2024 market prediction slips to $8.3 billion despite good March

Excellent results for Dune: Part Two, Kung Fu Panda 4, and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire added up to a good month at the box office in March. Unfortunately, the rescheduling of some films to 2025 meant that our prediction for 2024 at the box office dipped by $200 million to $8.3 billion in our latest update. (We’re at CinemaCon in Las Vegas this week to see what the studios have up their sleeves for the rest of the year—stay tuned for updates.)

Subscribe to The Numbers Business Report for an extended version of this report, delivered up to three weeks before we publish updates online, or read on for an overview of how our model thought the rest of 2024 will shape up in movie theaters, as of March 19…

The biggest new release announcement in the past month was Lionsgate confirming that The Crow will arrive in theaters on June 7. The model thinks that will earn in the region of $35 million. The other six films added to the schedule are all independent films that are shooting for wide releases. They are all most welcome additions, of course, but don’t move the dial much individually—in fact, when their predicted box office is added up, they only increase our total number by $40 million overall.

The feature article in our Business Report this month lists 31 films that we think could or should be added to the release list for 2024. Some of them won’t make it, of course, but if 20 of them do, that would take our wide release
total up to 121 or so. To get to our predicted 137 will therefore require another 16 films to get added to the list. Four of those will reportedly come from Angel Studios, and Crunchyroll will likely release another two or three anime titles. That leaves a gap of about 10 films that aren’t on our radar yet, or that may not materialize. It isn’t a huge number to make up, particularly given that we are cautious about adding films announced for wide release but that might not quite make it.

Unfortunately, the films that are getting added to the list are mostly hoping for closer to $10 million then $100 million at the box office. We think there are a few more films that are capable of nine-digit earnings domestically and that don’t have official release dates yet, but if they’re coming out in 2024, they’ll need to get added to the schedule soon.

This year’s ultimate fate largely rests on the performance of the potential blockbusters. The first of those, Dune: Part Two, made an excellent start on March 1, and is currently expected to finish with around $281 million in North America, according to our model. That’s significantly up from the $210 million we were predicting for it in January, but only a modest increase from the $270 million we anticipated just before its release. Impressive as its performance is so far (with the prospect of it making something around $800 million worldwide), its numbers actually slightly brought down our prediction when we ran the model on March 19.

Kung Fu Panda 4 is outperforming our expectations, with the model thinking it will end with $187 million, up $47 million from our prediction in February, and up $32 million as of March 19.

Those kinds of movements added up to basically a wash this month. What really harmed the year-end prediction, however, was three movies being moved into 2025: Mickey 17, Ballerina, and Alto Knights. Those changes pulled down the prediction by about $230 million, which is almost exactly how much it declined overall.

For more details on potential breakout hits, predictions for all movies through the end of 2024, and more, subscribe to our full report.

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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com