2022 market prediction: Maverick gives theatrical business a giant lift

July 11, 2022

Top Gun: Maverick

It’s Tom Cruise’s world. We just live in it. The incredible run of Top Gun: Maverick at the box office has helped increase our prediction for total box office earnings in 2022 by $200 million this month, in spite of a poor performance from Lightyear and, to a lesser extent, Jurassic World: Dominion. Our overall projection for the year now stands at $6.9 billion, up from the $6.7 billion our model projected as of May 18, and Maverick is now predicted to be the number one movie of the year.

Here’s how our prediction for 2022 looked as of July 10…




That big red spike in May represents the first month since the pandemic when the movies released totaled over $1 billion at the box office. Our model now expects Top Gun: Maverick to end up with something in the region of $650 million in total domestically, while Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will end up with around $413 million. Those two films alone are enough to push the month over $1 billion—our tracking counts earnings by the release month of the year, with the exception of films released in December, where we estimate earnings during the year.

And here’s what’s caused the biggest movements in our prediction over the last month:




The influence of Top Gun really stands out here. Prior to its release, our model predicted it would earn around $250 million domestically. That prediction rose steadily leading up to the day it came out in (a record number of) theaters, and by the time we had its preview numbers it seemed headed for around $400 million, assuming it had an average run in theaters.

However, Maverick’s run has been far from average, with a decline of just 29% in its second weekend, and 45 days in the top three and counting. It should earn something over five times its opening weekend in the end, which is a huge multiplier for a film that opened with over $100 million.

In short, it’s the standout film of the year so far.

At the other end of the scale Lightyear has been a major disappointment for Disney, coming in far below expectations. There are plenty of opinions out there on why Lightyear missed its audience and I won’t add to them here. I will, however, note that it leaves Disney in a bit of a quandary over how to split its animated releases between theaters and Disney+.

Things are looking brighter for Nope, Bullet Train and Black Adam, each of which have significantly higher predicted box office as a result of some tuning of the model around our tracking of audience interest. Roughly speaking, the model now uses a 50–50 balance between its “fundamentals” prediction and audience tracking rather than the 75–25 balance we’d been using previously.




Purchase our Bankability Index report for a full list of predictions for all movies coming out between now and the end of the year, and details on the nine movies that our audience tracking suggests will have breakout performances.

I had to make one big decision on the latest update to the prediction, and that was whether to change our baseline market assumption, which is the percentage of regular moviegoers we estimate have returned to theaters since the pandemic. Ever since I started running the model in January, 2021 I’ve assumed that the baseline would return to 70%. As the chart below shows, it has now done so according to our tracking, although Morning Consult’s surveys haven’t quite reached that level.

As of today, our market size adjustment is 74%. However, the number has been staying very close to 70% for a while, and the higher figure might just be noise. If it stays above 70% for three or more weeks I’ll make adjustments to the long-range model to reflect that. (Click on the chart below for full numbers from Morning Consult.)




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 2020. 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 six 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 74%. 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. This was taken into account when films were being simultaneously released on HBO Max and in theaters on the same day. Since that’s no longer happening, and we haven’t seen a measurable impact from films being released simultaneously on Peacock and Paramount+, no adjustment is currently being made. We are continuing to monitor this aspect of the industry.

Potential breakout hits. Films that have the potential to break out beyond what the model otherwise predicts are identified and their predictions increased accordingly. These films are currently selected based on our measurement of audience interest.

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. The rise of the Omicron variant at the beginning of 2022 caused another slowdown, which the model assumes will drag down box office from January–April, 2022. 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,

Filed under: Tom Cruise