Domestic Box Office Falls to $8.75 Billion in 2024 as Movie Theaters Struggle to Recover From Strikes

variety.com:

Rebecca Rubin Senior Film and Media Reporter Not even the dynamic duos of Joy and Anxiety, Deadpool and Wolverine, Gru and his minions or Paul Atreides and those massive sandworms could push the 2024 box office to pre-pandemic heights.

Domestic ticket sales have wound up at $8.7 billion for the year, down than 3.3% from 2023 (when revenues hit $9.04 billion) and 23.5% from 2019 (when revenues reached $11.3 billion), the last normal year at the box office, according to Comscore.

Admissions, expected to hit approximately 800 million, also declined from pre-COVID heights of roughly 1.3 billion. It’s the first post-pandemic year that overall revenues didn’t improve upon the last, though box office prognosticators attribute the downturn to the lighter release schedule that resulted from 2023’s actors and writers strikes. “The 2024 box office was healthy for six months, and unhealthy for the other half.

During the summer and year-end, big franchise series worked and records were broken,” says David A. Gross, who runs the movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research. “But the first four-and-a-half months of the year and the autumn were weak.