2022 market prediction: our first analysis of 2022 points to $6.8-billion year at the box office

January 6, 2022

After two years ravaged by COVID-19, we’re predicting that the domestic theatrical market will grow significantly in 2022, although it will almost certainly fall short of its pre-pandemic glory. Our model currently expects a $6.8-billion year, up around 50% from 2021’s $4.6-billion total, but still far behind the $10 billion or so we enjoyed each year in the decade leading up to 2019. There’s still a lot of uncertainty at this stage, not least because Spider-Man: No Way Home has performed extraordinarily well over the past few weeks, while almost every other film has fallen short of expectations. In keeping with that, one 2022 film stands head and shoulders above the others in the model’s estimation at this point. For a change, it’s one that doesn’t involve super heroes. Although it does feature dinosaurs.

Here’s an overview of our prediction for 2022 as of the beginning of January…

One quick technical point about the chart. The bars represent the predicted combined box office for all films released during a month, which is a slightly different thing than how much will be earned at the box office during that month. That’s the reason the chart shows very low box office for this month (January, 2022). The lack of new releases and the continued strength of No Way Home is over-stating the gross for December, 2021 (the blue bar at the right of the chart) and under-stating the box office for January, 2022. That doesn’t make a huge difference to the predicted box office for the year as a whole, but does skew the results for individual months.

The story for the market is that, assuming the effects of the pandemic wear off (something I’ll talk about more in a moment), we should see a bigger box office than last year each month through the end of the Summer, before a slow October, based on the current release schedule. I think it’s quite likely that something will move into October to take advantage of that gap, but right now Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2 has that month pretty much to itself.

The model thinks the movie with the highest probability of earning the most this year is Jurassic World: Dominion, which has a prime release date at the beginning of June and seems like the kind of event film that might draw in relatively reluctant filmgoers the way No Way Home has. There’s a cluster of films headed to theaters around the time that are also betting on relatively low COVID case counts and a more normal Summer. The much-delayed Top Gun: Maverick leads the charge on May 27, followed by Jurassic World: Dominion on June 10, Lightyear on June 17, Minions: The Rise of Gru on July 1, and finally Thor: Love and Thunder on July 8. Those five films will define the Summer of 2022.

The two standout films at the end of the year are Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, arriving on November 11, and Avatar 2 on December 16. Both come with question marks—the former due to the sensitivity of continuing the Black Panther franchise without Chadwick Boseman, and the second because it’s so long since the first movie in the franchise. There are several other films already planned for release at the end of the year, but honestly, if those two tentpoles falter we could be looking at a relatively soft end to the year.

That’s a long time away though, and there will undoubtedly be some shuffling of the schedule between now and then.

The big question hanging over everything, of course, is what might happen with regard to the pandemic. In some ways that’s fairly easy to answer. It’s clear that COVID will continue to circulate around the world for years to come, so we’re now looking at how people behave in the long term under those conditions. A major spike in cases, like the one we’re current experiencing with the Omicron variant, could reduce theater-going for periods of a month or two, but Omicron hasn’t caused a complete shut down, in spite of producing the highest number of daily cases during the pandemic, and it seems likely we’ve moved to a new phase where people are making up their own minds about whether to go to theaters or not. The statistics on that aren’t particularly encouraging, unfortunately.

Here’s the current comparison on what our model says about current moviegoing, what Morning Consult’s weekly survey is saying, and what our model predicted going into the Holidays.

The bad news in this chart is that the blue line (our estimate of current moviegoing) and the green line (the share of adults who say they are comfortable going to movie theaters, based on Morning Consult’s polling) have been basically flat at around 50% since June last year. Our model moved up somewhat ahead of Thanksgiving, but has since reverted back to the 50%-or-so level.

What about Spider-Man, you might ask?

It’s a fair question. Our model is built to resist large moves because of the performance of a single film, and No Way Home was the only film to really break out over the Holidays. It’s possible that will affect the market going forwards thanks to people having a good experience and going back again, or seeing a trailer to a movie they didn’t know about otherwise. Our 2022 model currently assumes that will happen to an extent, and that we’ll get back to around 70% of the pre-pandemic audience by the end of the year.

That’s far from a sure thing, and it’s something I’ll be looking at very closely as January progresses.

Methodology

Our market prediction is based on the same model as the weekend predictions that we’ve been running since theaters started reopening towards the end of last year. We are now running the prediction model for every announced wide release on the release schedule and estimating the size of the market as a whole by assuming a relatively small amount of additional revenue from limited releases. The prediction for each movie is based on four factors:

The performance of similar films in recent years, and cast and crew Bankability. So far as possible, the model uses films in the same genre released by the same distributor as points of comparison. The predicted performance of franchise films is based on previous releases in the franchise. Cast and crew Bankability is weighted more heavily for non-franchise than for franchise films.

The current state of the theatrical market. We update our model after each weekend with a wide release to estimate what proportion of formerly-regular moviegoers are currently going to theaters. As of today, that figure is 50%. We also monitor Morning Consult’s weekly survey of moviegoers, and may make adjustments to our analysis if our number varies significantly from theirs.

Adjustments for specific genres. The pandemic has affected different segments of the audience in different ways. We are currently using four categories of movie in our model: “date night” films (which are doing worse than the general market), action movies (which are doing slightly better), family films, and “everything else” (which includes drama, comedy, and horror movies, among others). Family films seemed to be doing the best in the early stages of the recovery but are now performing much more like other genres.

Adjustments for day-and-date streaming releases. Releasing a film on a streaming platform on the same day as its wide theatrical release does seem to reduce its opening weekend and overall box office. That effect depends on the streaming platform, and seems to be fairly small for Peacock, but larger for HBO Max. Currently, the model estimates that a simultaneous release on HBO Max reduces a film’s box office by 8%. No adjustment is made for other platforms at this time.

The expected recovery of the theatrical market as the pandemic is brought under control. The model assumes that the market will settle back to 70% of its pre-pandemic size at the end of the recovery. Growth will be slow at first, accelerate as more people become confident in going to theaters, and then slow down as more cautious moviegoers take time to return to attending. This is the classic ''S-shaped'' curve seen in economics textbooks (and in many cases in the real world). (For more on this see my previous article, How quickly can the box office recover?) The model assumes that this recovery started on April 1, 2021, plateaued in July due to the wave in COVID in infections caused by the Delta variant, and started again when cases waned at the beginning of October. Those parameters are likely to be adjusted as the market situation evolves.

- Current release schedule
- Recent release schedule changes
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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com