BOX OFFICE GOLD
‘Barbenheimer’ broke all the records – but 2023 was the year of remake after remake..
THE list of best-performing films in Irish cinemas this year is again dominated by sequels and remakes, but faltering comic book movies are about to leave the stage for a while, according to one leading critic.
Figures provided by Comscore Movies – from January 6 to December 19 this year – show that 2023’s two most popular films were first-time projects in Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie smashed the Irish box office record, taking in almost €13m on the island of Ireland, while Christopher Nolan’s J Robert Oppenheimer biopic took in over €8m – a little under last year’s top earner, Top Gun: Maverick.
However, a glance down the list shows only one more completely new project in the top 10 – Disney’s Elemental – and just 18 in the top 50.
Among the top 25 is the seventh instalment of Mission Impossible, the tenth Fast And The Furious and the fifth Indiana Jones film – 42 years after Harrison Ford first cracked the iconic bullwhip in the title role.
Elsewhere in the top 100 there are dozens of reboots and remakes and other franchise extensions.
Movies editor at Entertainment.ie, Brian Lloyd, said production studios have ‘always been risk-averse’ and ‘want a sure thing’.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘There’s more home entertainment available than ever with all the streaming services, so the idea is, in order to get people to leave the comfort of their home, the studio thinks there has to be something there that people will recognise and will connect with. You’ll say, “Yeah I’ve heard of The Flash, I’ll go see that.”’
But Mr Lloyd said the top two films this year ‘kind of gives me hope, because we’re not in this case of Marvel movies ruling the day’. In fact, he said the superhero movie Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania had ‘really underperformed’ with its takings of around €2m (13th), while DC’s Aquaman And The Last Kingdom, released this weekend to scathing reviews, is ‘tracking to bomb worse than any Marvel movie has this year’.
He said the former’s poor showing had ‘marked a general decline of comic book movies’.
Mr Lloyd said this was the first full year without restrictions for cinemas since 2019, and some films actually benefited from the downtime.
‘There was a breathing room there that they could actually put time and effort into things. So the product is much more refined than it’s been in quite some time.’
He said Disney was ‘very much trying to walk back the learned behaviour’ of the pandemic. ‘You’d see something released by Disney and think, “I’ll just wait until it comes into Disney plus.” They found that this was counter-intuitive, that they were first and foremost a movie production company and that cinema releasing was the best way to make money.
‘Like with “Barbenheimer”, if a movie makes a big enough splash it becomes a cultural moment – it becomes the thing that people are talking about. And Disney has really lost a step this year with the Marvel stuff faltering.’
As ever, children’s films are among the most popular releases, with The Super Mario Bros Movie placing third on Comscore’s list with a box office take of over €7m.