Memorial Day weekend in the US, which was on May 25-27 this year, is traditionally a much-anticipated moment in the calendar for Hollywood studios looking to begin their usual dominance of the northern hemisphere summer season.
Big-budget family fare, tentpole action and franchise favourites begin their expected journeys to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue as the summer begins. Initially, this year seemed, in spite of some obstacles, to be headed for a strong if slightly lower run of box office receipts.
Director George Miller’s fifth entry in his long-running Mad Max series — Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel of the character made famous by Charlize Theron’s performance in 2015’s Fury Road — opened in wide release following a well-received debut at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
Starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth and featuring the kind of old-school, high-octane action that the franchise has successfully delivered to fans over the past four decades, the film seemed to be headed for a slam dunk opening weekend, signalling that despite the strike disruptions of 2023 and the havoc they wreaked on release schedules for 2024, everything was back to business as normal. The weekend’s other release — the family animation Garfield starring Chris Pratt — was also expected to perform well and so Hollywood sat back and waited for the money to roll in.
However, while both films topped the box office lists for Memorial Day weekend, they managed to bring in a combined total of only $63.1m for the four-day period, a 30-year low and a sign to many that this year may be a washout for traditionally comfortable big box office tentpole releases.
The rest of the summer season is now looking a lot less steadfast than the back room calculator wielders in the studios may have believed. Will Smith, still carrying the weight of shame from 2023’s Chris Rock Oscars slap, returns with Martin Lawrence for another Bad Boys outing. John Krasinski took time off from his successful horror franchise, A Quiet Place, to direct the lacklustre and poorly performing family film Imaginary Friends. As a result, A Quiet Place: Day One, the third instalment of the franchise, will arrive without him at the helm.
Pixar’s successful 2015 animated dramedy about the interior life of a young girl, Inside Out, gets a belated sequel this year and, for no apparent reason than desperate barrel scraping, the 1996 disaster hit Twister gets a reboot/branch-off film called Twisters, which someone believes might have a climate-related selling point for a new generation.
There may be some last gasp-hope for the box office care of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in Deadpool & Wolverine in July, but word in the trades is that studios should be preparing for era-defining lows at the box office in 2024.
There are several possible reasons. The first of these is that the bumper box office promised by “Barbenheimer” madness last summer was hamstrung by the strikes, which also caused chaos to release schedules for this year, with several promising must-see films delaying their productions and moving down the schedule for release in 2025.
So instead of bankable blockbusters like the next Mission Impossible, 2024 has offered a risky prequel entry into the Mad Max franchise that doesn’t feature the title character of the series and The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling, a gamely entertaining tribute to stunt performers based on a cult favourite 1980s TV show. Add to that the lack of the usual big summer Marvel Comics Universe (MCU) instalment and no major Disney title for families — unlike in 2023, when the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid grossed $118m on its Memorial Day opening weekend — and the picture begins to look a lot less rosy than studios may have initially painted it.
The second factor is a more worrying and increasingly significant change in movie watching habits. Since the Covid-19 pandemic forced most of the world’s population indoors for months, viewers have often chosen to skip expensive trips to the cinema in favour of waiting until releases arrive on streaming platforms or on-demand services where they can watch them in their own time and in the comfort of their own homes.
In this environment, it seems it’s going to take a lot more than just another Mad Max film or animation to get people to drag themselves off their couches. The MCU has invested heavily in its series expansion of its multiverse of content; Star Wars has likewise become a big draw card for Disney+ and big-budget Netflix action adventures like Red Notice and The Gray Man have proved more than satisfactory to home audiences looking for the kind of all-year-round, splashy spectacle they’ve come to expect at the movies in summer.
The new blockbuster universe will probably now be divided between increasingly big-bet, high-budget offerings from streaming services and a last-ditch attempt by studios to squeeze whatever last drops of profit they can from CGI action franchises. Until then, 2024 looks like it will go down as a winds of change moment for the film industry, and what it does next may decide its future for decades to come. What that will be is uncertain but it seems obvious that it’s going to take a lot of imagination and a lot less repackaging of stale ideas and properties that have run their course.
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