and 25 percent.The 2018 domestic box-office totals were a little over $14 billion. Yeah, that’s a little around 50 percent.
All of this despite the massive successes of “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Even worse, the 2018 numbers came when ticket prices were approximately 20 percent lower.
The primary excuses that keep being mentioned are COVID and streaming. I won’t argue with that. It’s obvious that they’ve both had an enduring effect on the theatrical experience. I’d also add Marvel fatigue and really just the overall lack of quality movies in theaters.
The hopeful one in me wants to believe that this has just been a weak year at the movies (it has) and that things will get back into place next year, but who am I kidding? I’m still struck by how fast this change has happened. Movie theaters are turning primarily into, as Scorsese pointed out a few years back, theme park rides.
What we’ve learned this year is that the younger crowd will still purchase a ticket for the token Marvel, Pixar, sequel packages, but that’s about it. You’ll have the odd “Elvis” phenomenon, but one look at this year’s 10 highest-grossing movies and they are all superhero movies and/or blockbuster sequels.