Similar to how people went on vacation with revenge as Covid simmered down, so did they return to cinemas this summer.
Even though this season’s domestic box office take of $3.6 billion, per Comscore, is roughly a half-billion lighter than last summer’s $4.09 billion, chalk that up largely to a Marvel movie missing from the traditional early May summer kickoff slot due to the hangover from the Hollywood strikes (Deadpool & Wolverine didn’t arrive until late July). Last summer, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 delivered $359 million stateside upon its May 5 launch — enough said.
The town freaked out because we were going through a dry period, fearing that moviegoing was hearing the death gong. But theatrical showed a nonstop resilience once Sony‘s Bad Boys: Ride or Die lit the spark in early June with a $56.5M debut, commencing a flood of event films.
Is it us, or is streaming looking a lot like linear TV … with ads now? It seems like 274 million people began to notice this summer as they sought out the most economical out-of-the-home form of entertainment in moviegoing, where the average adult ticket price was $12.36, according to EntTelligence.
Nine summer movies crossed $100M compared with last year’s 13 at the same point in time, while four movies grossed north of $200M versus summer 2023’s five.
Yes, there are absolutes that made this summer a comeback success — the season currently accounts for 64% of the current $5.6 billion in 2024 box office — from tentpole inventory to Latino and Hispanic moviegoers catapulting pics’ openings past tracking projections. But there were a few other eye-opening moments from summer 2024. Here they are:
Movie Marketing Got Clever
This summer, studios cracked and harnessed the ever-changing media landscape with serious results.
First, let’s look at movie marketing throughout time. Studios were once tasked with delivering insanely good materials via broadcast TV. This eventually evolved to targeting myriad demos across linear cable (which we all know is in freefall in regards to viewership). These days, marketing is about narrow-casting across digital. What specific audiences do studios show materials to? Where do studios find them? Industry sources tell us that there was less linear TV spend in campaigns this summer in exchange for more digital ads. Studios activated people to go to the movies in ways that they didn’t before, and at cheaper price points.
Of those who figured it out were Neon with its cryptic clip rollout of Longlegs and genius hiding of star Nicolas Cage in its campaign; the pic’s total P&A cost under $10M. The marketing hit horror cinephiles on the head and yielded a domestic gross of $73.5M. Above all, Neon (and Paramount with A Quiet Place: Day One) showed that horror isn’t plug and play when it comes to marketing. A flood of horror movies opened earlier this year to low double digits or lower: Abigail ($10.2M), Imaginary ($9.9M) and The First Omen ($8.3M) to name a few. The industry believed that the genre, quite robust post Covid, hit its ceiling. Perhaps when it comes to marketing, instead of revealing in full what a movie is, maybe it’s a vibe or a feeling that needs to be conveyed, or in regards to a horror movie, creating a sense of dread.
A sequel to the original 1996 movie Twister twisted in the wind for years because studio executives couldn’t figure out how to one-up the stakes. For Universal/Warner Bros’ Twisters, one source observes that the storm-chasers reboot is essentially akin to a dog chasing a car. When the dog catches the car — who cares? The trick to the campaign entailed selling audiences on the movie’s 100 mph ride, but there was something else: The characters had a technology to wrangle, err stop, a tornado. Essentially, in every ad spot, the gist was to leave potential audiences yearning to know what happens next.
We’ve seen this cliffhanger tactic once before, in the trailer for the 2012 Denzel Washington movie Flight, which ended with a plane ending upside down. Coincidentally, that marketing spot was overseen by then-Paramount marketing guru and now Sony Motion Pictures president Josh Greenstein, whose team’s fingerprints are all over the female romance movie comeback It Ends With Us.
Sony sold the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni movie from Wayfarer Studios like a Nicolas Sparks film, with social media stunts around the female protagonist’s love of flowers and the Gossip Girl alum’s beauty line. Core fans were fully aware of the pic’s domestic abuse theme. Clutch your pearls, but that sleight-of-hand tactic in the pic’s marketing not only attracted the novel’s faithful but also non-fans. Look what happened with advance ticket sales: We’re told checkouts for It Ends With Us weren’t for two tickets, but rather five or six tickets per order.
Says one razor-sharp movie marketing boss: “We’re in a business where the key is getting others to go with you to the cinema. Finding people who are interested in the movie isn’t hard; how do you get other people to go?”
Repeat Business, and Legs
People didn’t just go once to the movies — it’s clear per sources they took several trips. Behold the 4.6x multiple on Despicable Me 4 in regard to its current domestic box office vs. its opening B.O., and the 4.2x multiple on Inside Out 2. Deadpool & Wolverine has averaged a weekend hold of -45% during its five weeks of play, while It Ends With Us has been doing around -50% over its last three. Even though Universal had a 26-day theatrical window on Twisters, the movie continued to hold in theaters with an average -36% since its August 13 in-home digital release. Say what you will about the studio’s Fall Guy failing to start summer with a $27.7M opening, but the Ryan Gosling-Emily Blunt action rom-com legged out to a 3.3x multiple of $92.9M.
Disney Righted Its Ship
That’s good news for the overall industry, from rival studios who have something to strive for to exhibition which is the beneficiary of a trickle-down business.
Disney CEO Bob Iger, Disney Entertainment chairman Alan Bergman and team made it their business to make fewer, higher-quality movies. “He’s a very progressive thinker and knows that they previously took the signals the wrong way,” one industry insider tells us about Iger. Read: the family conglom that once banned junk food ads on Disney Channel and other verticals embraced edgy fare with the R-rated Deadpool & Wolverine. The Marvel Cinematic Universe title became the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time at $1.2 billion, besting Warner Bros’ The Joker ($1.1 billion) while also posting a record debut for an R-rated movie stateside with $211.4M domestic/$444.7M global.
Instead of three Marvel movies in a given year, look at the pent-up demand for one. The studio has at least two MCU titles next year in Captain America: Brave New World and Fantastic Four; Blade, though dated for November 7, 2025, hasn’t even found a director yet.
All in, the Mouse House towers over all studios this summer with close to $1.5 billion in domestic gross, 18% of that from revived 20th Century title Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Alien: Romulus. Universal is second with $737.2M and Sony, with Crunchyroll, is third at $521.1M (figures will be updated throughout the weekend).
#BookTok cannot be denied as a box office influencer
Today reports that TikTok’s #BookTok subpage of 36.2M posts yields 108 billion views. Author Colleen Hoovers’ TikTok hashtag has 2 billion views alone; it yielded 25M books sold by the end of 2023. The first feature adaptation of a Hoover book, It Ends With Us, has grossed more than $125M stateside off a $50M opening and is close to $250M worldwide so far. Mic drop.
If you make a movie for women, they’ll go (for the most part)
No disrespect to Channing Tatum. He had two offerings for women in Apple Studios’ feathered fish period rom-com Fly Me to the Moon and Zoë Kravitz’s erotic thriller Blink Twice. However, one was a streaming movie made without any sense of quality control guardrails chiefly for a home audience, and the other was an esoteric movie that divided moviegoers. Still, we’re talking again about movies like It Ends With Us: Get the IP and the cast right, and bingo. Why do we have to wait another year for movies like Barbie or Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour? What if studios made 20 movies in a given year targeted at women? Then what? Did we expand the box office?
Families will spend to go to the movies
Before Covid and into Covid, studios were eager to execute a day-and-date theatrical strategy, believing that premium fare, if left in the home, will easily placate families who wish to avoid spending the extra cash on parking and popcorn. But looky here, the trope that families don’t like going to the movies isn’t true. The latest examples this summer include Inside Out 2, at $647M the highest-grossing animated movie ever; Despicable Me 4 ($350M), the third highest-grossing title stateside in the 14-year-old Illumination franchise; and The Garfield Movie ($91.9M). All were fueled by families who jumped into the car with screaming kids and spent money.