Barbie’s billion dollar box office success has fans tickled pink, but it’s left rival studios green with envy in a year that’s suffered failure after failure of would-be blockbusters. Does Barbie Mania mean box office is returning to normal in 2023, or is Barbie just an oasis in a sea of cinematic disappointment?
Margot Robbie stars in “Barbie”
Topping $1 billion as the biggest blockbuster of summer 2023 and on course to become the year’s biggest film, Barbie is a rare bright spot in a theatrical landscape yet to recover fully from the ongoing Covid global pandemic, or from the shift in audience viewing habits and ever-increasing streaming options.
While it’s true that 2023 is up overall compared to 2022 at this point, the increase is largely attributable to 2022 holdover Avatar: The Way of Water adding a billion-plus bucks to its coffers after the new year, as well as combining with The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s $1.35 billion to account for close to half of 2023’s receipts.
So far in 2023, buzzy projects and franchise sequels that have underperformed or outright flopped include Black Adam, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Flash, Haunted Mansion, Elemental, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, 65, The Little Mermaid, and several more.
While some would rightly point out a few of those films did several hundred million dollars in box office, the fact is they still had large production budgets and were expected — and needed — to gross up to/at least twice as much as they did to avoid underperforming.
There have been several success stories before Barbie, including The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and of course Oppenheimer, plus a few more relatively modest successes with high profit margins off low/modest budgets. But we can count these big hits on one hand, while we’re running out of digits to keep track of the failures and disappointments.
What this means is, breakout blockbusters are not only possible but inevitable, and audiences absolutely want to show up in droves to support and revisit films that meet or exceed their expectations. But for now and the foreseeable future, audiences are being much more selective in where they spend their theatrical dollars.
Post-COVID, people only see perhaps three or four movies at theaters all year, and use stricter standards for making selections: cost of tickets, strong desire to get the best seats (and willingness to wait a days or weeks to secure those seats), increasing top quality and affordable pricing of home theaters, growing number of streaming options with hundreds of movies and shows, increasing speed of films moving from theaters to PVOD to streaming, and growing bodies of entertainment and leisure activities that undermine the push to see every film vying for attention.
Covid finally slowed everyone’s lives down and reduced the size of our worlds until we had to make choices about what to prioritize, what we could and couldn’t live without, and where to find escape. Streaming became a lifeline to sanity.
In the aftermath of those early years of the pandemic, we’ve learned we can live with a lot less cinema visits — and even less streaming, as it turns out, or at least less streamers. Audiences are more savvy about their options, and less impressed by half-measures and “good enough” shows or films. As a result, only films that audience feel rise to the level of must-see are deserving of their attention.
Studios push so many projects at us, productions have to go faster and faster until quality suffers. VFX houses are overworked on too-short deadlines without proper pay, movies go through endless retooling to meet endless pandering to executive sensibilities or ever-changing plan involving sequels and spinoffs to set up, productions get more complicated and money gets tighter, people are overworked and underpaid, and as this becomes more common audiences are less impressed.
When audiences have the option to see movies like Avatar: The Way of Water and Avengers: Endgame and Barbie that reward viewers by making maximum use of the venue and the crowd experience, that are powerful testaments to artistic vision and ambition, that pay off on the promise of their premise, and that make us want to walk back into the theater and watch them again, we lose patience for anything that wastes our time by delivering less.
We’ve learned to expect more, because we know it’s possible. We’ve also learned what’s possible on TV now, and our demands and expectations have risen at home as well, so a lot of films we used to pay to see in theaters are now the sort of things we relegate to home viewing.
Even if the Covid pandemic ended — which it hasn’t — we would soon face a new pandemic, since they have become cyclical now. Streaming isn’t going away, either, nor are ever-improved home theaters. And audience judiciousness in deciding when and what to watch in theaters isn’t going to slacken — if anything, viewers will get more selective as options continue to get better at home and theatrical releases fight more for their attention with bigger, bolder projects.
Plus, coming technological changes involving AI will broaden who is making what, how fast they make it, and how widely they distribute it, which I’ve dived into elsewhere. Indeed, AI will even change how we consume entertainment as well, as I’ve also discussed in detail before.
Then there’s climate change to consider, which will increasingly lead people to stay home more and consume less in the near future. That, in turn, will all contribute in many ways to — in my estimation — further reductions in theatrical attendance (which will be the least of anyone’s worries in the larger context, obviously). There are also ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes to consider as additional short-term issues with longterm consequences.
All of this tells me we aren’t seeing the start of a theatrical recovery, because a full recovery is not possible under present conditions, so I fully expect current trends to continue or even perhaps worsen for a lot of studios and franchises. As time passes, the lingering effects of Avatar 2’s holdover receipts in 2023 plus a couple of particular breakout billion-plus performers will fail to prop up any seeming annual increase in total domestic receipts, unless more breakouts lead to increased audience enthusiasm and a reversal of all of the trends discussed above.
Studios that ignore these trends and try to force more and more big-branded big-budget big-screen offerings into the marketplace without ensuring broad appeal, highest quality, and commitment to marketing and promotion that maintains buzz (which requires knowing your audience and caring more about quality entertainment than about meeting deadlines to secure bonuses) will see their projects struggle or fail at the box office, in a marketplace that won’t get any easier any time soon.