Summer Box Office Shows Hollywood Settling into a New Normal

Yesterday was Labor Day, which means Hollywood’s all-important summer blockbuster season is officially over. But don’t roll the credits just yet.

After a dismal start to the summer, the movie business roared back to life with a steady stream of hits. As we roll into autumn, the industry might finally have reason to be optimistic again — if it can recalibrate its expectations, at least.

Mayday, May Day

No strikes. No pandemic. 2024 may have delivered the most “normal” summer Hollywood has seen since the relative glory days of 2019. Unfortunately, nobody told audiences — at least not in May, the unofficial start of the season. For the first time in roughly 15 years, Disney’s Marvel Studios abandoned the first weekend of the month, leaving Universal to swoop in with “The Fall Guy,” a Ryan Gosling-led reboot of the 1980s TV series. It fizzled in its opening weekend, sparking something of an industrywide panic, especially as the month rolled on and new installments in the “Mad Max” and “Planet of the Apes” franchises underperformed compared to previous entries. The month culminated with the worst Memorial Day weekend box office performance in nearly 30 years.

But then June rolled around. Sony scored a $400 million global hit with “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” which Shawn Robbins, industry analyst at Box Office Theory, told The Daily Upside created “momentum to moviegoing.” For the next two months, nearly every week delivered a new hit, including Paramount’s “A Quiet Place: Day One,” Universal’s “Twisters,” horror-thriller “Longlegs,” which crossed $100 million globally to become the biggest hit ever for ascendant indie studio Neon, and two billion-dollar grossers from Disney: “Inside Out 2” and “Deadpool & Wolverine.” (It’s redemption for the company that whiffed on last year’s “Barbenheimer” craze.) Suddenly, the box office kinda sorta found a new stride:

• Overall, the domestic box office haul this summer came in at around $3.6 billion, per Comscore, off from last year’s $4.09 billion but mostly considered encouraging after the dismal May. Most encouraging: 2024’s hits had legs (long ones, even), taking in an impressive amount of business after their opening weekends, per a recent Deadline analysis.
• The rub? While Americans are back to moviegoing, it’s increasingly hit-or-miss for Hollywood overseas. Especially in China, where just one Hollywood film crossed $100 million this summer (Disney/Fox’s “Alien: Romulus”) — a threshold that Hollywood routinely passed in pre-COVID times, when Beijing censors were far more lenient with American imports.

Heat Check: One major factor possibly underlying the strong summer, Robbins told The Daily Upside: heat waves. What may be one of the hottest summers on record “pushed people indoors toward more air-conditioned entertainment,” Robbins said. It’s at least one silver lining for the silver screen.