The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
Box Office 2022: A Lucky Few Prosper, Tough Times for the Rest
Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water lead a theatrical landscape reliant on tentpoles alone as insiders fear the movie pipeline has yet to return to normal and distributors grapple with the impact of COVID-era production delays
The ups and downs at the 2022 box office were certainly dramatic. Recovery from the COVID19 crisis was in full swing during the summer, only to crash in the fall. There were high hopes for the yearend holidays, but the merriment didn’t quite materialize outside of Avatar: The Way of Water and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Throughout the pandemic era, such films have fared the best because they appeal to a broad swath of people, including those between the ages of 18 and 34, who were the most likely to return to the cinema.
Families and older adults, however, may have become more discerning in terms of how they spend their leisure time — and money. Animated films, once a bankable staple for Hollywood, kept facing headwinds in
2022. And the marketplace for adult-skewing titles remained uneven at best. Some worked —
Elvis, Where the Crawdads Sing, Ticket to Paradise and The Lost City — while others were quickly shown the door: Babylon, She Said and
Don’t Worry Darling.
An underlying issue was a lack of product. The movie pipeline has yet to return to normal as studios and other film distributors continue to grapple with production and postproduction delays due to COVID-19 (by all accounts, special effects houses are stretched to their limit). As a result, the calendar was sparse for stretches at a time in terms of all-audience fare.
While there are plenty of big titles in 2023, there is a lack of product during certain times, prompting B. Riley Securities analyst Eric Wold to lower his domestic box office forecast for 2023 from $9.5 billion to $8.9 billion (he’s very bullish). Adds analyst Eric Handler of MKM Partners: “2022 showed us that people are willing to come back to the cinema, especially for blockbusters and event films. There just wasn’t enough of them. The