2020 has been an interesting year: wildfires in the Australian bush; Prince Harry and Meghan Markle conduct their own Brexit; murder hornets; wildfires in the Western US; and Zoom surpassed Skype as the most popular personal Web conferencing application. That last one may have been helped along by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the audiovisual entertainment world, stay-at-home orders and social distancing have led to renewed interest in terrestrial over-the-air broadcast television and have been a boon for video streaming services – OTT really has gone over the top.
2020 has also been the most difficult time for the theatrical market since the two World Wars. In both World Wars, the European movie industry was devastated while the US industry was left largely untouched. This led directly to a shift from a European-led silent film era before World War I to the domination of the US studios by the end of World War II. Oceans could not protect the US this time, so it has joined in the production and box office slump that has spanned the globe.
While 2020 was definitely an off-year, the theatrical market has persevered. Our friends at Nash Information Services (home of The Numbers and Opus Data) compiled a report of the top 100 2019 and 2020 box office performers in the US domestic theatrical market.[1] All told, 2020 is shaping up to total 12% of 2019’s gross, with 84 of the 2020 films grossing below the lowest performer from 2019. 2020’s top 5 all had January or February releases, while 2020’s top performer, Bad Boys for Life, would have come in at number 12 in 2019. Tenent, summer’s big hope with an early August release, earned less than $58 million US. This earned it the number 8 slot for 2020, but would have been would have placed it at number 49 in 2019.
This has all been grim news for theater owners and theatrical producers, but with vaccines already being administered in the UK and the rest of the world soon to follow, the dawn will soon come. When restrictions on theatrical operations lift, the pent up demand from people who have been forced to stay home entertaining each other should drive a brisk theatrical market. Dinner and a movie will return as the go-to date night option, replacing Codenames via Skype, which is fun and all, but not nearly the same thing.
So, congratulations to those movies that managed a theatrical run in 2020 and here’s to a superior 2021 in all respects.
USA Top 100: 2020
USA Top 100: 2019
[1] An important point, these are gross revenues earned during the calendar year rather than revenues over the full run for a film in release during the year.