Box Office: Theaters Cannot Survive on 'Joker 2' and 'Venom 3' Alone

The overall weekend is down 38% from 2014, because the non-tentpole films that held up October a decade ago ('Fury,' 'Gone Girl,' etc.) are no longer theatrically viable.

This is one of those weekends that qualifies as “good for studios, less good for theaters.” Most of the films in the marketplace are generally doing at least “okay” on a case-by-case basis, yet the entire weekend total is barely above $71 million. That is down 19% from last year and a brutal 48% from this weekend in 2019. Last year, this weekend saw Taylor Swift: The ERAS Tour topping again with $33 million in its second frame as Killers of the Flower Moon opened with $23 million. This weekend in 2019 featured Joker’s $29 million fourth weekend sandwiched between a “merely okay” $37 million debut for Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and a “good enough” $27 million opening for Zombieland: Double Tap (compared to a $24 million debut for Zombieland ten years earlier). Sans inflation, this weekend is down 38% from 2014.

In years before 2021, before merely putting a film in theaters temporarily became a rebellious action, I didn’t care how the theatrical marketplace performed compared to a given weekend, season or year. While operating on the presumption that the industry would exist, I was (and remain) more concerned about how specific films performed in relation to budget and expectations. Different films earn different amounts of money. Unless you wanted MCU or Jurassic-sized tentpoles every weekend, you would have some off-season frames or flukes in the weekend-to-weekend comparisons. The media lost its mind in 2014, arguing that the summer season was in a slump compared to 2013. Yet, the difference was primarily due to Furious 7, Fifty Shades of Grey and The Good Dinosaur being moved to 2015, and the deficiency also allowed films like Tammy and Lucy to break out and/or leg out.

Some of the differentials between this October and October of 2019 are due to Joker: Folie a Deux earning around $60 million domestically instead of the $286 million (out of a $335 million total) that Joker brought in during its first month. That’s an ongoing issue when an entire month is predicated on a single big-deal movie performing as well as hoped. We saw that in early 2019 when the “merely okay” performance of Glass in January and the outright failure of The LEGO Movie 2 in February led to the entire industry holding its breath until Captain Marvel in early March. However, it’s not just a “big tentpole underwhelms” issue. It’s a symptom of the “folks stopped going to the movies just to go to the movies” problem. Back in the day, audiences showed up for Gravity *and* Captain Phillips.

A decade ago, October had both the Conjuring spin-off Annabelle *and* a slew of “regular movie” releases like Fury (this weekend’s top film a decade ago with $23 million), Alexander and the Horrible, Terrible No Good Very Bad Day and The Judge. Such films would barely justify a theatrical release today or likely bomb as the folks who complain that Hollywood only makes comic book films, sequels and cartoons stayed home. The biggest domestic earner in October 2014 was Fox’s Gone Girl, with $167 million. In 2024, A) 20th Century Studios barely exists under the Disney umbrella (sorry, Book of Life) and B) Deep Water barely plays on Hulu, let alone in theaters. Ten years ago, Lionsgate turned a would-be VOD actioner into a breakout hit. Would “the next John Wick” today play any better than The Killer’s Game or, at best, Plane?

I got to become Twitter’s main character for 48 years in March of 2018 for arguing that it was “bad actually” that Black Panther was cosplaying as Titanic and steamrolling six weeks’ worth of would-be (and ironically inclusive) tentpoles (Tomb Raider, Pacific Rim: Uprising, A Wrinkle in Time, Red Sparrow, etc.). Frankly, as studios got aggressive around year-round tentpole/franchise scheduling while studio programmers struggled, this is precisely what I was worried about. Part of the reaction to Black Panther’s $700 million domestic success (thing good) would be to space out the tentpoles (also thing good). That would, and did — in an ecosystem where tentpoles hold up the whole industry — lead to giant commercial chasms whenever one of them underperformed (thing bad). Cut to 2024. October is comparatively underwater because Joker 2 bombed while everyone holds their breath, hoping that Venom 3 performs as presumed.

The good news is that the more we see individual movies like Smile 2 (a solid $46 million global debut for the $28 million horror sequel) and (relatively speaking) Anora (a whopping $540k domestic in six multiplexes) excelling in theatrical release, the more studios will gamble on theatres. As the dust settles on an industry-imperling streaming war, a multiplex release is still the best way for a movie to A) make actual revenue, B) create a lasting pop culture/offline impression and C) create long-term value for the various post-theatrical windows and ancillary opportunities. The battle of “proving” the value of putting your movie in theaters versus throwing it on a streaming platform is over. The next fight will be reacclimating moviegoers to seeing a flick like John Wick, Fury and Gone Girl as being at least somewhat worth a trip to the multiplex.