THB #591: 64 Ain't Enough

Just 64 movies defined the commercial movie business in the last year.

Just 64 movies grossed $20 million or more in the domestic marketplace, representing, very roughly, 80% of total domestic box office revenues.

There are many, many ways to measure the health of the movie business. So please just take this particular set of snapshots as the partial perspective that they represent.

The following numbers are the last year of movies (September 2023 - August 2024) grossing over $20 million domestic, which is generally the floor for Major distributors releasing wide.

STUDIO - AVG GROSS - # OF RELEASES
Disney - $175m - 10
Universal - $101m - 15
WB - $123m - 8
Paramount - $92m - 6
Sony - $86m - 10

Lionsgate - $49m - 7
MGM/Amazon - $48m - 4
A24 - $42m - 3

Neon only qualified 1 film… $74m
Apple released 2 movies through Paramount and Columbia

For perspective, I decided not to compare this last year to 2018/2019, amongst the highest grossing years in history, but a bit more randomly to 10 years ago… more the old norm than the apex of Marvel and Lucasfilm… so here are those numbers…

September 2013 - August 2014

Disney - $150m - 12
Universal - $69m - 17
WB - $102m - 16
Paramount - $115m - 9
Sony - $81m - 16

Fox - $98m - 15

Lionsgate - $103m - 8
Weinstein - $40m - 4
Relativity - $32m - 8
Open Road - $39m - 3

No active MGM
No A24

The business has changed a bit, eh?

The first number that jumps out to me is that 4 of the 5 Majors have higher average grosses per title now than then. All 5 of the Major distributors released more movies 10 years ago than they do now.

You also see that the larger indie distributors contributed over a billion dollars to the pot with films grossing more than $20m as well back in 2014… and less than a querter of that this year.

This is a double-edged sword.