2024 market prediction: a tough year ahead in theaters

February 7, 2024

Deadpool 3

The January revision to our 2024 prediction sees a revised expectation of $8.3 billion at the box office, down $100 million from our December forecast. That’s in spite of a net gain of two wide releases on the confirmed schedule, no major hiccups among the new releases in the first half of the month, and some good January earnings from films that were released at the end of the year.

The reason our prediction has fallen is that, while we’re seeing some interesting new announcements, they are not coming at a rate that’s quick enough to keep the market on track for our original $8.4-billion prediction.

Subscribe to The Numbers Business Report for an extended version of this report, delivered up to three weeks before we publish updates online, or read on for an overview of how our model thought the rest of 2024 will shape up in movie theaters, as of January 16…

We now expect 127 wide releases in 2024, down three from last month’s prediction. That’s going to be a key metric going forward, with 83 films dated as of January 16 compared to 98 at that point in 2023. There’s still plenty of time to catch up of course, but it’s probably already too late to save April, which might be one of the worst months at the box office since 2021 unless some of March’s releases have unusually long legs.




While 2024 still looks as though it will come in behind 2023, it does look as though we will have a strong end to the year compared to the past two years. Unfortunately, that remains a weak time of year compared to the era before the pandemic.

Overall, the major releases are still clustered in the early Summer and right at the end of the year, leaving some big holes from January through April, and September through Thanksgiving. For a full market recovery, someone will need to step in with films that at least stand a chance of hitting $200 million or $300 million at the box office. For this year, that looks like a distant prospect.




The deep dip in the blue line at the right-hand end of the market strength chart shows just how weakly films released at the end of 2023 have performed. The model currently thinks the market is at 50% of 2019’s level, which is a level we haven’t seen since early 2022. Even though that’s probably partly a matter of luck, it’s a big hole to dig ourselves out of. The model assumes that we’ll revert to the mean fairly quickly (as shown in the dotted grey line), but that would require almost all films released in the next month to over-perform. Given they don’t have a huge amount of competition, that might be on the cards, but it’s a lot to assume. More likely, we’ll see things return to “normal” more slowly.

With the exception of Argylle, the films coming to theaters in the second half of January and the first half of February weren’t expected to earn a huge amount. So the one piece of good news in all this is that even with some misses (Argylle in particular), the prediction for the year as a whole won’t change much for now.

The real test will be the release of Madame Web and Dune: Part Two. We’ll have more on those films in the next issue of the Business Report next week, and we’ll have an update here on The Numbers in a few weeks.




For more details on potential breakout hits, predictions through the first half of 2024, and more, subscribe to our full report.

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Bruce Nash,