Why are movies the only heavily covid impacted industry to see a 50%+ drop post covid?

in #movie2 years ago

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Movies globally are projected to make 20.2 billion this year.

The US box office for movies in 2019 was 11.4 billion dollars.
Globally, it was 42.5 billion.

In 2020, it was 2.2 billion in the US.
Globally 12 billion

The entire worlds movie industry in 2020 only did marginally better than the US the year before, due to COVID.

But why did is it still down over 50% after compared to 2020?

First look was releases.

In 2019, 792 movies came out in the US.
2020 was 392.

2021, official number isn’t in yet, but it’s projected to break 700.

Quantity is almost the same due to the backlog of 2020 releases that were postponed, but they just haven’t made that much money.

Black Widow released 379 million made.
The lowest performing Marvel movie.

Cruella made 233 million.
Lowest performing Disney live action reboot in the last decade.

Fast & Furious 9 made 716 million globally.
Less than Fast 8, which made 1.2 billion.

Big guess for why movies are making less, COVID fear.

Only issue with that.

Delta made 1.2 billion in profit, for the second quarter of 2020.
They made 1.4 billion in profit for that quarter in 2019.

Airlines are recovering.
Hotels are doing better.
Restaurants are surging.

Movies… They are the only heavily covid impacted industry to see a 50%+ drop post COVID.

Why is that?

Big thing to look at would be how studios like Disney & Warner went hard on allowing releases for Disney+ & HBO Max.

Disney charges $30 extra to see newly released movies.
HBO Max spent 2020 letting subscribers just watch new releases for free.

Neither of those did particularly well on the box office front, likely due to cheaper online options.

Fast & Furious 9, which was made by universal and didn’t stream anywhere on release did way better Black Widow or Shang Chi.

Best example being the Suicide Squad.

The first one made 746 million.
The sequel which had a duel release on HBO Max made 167 million.

Probably a decent loss in revenue from it being rated R and the first one being awful, but a big bite clearly from that HBO Max release.

Another example relates to Marvel & comparing Shang Chi with Venom 2, which came out under Sony’s distribution and didn’t go to Disney+.

Shang Chi has made 440 million globally.
Venom 2 came out a month later and broke 300 million, which means it’ll likely pass it.

That points the direction at this being an online release thing, which is why these movies like Venom, Shang Chi and so on do really well opening weekend, for people who want the theater experience and everyone else just watches online.

So… Do movies get better in 2022, when everything is theater exclusive releases again?

I doubt it.

I think the worst thing a company can do is take something away from customers.

Disney+
Paramount+
HBO Max

These all make way more revenue and way more stable revenue, versus the box office, which has failures all the time.

I think there’s a large crowd of people who kind of realized how expensive movies were, prefer the shows/movies streaming platforms offer and just want to stick with that.

2022 is obviously going to be better over 2021, but I don’t really think we see the global box office break 40 billion this decade.