Movie Content Scoreboard: The Experimental Window Closes

Like the movie business itself, the media wants answers about what will happen as the option of seeing movies in a movie theater becomes normal again. But as we saw this past weekend (March 5, 2021), landmarks like reopening New York theaters are not anything close to turning the key and getting back to March 6, 2020, which was the last $100 million domestic box office weekend.

What most every writer has gotten wrong all year is seeing every major release as a standalone event. Almost none of them have been that. They are all experiments. And while some are repeating (Universal and WarnerMedia), a total of zero have truly been successful.

Just under 200 new movies were released domestically after the shutdown last March. Twelve grossed as much as $10 million. (Onward opened on March 6 and got a good weekend in, topping the list with $62 million. Tenet at $57 million. Croods: A New Age is at $54 million and is still in release.) About 150 of the releases grossed under $500,000. Sixteen m…