The giant success of The Super Mario Bros movie is helping to paint a brighter picture for cinemas in 2023, it seems.
Whilst we still aren’t anywhere near the level of pre-pandemic global earnings, cinemas across the world are set to surpass expectations this year, as forecasts are adjusted in the wake of The Super Mario Bros movie’s rush towards being the year’s first billion dollar-grossing film. According to Deadline, Gower Street Analytics, the firm who handle such estimations, has revised this year’s prediction upwards from $29bn to $32bn.
Perhaps more importantly, the recalculated global haul of $32bn will surpass last year’s box office takings by a whopping 23%, suggesting that cinemas have taken a healthy step back towards the kind of earnings that we saw before the pandemic. There’s still some way to go as should this figure prove to be accurate, the global industry would still be 20% down on 2017-2019, but there’s no doubt that it’s certainly a big step in the right direction.
Of course, a fair chunk of this income is being powered by blockbuster releases and cinema operators continue to be concerned about a lack of those kinds of films releasing in the latter part of the year so we’ll have to see how well-founded those fears are as the second half of 2023 looms.
Aside from the impressive over-achievements of everybody’s favourite Italian plumber, the Chinese box office has continued to be reinvigorated, adding to the mostly positive picture. If there’s a weak area, it’s Hollywood’s blockbuster pipeline which hasn’t really performed as expected, especially superhero films which are failing to earn the huge grosses that they have in the past. With the exception of Avatar: The Way Of Water, not many of the huge Hollywood releases in 2023 have made the expected financial impact which would bounce the global box office back to those pre-pandemic highs.
Quentin Tarantino has talked fairly recently about every era of cinema coming to an end, citing the studio era shifting into the New Hollywood phase before that in turn was superseded by the first modern blockbusters of the 1970s. Could this be the beginning of that next shift: as superhero films continue to struggle commercially to meet past glories, does the next era beckon? With box office totals rising as superhero grosses fall (although we suspect Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 might have something to say about that), not to mention major players such as Amazon and Apple moving into theatrical distribution, is it possible we’re seeing the beginnings of that change?
Who knows, but if nothing else it’s another interesting set of figures with which to try and discern the future direction of the industry.
