The summer of cinema’s discontent

Is 2024 the year the summer blockbuster dies? For more than 40 years, Hollywood has saved its biggest films for the year’s hottest months, but so far, the old playbook isn’t getting its typical results.

The Fall Guy, a big-budget romantic action-comedy starring Hollywood darlings Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, kicked off the summer season on the first weekend of May. The movie debuted with a disappointing $27.7 million, well below the studio’s already modest expectations of $35 million. Three weeks after The Fall Guy opened, blockbuster hopeful Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga led the weakest Memorial Day weekend since 1995 (not counting the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021) with a measly $32 million.

Everyone in the entertainment industry knew that 2024 would be a rough year, but these numbers were shockingly bad. Last year in the first weekend in May, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 made more than four times what The Fall Guy did, and over 2023’s Memorial Day weekend, Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid—which at the time was thought to have had a soft opening—made three times more than Furiosa. These trends worry movie studios, but theater owners, who rely on summer’s weekly parade of big-budget films, will feel the brunt of these cinematic misfires.

Hollywood’s dual strikes are getting much of the blame for the industry’s malaise. Last year, the writers’ and actors’ unions were on strike simultaneously for the first time since 1960, and the work stoppage effectively shut down film production for six months. Studios delayed release dates for unfinished movies and pushed back completed movies to hide the gaps on the calendar. This reshuffling meant that cinema owners would have fewer films hitting their screens this year. Fewer movies lead to fewer reasons for moviegoers to buy a ticket.

But labor disputes are only part of the entertainment industry’s problems. Even though 2023 was cinema’s most profitable year since the pandemic, the tried-and-true method of relying on big-budget action movies didn’t pan out.

Steven Spielberg often gets credited for inventing the summer blockbuster with his megahits Jaws (1975) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and studios started betting that big budgets would result in even bigger profits.

During the age of the blockbuster, box-office revenue in America tended to increase every year, but about 10 years ago, revenue started to plateau, hovering around $11 billion. But four decades of steady growth in revenue is only part of the story. Even when the industry reaped record profits in 2018, it was already in trouble. The steady inflation of ticket prices disguised the fact that the number of tickets sold each year had been declining since 2002, long before streaming threatened the theatrical ecosystem.

Movie studios tend to be risk averse because the investment in each film is large and the profit margins are relatively small. As film budgets for potential blockbusters increased, studios worried about risk even more. About 20 years ago, the industry began narrowing its approach for big-budget films, hoping to minimize this risk. This change gave moviegoers two decades of big-budget special-effects-laden films based on comic books and other established franchises. Marvel Studios became the gold standard for box-office success, releasing 23 interconnected films between 2008 and 2019, raking in billions of dollars. Other studios tried to replicate Marvel’s triumph, launching their own “shared universes.”

El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, Calif. Sthanlee B. Mirador/Sipa USA via AP

During the boom of the superhero era, the major studios began releasing fewer movies, betting on a few big movies to increase revenue. In 2002, when theaters sold a record 1.5 billion tickets, the six major studios released 119 films. In 2019, studios released just 87 films while selling only 1.2 billion tickets.

Last year this precarious model, weakened by pandemic lockdowns and competition from streaming, failed. Moviegoers revolted against the notion that they were supposed to care about big-budget action movies. Two of Marvel’s three films didn’t gain traction in theaters, and DC Studios’ four comic book movies performed even worse. Other franchise staples, like Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, bombed.

The unexpected saviors for theater owners were Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which bucked the blockbuster trend. Both featured recognizable characters, but neither was part of an established film franchise. Perhaps even more surprising was the success of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a historical drama about the father of the atomic bomb. In 2023, moviegoers rewarded originality and engaging storytelling over frenetic action and special effects.

Despite this year’s big-budget action movies failing to live up to their hype, theater owners experienced a hopeful moment when Inside Out 2 made $154 million in its first weekend. But with only 77 major new films released this year, cinemas won’t be able to close the financial gap for a box office that’s currently down 25 percent compared with 2023 and down 40 percent compared with 2019. And who knows how long it will take Hollywood to learn that right now audiences crave original heartfelt stories rather than hollow computer-­generated spectacle.