If you’ve gone to a movie theater recently, it was probably for a reunion of sorts. The familiar faces of Ant-Man, Adonis Creed, and John Wick have been some of the biggest box office draws so far this year, adding to the already overflowing mountain of evidence that audiences will only turn out to theaters for superheroes and sequels.
Hollywood has been wringing its hands about the state of the theatrical business since ticket sales cratered during the early days of the pandemic. “The audience is just not there anymore” for dramas aimed at adults, one industry insider lamented to Vanity Fair last year as Oscar hopefuls Armageddon Time, Tár, She Said, and Women Talking struggled to find audiences. But squint a little at early 2023 US box office returns, and there might be signs for hope. The wholly original (and much-hyped) horror comedy M3GAN has made more than $95 million on a $12 million budget. The sleepy Tom Hanks drama A Man Called Otto has surprised with $64.2 million in grosses. Meanwhile, zeitgeisty comedy thriller Cocaine Bear overindexed with the extremely online and pulled in $62.6 million.
“There is an audience out there, and there is an appetite and a desire to go back to theaters,” says UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer, whose agency recently commissioned a study that, among other findings, backs up what is playing out around the country: That if studios make the right kind of movies, audiences will come.
The study from the agency’s research group, UTA IQ, offers a generally optimistic outlook on the future of movie theaters, though 2022 grosses remained woefully below a prepandemic high. In a poll of 2,000 Americans between the ages of 15 and 69, 75% said they planned to maintain (or even increase) their moviegoing this year. Perhaps more notably, 33% said they would go to the movies more—if there were more distributed that they were interested in seeing.
That might seem self-evident, but film industry observers have been saying for a while that studios need to put more movies—and not just big-budget franchises—in theaters if they expect cinephiles to pay up for tickets, and that hasn’t exactly happened. “I think there needs to be a little more courage and encouragement to make those kinds of movies,” says Zimmer, pointing to mid-budget films like the 1994 crime drama The Shawshank Redemption and the 2005 sports biopic Cinderella Man.
Look no further than the saga of the $150 million Nancy Meyers rom-com, which Netflix scrapped over concerns about the budget. Though she’s been shopping it to other studios, no new distributor has been announced. That’s a big number for a romantic comedy, but the movie’s struggle could also be read as a sign of how undervalued films aimed at adult women are and how much more reticent execs are to take a swing on a project not based on pre-existing intellectual property.
Hollywood likes to blame the rise of streaming for the challenging box office climate. After Netflix began investing in big-budget action flicks and dramas from Oscar-winning filmmakers, it became a lot more enticing for audiences to stay home on a Friday night. Then the pandemic hit and traditional theatrical windows (the period of time when a movie is distributed exclusively at theaters) collapsed. But the UTA study found that for two-thirds of consumers it doesn’t really matter how quickly a film becomes available on streaming. The box office performance of Ticket to Paradise backs that up. The George Clooney and Julia Roberts rom-com made $68.3 million in theaters even as it became available for streaming on Peacock only 45 days after its release.
That doesn’t mean every movie belongs in theaters. As Zimmer puts it, “Every movie has its own potential and its own lack of potential.” More than a third of US consumers are being more discerning about the movies that they will see in theaters, according to the UTA study. But it’s generally accepted that giving a film a theatrical push can have a halo effect as that title makes its way to home video and streaming.
