The summer 2024 box office finally wrapped up. What started as a bleak movie season quickly morphed into a solid return for Hollywood, with over $3.340 billion in the bank as of Aug. 19 (per BoxOffice Mojo). That number is far below last year’s $4.039B tally (primarily due to late bloomers Barbie and Oppenheimer) and nowhere near the $4.754B collected in 2013, but it remains a decent, if unspectacular, return, all things considered.
Although there are technically two more weeks left before this summer officially ends after Labor Day, we’re likely well past the peak moviegoing season with only a remake of The Crow left on the schedule. So, it’s time to reflect on the past few months and identify the winners and losers of summer 2024.
Winner: Disney
Say what you will about the Mouse House’s track record of late, but the studio absolutely dominated the summer movie season thanks to Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine. Both films grossed well over a billion at the worldwide box office, backed by solid reviews from critics and tremendous audience scores, proving that the crowds will come in mass if you give them what they want.
If that weren’t enough, the studio scored a late-season hit with Alien: Romulus, which exceeded even the loftiest expectations with a terrific $108 million worldwide opening.
What do these films have in common? They avoid controversy (i.e., politics), cater to franchise fans, and provide a quality cinematic experience. Moreover, all three movies were relatively cheap by modern-day standards. Inside Out 2 and D&W cost $200M to produce, while Alien came in at a cool $80M.
Last year, every Disney production seemingly carried a colossal price tag due to problems caused by the Pandemic or messy productions that required extensive reshoots. We need more cost-efficient films like Alien that aren’t required to reach a billion at the box office just to break even. This takes a lot of pressure off the filmmaker and keeps anxious producers from tinkering with the final product. Say what you will about Alien, but it is very much Fede Álvarez’s vision, unlike, say, James Mangold’s creatively bankrupt Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Mixed Bag: Star-Driven Vehicles
A few months ago, I asked whether stars make or break a film. Well, 2024 answered that question—kind of.
One look at the Top 10 domestic box reveals star-drive vehicles such as Deadpool & Wolverine (Ryan Reynolds/Hugh Jackman), Twisters (Glen Powell), Bad Boys: Ride or Die (Will Smith/Martin Lawrence), Challengers (Zendaya) and the recent It Ends with Us (Blake Lively) were all the rage this year.
Then again, star-driven pictures such as IF (Ryan Reynolds), The Fall Guy (featuring the combined star power of Emily Blunt and a post-Barbie Ryan Gosling), Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Anya-Taylor Joy and Chris Hemsworth), Horizon: An American Saga (Kevin Costner), Fly Me to the Moon (Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum), and the recent Borderlands (Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Kevin Hart) failed to connect with audiences. Some, like Furiosa and Borderlands, were outright bombs.
What’s the lesson? Movie stars can propel a picture to the box office stratosphere, so long as they’re placed in the proper role. Hugh Jackman has never been a box office draw sans his Wolverine claws, while ScarJo’s biggest hits were all Marvel products or animated features. Hell, even Tom Cruise fell back to Earth with last year’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning a year after saving Hollywood’s bacon with Top Gun: Maverick.
Would a Will Smith film besides Bad Boys generate enormous box office receipts? Would Glen Powell have hit paydirt in anything but Twisters, a legacy sequel to a popular 90s action film? It’s an interesting conundrum without a clear-cut answer.
Loser: Original Movies
Try as it may, but modern Hollywood cannot produce original tentpoles. Aside from Longlegs, every creative swing this summer struck out. IF legged out to a respectable $184M worldwide but was far from a hit. Kevin Costner’s Horizon crashed and burned with a putrid $34M (against a $100M price tag). Pictures such as The Bikeriders ($35M), The Watchers ($32M), the costly Fly Me to the Moon ($40M), and even M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap ($62M) failed to generate much excitement. In the case of Trap, the picture was a success relative to its $30M production cost but a far cry from Shyamalan’s more lucrative projects.
The Top 10 consists almost entirely of sequels, including Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes ($397M), with only IF and It Ends with Us standing out as original concepts. Smaller pictures such as Babes ($3.8M) and Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot ($11M) performed decently relative to their minuscule budgets, but other than Longlegs ($72M), no other original picture took flight this summer.
Winner: Low-Budget Thrillers
Speaking of which, Longlegs’ improbable run proves low-budget horror is still the best way to make moola. Trap, for example, may not have been a massive success, but its modest budget ensured it still turned a profit.
Elsewhere, MaXXXine earned $20M worldwide against a $1M budget, a win any studio will happily take. On a larger scale, A Quiet Place: Day One cost just $67M to produce and ran away with $261M worldwide, while Renny Harlin’s The Strangers – Chapter 1 slashed its way to an impressive $47M worldwide gross against an $8.7M budget.
Toss in the aforementioned Alien: Romulus, and there’s no reason studios shouldn’t be churning out a pair of small-budget horror features each year.
Loser: Movies No One Wanted
Obviously, gauging audience interest is difficult. Otherwise, every picture would make a billion dollars. However, in the case of Furiosa, there were enough warning signs to suggest that moviegoers weren’t interested in another go with these particular characters.
Now, I love Furiosa — it’s one of my favorite movies of the year! — but even I felt it was foolhardy for George Miller to produce a $168M sequel to his Mad Max: Fury Road. The 2015 Mad Max sequel earned a modest $380M and was more of a critical hit than an out-and-out blockbuster. A wiser studio would have given Miller an $80M budget and forced him to include Tom Hardy, if not Mel Gibson.
Likewise, a book like Harold and the Purple Crayon isn’t exactly begging for the big-screen treatment. Alas, someone greenlit the project for $40M, no less, and received a paltry $20.9M for their efforts. Ouch.
Then there’s Borderlands, a $100M adaptation of a long past-its-prime video game directed by Eli Roth (allegedly) and starring Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Gina Gershon, and Kevin Hart. The Guardians of the Galaxy wannabe has earned just $18.6M and will likely hit streaming far earlier than anticipated. Ouch, again.
I’m tempted to place Twisters here. The storm-chasing pic ran off with a solid $333M worldwide, despite Universal Pictures pulling the plug and sending it to streaming far too quickly. By contrast, the original 1996 film earned $494.5M WW (or $992M adjusted for inflation). Is the sequel a hit? You be the judge.
Winner: Animated Movies
Finally, never underestimate the power of the animated feature. Inside Out 2 blew past expectations to become 2024’s highest-grossing picture, while Illumination’s Despicable Me 4 cruised to an easy $848M. While initially dubbed a bomb, The Garfield Movie grossed a sizeable $255.4M despite earning just $91M stateside.
Moral of the story: parents want to distract their kids for 90 minutes, and the final product doesn’t have to reach early Pixar levels of genius.
Final Note: We Need More Action Movies for Men
The 2024 summer movie slate reveals an important detail: movies for dudes sell. Deadpool & Wolverine were mainly skewed toward men (63% per Deadline), and ditto for Alien: Romulus (71%). There aren’t any gender stats for Bad Boys: Ride or Die, but I assume the numbers are similar. Even action movies designed for women, like Furiosa, attracted more men than women at an alarming rate.
Predictably, the only picture that brought the ladies in droves was Twisters (46% women), and that likely has more to do with Glen Powell’s luscious locks than Daisy Edgar-Jones’ strong-willed tornado chaser.
This begs the question: Where are the dude movies? What happened to stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, and Bruce Willis? Why isn’t Chris Hemsworth leading his own Die Hard-esque action franchise (on the big screen, Netflix doesn’t count)? Why is Chris Pratt wasting away doing animated voice work and Amazon TV shows? Why is Michael B. Jordan only doing Creed pictures? Why aren’t we seeing more John Wick-inspired action thrillers? Where the hell is Jason Momoa?
Clearly, the talent exists to form a modern “expendables” as it were, but Hollywood keeps sidestepping easy box office receipts and trying to force-feed dimwitted heroes like Colt Seavers down our throats. Deadpool & Wolverine is the closest thing to a bromance we’ve received since Top Gun: Maverick, a film that grossed $1.493 billion worldwide.
Action films geared toward men sell. Stop dicking around, Hollywood. Bring back the classic action hero, and watch the money roll in!
