2022/23 market prediction: Smile, Ticket to Paradise, and Black Panther help boost end-of-year forecast

November 8, 2022

Strong recent performances from Smile, Ticket to Paradise, and Black Adam have given our prediction for 2022’s total theatrical market a boost as we go into the critical Holiday Season. Adding to this, audience tracking of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is currently sky high, with the Marvel movie currently predicted to be the second-highest-grossing film of the year, behind Top Gun: Maverick (although Avatar: The Way of Water is expected to overtake it in the end, thanks to the extra money it’ll earn during 2023). That’s enough to take our theatrical market prediction for the full year up $200 million to $7.4 billion.

Here’s an overview of how everything looks through the rest of this year and up to the end of September, 2023 (including our first public prediction for the months of July, August, and September of next year). The bars in the chart estimate the total box office for all films released in a particular month.

For the remainder of 2022, two films stand out well ahead of the others: Black Panther and Avatar: The Way of Water. It’s not quite true that the fate of the business between now and the end of the year hangs on those two films, but it’s not far off. They could certainly earn $1 billion between them at the domestic box office, and the model thinks that they will contribute $840 million between now and the end of the year. All other films combined are expected to earn about $660 million. Meaning that if someone tells you they just saw a movie in a theater between now and the end of the year, there’s a better than even chance it’ll be one of those two!

The two other movies the model thinks should hit $100 million domestically before the end of the year are the family movies Strange World and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Neither film looks like it’ll set records, but they don’t have much competition over Thanksgiving and Christmas respectively. Which is kind of amazing, when you think about it. The prime season for family films will just have two of them opening in wide release.

Looking further ahead, the model is currently predicting that June, 2023 will be the biggest month for films since the pandemic, with a major release every weekend that month (and the prediction helped by the fact that there are five Fridays in June, which means the box office for Indiana Jones 5, opening on June 30, is counted towards the month’s total). It’s also predicting a sharp slowdown in earnings in August and September, much like this year, although August, 2023 should be better than August, 2022 thanks to The Haunted Mansion from Disney, and Blue Beetle from Warner Bros.. Those two films might not do huge business, but they (in tandem with The Meg 2 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem) should at least mean Summer lasts longer next year than it did this year.

The problems caused by an almost complete lack of major movies in August and September this year are made clear by our market strength estimate. Look at the drop in the measurement since mid-September:

In last month’s update, I speculated that this decline could be due to one of three factors: inaccuracy in the model, a reversion to the mean, or genuine weakness in demand as people got out of the habit of going to see films. With more data, I’m now fairly confident that the market has weakened since the Summer.

In my opinion, Black Panther is a “model proof” movie, in the sense that it doesn’t really matter how weak the model thinks the market is, people will probably still go see the movie. We’ve seen that a few times in the past year, most obviously with Spider-Man: No Way Home and Top Gun: Maverick, which basically performed as if the pandemic had never happened. I’ll have a detailed prediction for Black Panther later this week where I’ll examine that theory more closely.

The big news for now is that Black Panther is the biggest mover since our last market prediction:

The other pieces of recent good news are Smile, Ticket to Paradise, and Black Adam, all of which outperformed the model’s prediction. Those films add $167.7 million to the annual prediction, which has been dragged down by most other recent films underperforming expectations, to the tune of around $60 million.

One encouraging sign for 2023 is that several smaller films have been added to the schedule, with the Untitled Adele Lim film getting the model’s approval, possibly thanks to Lim’s previous credits on Crazy Rich Asian and Raya and the Last Dragon.

Two other films scheduled for release in 2023 are considered potential breakout hits by the model, mostly because of very early audience buzz. Oppenheimer and Barbie are both scheduled to open on July 21 next year, and look likely to have strong debuts.

For full details of which movies our audience tracking suggests will have breakout performances, a list of predictions for all movies coming out in wide release between now and the end of September, 2023, plus the latest updates to our Bankability values for acting and creative talent in the industry, purchase or subscribe to our Bankability and Box Office report.

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.

Adjustments for specific genres. The pandemic has affected different segments of the audience in different ways. We are currently adjusting movies with romantic content down by 20%, but not adjusting any 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 90% of its pre-pandemic size at the end of the recovery. Growth was slow at first, accelerated as more people become confident in going to theaters, and then will 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. 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