Movies are having their second act after the long pandemic intermission, according to data and a podcast interview from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
“It’s come back in a way that a year ago or even two years ago we never would have even imagined,” Comscore Inc. senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian said during the podcast.
“Total box office gross in the first half reached nearly $3.78 billion. The second quarter alone hit $2.29 billion, outstripping the same quarter of 2021 by 266.5% and marking the best quarterly result since the pandemic began, according to Kagan, a media research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence.”
Looking at the figures, even assuming some inflation effects, the rebound is bigger than you’d find in a major release romcom.
Looking at the first 26-week periods, 2020 saw grosses of $1.89 billion. Compare that to 2021’s $1.03 billion and then this year’s nearly $3.78 billion. That’s a 266.5% growth over last year and 99.5% over 2020.
Admissions dropped by about half between 2020 and 2021. Now? 2022 is close to double 2020 and almost quadruple those of 2021.
The summer season box office gross was $3.5 million in 2020 (not hard to understand given pandemic closures), $607.3 million last year, and $1.76 billion this.
“So far, the strong numbers in 2022 have been largely driven by high-grossing titles that appealed to younger audiences,” said S&P Global Market Intelligence. “For example, the debut of Walt Disney Co.’s ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ over the weekend of July 8 collected about $143 million domestically and $302 million worldwide. Not only was that a strong performance by any historical standards, but it was also stronger than any of the three prior Thor films.”
“The Batman,” “Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” and “Jurassic World: Dominion” were other big tent movies whose performance was “forecast-crushing.”
“I think the studios realized that, especially for big event films, … it needs to be in a theater. It needs to have that exclusive run that needs to draw excitement,” said Kagan box office analyst Wade Holden during the podcast.
Then again, while this is good progress, things are still playing the role of a sequel. “The second quarter performed well for pandemic-era standards, but it was still well below the $3.21 billion in box office receipts printed in the second quarter of 2019,” said the analysis.
Streaming is probably having an impact, say the experts. New contracts between studios and big theater chains give the former the ability to pull titles earlier than in the past and put them on their own streaming platforms.
As an example, if you wanted to see “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” you could have waited a bit and then, even as it was still in some theaters, purchased a month’s worth of subscription to HBO Max and caught it at home for a total of $10.
But S&P noted that experts see premium screens, like IMAX and dine-in premises, as offering a path back to the $11 billion levels from a few years before the pandemic.