As the summer movie season unfolds, Comscore SVP and managing director Janice O’Bryan and PvNew senior film and media reporter Rebecca Rubin joined VIP+ media analyst Kaare Eriksen for a conversation on the months ahead at the cinemas.
Before Warner Bros.’ “Mad Max: Fury Road” follow-up “Furiosa” and Sony’s “The Garfield Movie” stumbled over the Memorial Day weekend, O’Bryan underscored how important it was for big studio titles to pick up the pace after a lackluster start to the year.
“I completely see it as a content issue,” O’Bryan explained, “and that has a lot to do with the films.”
After the extended weekend, 2024’s prospects remain grim. “Furiosa” collected $32 million over the four days, with “Garfield” amassing just under that. Per Comscore, it was the worst Memorial Day weekend in almost three decades, excluding 2020.
While the dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes ended before 2024, many films are still delayed to 2025 as studios play catch-up with various production schedules. This was the case for “Ballerina,” a follow-up and spinoff to the “John Wick” movies in the vein of “Furiosa,” as well as all of Disney’s Marvel films, apart from “Deadpool and Wolverine,” whose first-day ticket sales already set a record for R-rated movies.
Warner Bros. had already picked up much of the slack before the summer with the dual success of “Dune 2” and “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” but the first weekend of May hit a snag with Universal’s “The Fall Guy,” which opened under $30 million domestically despite being led by stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt after their Oscar nods in March, as well as a hefty production budget of as much as $150 million.
“With everyone … talking about franchise fatigue, and studios [needing] to come up with new ideas, it seems like 2024 is kind of saying, ‘Not so fast, we still need these anchor films, whether it’s the fourth film, a second film, a third,” posed Eriksen. “Does this cement that this is always going to be a reality of movies going forward?”
“I hope not,” said O’Bryan. “I hope that we aren’t just relying on remakes and sequels to films that have worked in the past.”
Studios including Disney and Paramount observed the consequences of spending too much on tentpoles last year, such as the former’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and the latter’s “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning,” each of which cost almost $300 million to make, before marketing costs.
“I think it’s always helpful for a studio to have a franchise, because it’s just a familiar brand that people have heard of,” Rubin said. “The hook is easier for marketing.”
But Rubin asserted the size of some of these production budgets isn’t in line with the reality of film exhibition after the pandemic, especially when Hollywood has to contend with the state of cinemas around the world to turn a profit.
“China has been slightly more receptive to U.S. product, but for the most part, they’re earning nowhere near what they did pre-pandemic,” said Rubin. “That has been a huge, huge loss for the major studios, to the point where they need to start readjusting their budgets.”
In the meantime, long dormant franchises have been roaring back to life. Almost a decade passed between “Furiosa” and the last “Mad Max” movie, but that’s nothing compared with upcoming sequels to “Gladiator,” “Twister” and “Beetlejuice.”
“ ‘Gladiator’ will be interesting because it’s been a while since the first movie,” said Rubin. “I think that [quality] can be really important in terms of getting people back.”
With “Furiosa” and “The Garfield Movie” now out the door, the summer season is that much more dependent on“Deadpool and Wolverine” and big animated sequels such as “Inside Out 2” and “Despicable Me 4” to arrive.
Stay tuned for more analysis on how animated films are picking up, as well as how film exhibition companies themselves are pushing through the challenges of 2024.
