Box Office: Seven Key Questions For June
Can the forward momentum be sustained after a (mostly) business-as-usual first month of summer, or will the (potential) glut of IP for IP take its toll?
Think of this as a June box office preview. Still, since I imagine most folks reading this have a general idea of what newbies are in play and what those films are about (“See, it’s about this kid who is supposed to kill dragons, but he doesn’t want to kill dragons…”), I’m formatting this as more of a macro-focused look at the sixth month of the year and the second month of the summer movie season.
At a glance, the overall domestic box office for May totaled $967.51 million, which is the top-earning “month of May” total since 2019 and (noting those last two Avengers movies skewing the curve) the biggest such “month of May” without an Avengers flick (Age of Ultron also helped the month reach $1.077 billion in 2015) in play since 2014.
Just looking at the final lifetime cumes for the movies released in May (Fuck off, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame and Fast Five!), this past month’s newbies thus far total $775 million. Considering the likely/plausibly optimistic lifetime totals for the still-kicking likes of Lilo & Stitch, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning and Final Destination: Bloodlines, the “movies released in May 2025” total will easily top the $816 million total for May 2018 and possibly the $1.16 billion total for 2019. Fun fact, the 2022 “lifetime totals for movies released in May” cume was $1.23 billion, with $719 million of that courtesy of Top Gun: Maverick. It’s not all sunshine and roses, as there were still so few “big” movies in May that IFC’s Clown in a Cornfield was the ninth-biggest newbie with under $8 million.
The good news and bad news is that the strong overall cume for May is as much about the holdover business for Sinners ($123 million just last month) alongside the over/under $35 million earned by both A Minecraft Movie and The Accountant 2 as it is about the actual May releases. Likewise, May 2023 brought in $71 million from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, $22.4 million from Evil Dead Rise, and even $10.6 million from the late-March-released John Wick: Chapter 4.
But then, that’s the point of having a regular slate. The 2023 May grosses were so abysmal, both because of the smaller-scale May flicks themselves (Fall Guy, IF and Garfield are supposed to supplement the tentpoles rather than being the by-default tentpoles) and the lack of April biggies. Anyway, without further ado…