Calamity? Anomaly? 2020 was a box office year like no other
When the sun sets on the 2020 film box office, it’ll be difficult to look at the numbers as anything but disastrous.
After five consecutive years of North American revenues exceeding $11 billion, this year they’re expected to cap out at an almost 40-year low of around $2.3 billion. That’ll be down 80% from last year according to data firm Comscore. Globally, where markets have been able to recover more fully, ticket sales will likely end up somewhere between $11 and $12 billion. Last year, that total hit $42.5 billion. But of course, 2020 is a year with a big asterisk.
“It’s a year like no other,” said Jim Orr, president of domestic theatrical distribution for Universal Pictures. “We’ve never seen this little business in this industry.”
Outside of January and February, it’s impossible to judge the year’s box office by pre-pandemic standards. Box office, in aggregate, is fairly predictable in a normal year. But when the theaters shut down March 20, that “all went out the window,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst with Comscore. “The unpredictability became the constant.”
Most North American theaters weren’t open for six months straight through the summer season, which typically accounts for around 40% of the year’s profits. For the past two years, the summer movie season has netted over $4.3 billion. This year it brought in $176.5 million, much of that from drive-in theaters.
“The drive-in became the hero of the summer,” Dergarabedian said.
When indoor theaters did start to reopen in late August and early September, it was at limited capacity and with limited product. Currently, about 35% of theaters are open in the U.S. and some of the biggest markets, including New York and Los Angeles, remain closed. Although there have been a steady stream of new releases, the blockbuster tentpoles have been few and far between. Some went to streaming services, others became premium digital rentals, but most simply retreated into 2021 and beyond.
Perhaps there is no more telling fact than that 2020 was the first time in over a decade without a Marvel movie. The Walt Disney Co.’s superhero factory has for the past two years topped the year-end charts with “Avengers: Endgame “and “Black Panther,” and has regularly had two or more films in the top 10.
Unsurprisingly, the 2020 top 10 is a little chaotic and comprised mostly of films from the first two months of the year. Sony’s Will Smith sequel “Bad Boys for Life “has stayed in first place in North America since its January release with $206.3 million. Globally it’s in second place to the Chinese film “The Eight Hundred” — the first time that the top worldwide film originated outside of Hollywood. The only post-shutdown films to crack the top 10 are Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” in eighth place with $57.2 million and the animated family sequel “The Croods: A New Age,” which was released at Thanksgiving and has earned $30.8 million so far to put it in 10th place.
And at least 15 films in the top 100 were retro releases, including “Hocus Pocus,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”
“The silver lining for movie theaters is even though people had unlimited options at home, people still sought out the movie theater,” Dergarabedian said. “People have a desire to go outside the home and be entertained. That desire hasn’t changed but the ability to do that was profoundly limited.”