THB #176: Mid-Summer Check-Up

sky, ©davidpoland 2023

The good news has been that most of the movies expected to perform have performed pretty well.

The bad news is that in the last month alone, regardless of the success of Top Gun Maverick, the domestic box office has underperformed my intentionally broad estimates for this first half of the summer by almost $150 million and the likely final gross for the summer is likely under $2.9 billion.

The domestic box office in Summer 2019 was $4.3 billion. (Self-quote, April 29: “$2.9 billion seems to be the cap on box office this summer… and it is 100% a choice by these distributors.)

My intentionally broad estimate for the rest of the summer is about $1.3 billion domestic. We are currently at about $1.6 billion.

There is a lot of misguided, myopic thinking amongst many of the professional box office writers whose writing influences and gets quoted by other media that does no analysis of their own but feels compelled to discuss office.

This last weekend (#45), in spite of wh…