Welcome to my annual box office year in review column. Disclaimer: this column features scenes of violence and coarse language, most of it coming from cursing studio executives. Viewer discretion advised.
I have done a lot of “year in review” writeups lately looking back at the awful year 2020, and while the subject matter has differed the general content has remained the same. They all talked about how COVID-19 upended the year in general and caused changes in the way society functions. The motion picture industry was disrupted more than most, due to attendance restrictions and outright shutdowns of cinemas for long periods of time.
We saw wide releases delayed for months at a time. We saw movies released directly to digital. We saw more outdoor screenings at drive-ins. None of that made up for the revenue that was lost to the industry.
Motion picture shoots were also disrupted everywhere, with projects planned for releases 2021, 2022 and beyond seeing their dates pushed back. In short, it has been chaos.
Instead of focusing on that, I will be turning my attention in this column to all the gory details about the box office bottom line for 2020. Based on the numbers for the whole year that are listed at Box Office Mojo, here are the top five domestic box office grosses for movies released in 2020:
Bad Boys for Life(Sony) $206,305,244
1917(Universal) $159,227,640
Sonic the Hedgehog(Paramount) $159,227,644
Birds of Prey(Warner Bros) $84,158,461
Dolittle(Universal) $77,047,065
It’s pretty obvious what these films have in common: they were all released prior to March, the month when the whole world went to heck. Bad Boys for Life and Dolittle were released Jan. 17. 1917 went into wide release Jan. 10. Birds of Prey was released Feb. 7. Sonic the Hedgehog was released Feb. 14.
You have to keep in mind that the January-February period is typically not a big time for new blockbuster releases, yet due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control it produced all the top grosses for 2020. And to give you an idea of how truly bad a year it truly was — the haul for Bad Boys for Life would barely make it a Top Ten movie in most years. The last couple years or so, it would not have made the Top Ten at all.
Compare it to the top grossing movie of 2019, Avengers: Endgame, which made a domestic haul of over $858 million dollars. $206 million is a gigantic drop off for a Number One movie.
Having said all that, even if this was a normal year this was still a good performance for Bad Boys for Life. Their haul now looks positively earth-shattering compared to movies released the rest of the year.
The top post-pandemic-shutdown movie was Tenet, released Sept. 3, with a haul of $57,929,000. Their domestic haul was considered disappointing at the time, but in retrospect it is remarkable this movie did as well as it did.
Tenetwas supposed to be the movie that led Hollywood out of the pandemic, but the pandemic had other ideas. In the end, it was the international markets that bailed Tenet out: its worldwide haul was ultimately up to $362 million.
As for Wonder Woman 1984, its domestic box office haul so far is over $28 million, but it is also expected to take in a significant amount through its digital release. Had times been normal, this movie would surely have challenged for the box office title and made hundreds of millions of dollars.
Some further details to share about the carnage at the box office in 2020. I saw a piece in the Hollywood Reporter which reported that the domestic box office gross in 2020 was $2.3 billion, down over 80 per cent. The gross in 2019 had been $11.4 billion. Yikes!
The global box office was also absolutely dog ugly, with an overall haul between $11.5 and $12 billion, for a drop of 70 per cent. In fact, most of the major markets around the world, including France and the UK, were reporting drops in excess of 70 per cent.
That same Hollywood Reporter story noted that for the first time in history, China had topped the North American market to become the top domestic movie-going market in the world, at $2.7 billion compared to $2.3 billion.
This is a big story. From what I gather, what actually happened is that the Chinese market returned to “normal” conditions around August, while North America and other parts of the world were still struggling to re-open and contending with attendance restrictions. Then in the fall, the “second wave” hit and the lockdowns hit the cinemas again in North America.
Here is one more fact that absolutely blew my mind: the global No. 1 movie for 2020 was not a Hollywood production. It was a Chinese one: The Eight Hundred, which has hauled in $460 million. By contrast, Bad Boys for Life grossed $426 million globally.
I have seen it all now.
Going into 2021 things continue to be in a state of flux for the foreseeable future. I expect the overall box office carnage to continue for the first half of the year, and when things get back to normal depends entirely on how fast the vaccine rollout is. I do think the international box office will be better than the North American box office for the first half of 2021. Europe, though, will still be terrible. The United States, terrible. Canada, terrible.
Having said that, I am optimistic things will finally get back to normal everywhere during the second half of 2021, once everyone has figured out how to deliver the vaccines to millions upon millions of people. I don’t expect any movies to be setting box office records for a while, but I do think a full recovery will happen at some point.
There are several major releases planned for 2021 including the oft-delayed No Time to Die (James Bond) scheduled for April 2, the oft-delayed Marvel’s Black Widow on May 7, Godzilla vs. Kong on May 21, F9 (Fast and Furious) on May 28, and Top Gun: Maverick on July 2.
Whether these release dates go as scheduled is an open question. My guess is that the studios will be looking closely at how the pandemic is doing and make decisions on release dates based on that. To my eyes, given the current lockdown situation, April and May looks to be too soon for these blockbuster releases and it might make good business sense if these are delayed to late summer or the fall. Surely by then, things will be better. Things cannot get any worse, can it?
That’s about all I want to say about the 2020 box office and what might happen in 2021. Normal times cannot resume fast enough, as far as I am concerned.
