The U.S. box office is down this summer, but not by that much

The Flash and Indiana Jones are disappointing, but the box office in general is barely down from last year

By Sam Barsanti  |  July 3, 2023 | 10:49pm
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The U.S. box office is down this summer, but not by that much
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The big headline in show business this summer, aside from the ongoing WGA strike and still-potential SAG-AFTRA strike that would pretty much prove that the whole industry is busted, is that there have been a bunch of surprising box office flops. There have been a fair amount of big hits, including relatively surprising ones like John Wick: Chapter 4 (which opened higher than every other movie in the franchise) and Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (which easily swung past its already high expectations), but good enough is never good enough for Hollywood is why The Flash failed, why Elemental failed, and why Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny has no chance but to fail because it was so comically expensive to produce.

But, according to Variety, Comscore’s data on this year’s box office isn’t quite so doom-and-gloom. Oh sure, things are worse than they were last year, but, like… barely? For the first half of summer, which Comscore says is May 1 to July 2, the U.S. box office made $1.88 billion. That’s compared to $1.91 billion last year, so it’s about a two percent drop, but that doesn’t seem particularly dramatic. It’s still $1.8 billion.

Then again, it is quite a bit down from the last pre-COVID summer in 2019, which Deadline says was on both “Viagra and steroids” in a mildly gross metaphor, when movies brought in $2.27 billion by this mid-summer point. But “things are worse now than they were pre-COVID” doesn’t seem like something to get too upset about. That’s what most things are like now. We were having a ball pre-COVID, getting all of our droplets on each other, washing our hands only a few times a day, spending several more millions of dollars on movie tickets. It was great.

Plus, there are three potentially huge movies coming in just a few weeks: Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One. It’s only apocalyptic if you subscribe to the bleak worldview that everything must make more than it made previously, which anyone who isn’t a brainless vulture capitalist can tell you is untenable. (Correction: It also might look bad if you’re the person signing checks for hundreds of millions of dollars to make an Indiana Jones movie, and that person can afford to take the hit by cravenly deleting things off a streaming service anyway.)

 
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