2023 market prediction: mix of hits and misses keeps theatrical prediction at $10 billion for the year

June 22, 2023

The Super Mario Bros. Movie gave the market a huge boost in April, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 outperformed our prediction in early May, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse started June with a bang. But our predicted box office for the year as a whole remains unchanged at $10 billion in our latest update thanks partly to Fast X underperforming stateside, but also quite a few other films missing expectations. The good news is that our model remains fairly confident that the North American market will hit the magical 11-figure number this year after our prediction jumped appreciably in late April and early May.

Subscribe to our Bankability and Box Office report for full details, or read on for an overview of how our model thinks the rest of 2023 will shape up in movie theaters…

June remains on track to deliver the biggest box office month since the pandemic, at least as measured by the sum of box office earned by all the films opening during the month. Joining Spider-Man in the $100-million-plus club will be Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, The Flash, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. That should give the market a lot of momentum as we head into the second half of the Summer, with Mission: Impossible, Oppenheimer, Barbie and Haunted Mansion likely to keep things going through July.

August looks like a potentially strong month, but its box office performance is heavily dependent on films like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Meg 2, and Blue Beetle, none of which look like surefire hits to me. If one or more of them misses out, we could well slip below the $10-billion pace again.

Here’s a summary of the films making the biggest impact on the change to the overall prediction this month:

A slight tweak to our model has increased the predictions for a few dramatic films/awards contenders like The Color Purple, Killers of the Flower Moon, and A Haunting in Venice. I'm pretty comfortable with those movements, given that all of the films have moved closer to our measure of audience interest.

Our market strength measure again offers a word of caution:

As I mentioned last month, while the trend-line is still looking positive, the large number of films coming out at the moment means the estimate is jumping around quite a bit. That’s partly because the market strength estimate weights all wide releases equally—the over-performance of Mario is balanced by the under-performance of Elemental, for example. I still think that’s the right thing to do from a modeling perspective, but I’ll continue to monitor the situation.

With new predictions for March, 2024 this month, there's quite a bit of activity on the list of potential breakout hits:

Barbie remains the buzziest film out there in my opinion. Talk to Me is getting a big upwards adjustment, but still isn't expected to earn a lot at the box office. Our full report (click here to purchase) has full details on the top ten potential breakout hits through the end of the year. It also has our early predictions for films coming out in the first quarter of 2024.

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?) 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