IP vs. Originals Showdown: What the Top 50 Movies RevealI look at three years of box office data to reveal hot new genres, six promising new franchises and the mystery of what happened to the $100m movie
ESG’s data-driven analysis for paid subscribers appears every other Thursday. He recently wrote about 6 producers who didn’t live up to their hype in 2024, made a cautious defense of David Zaslav and explained how animation is making serious bank, almost no matter what.Happy New Year! 'Tis the season for reflection and resolutions. Specifically, it’s the time of year to look back on the year that just passed, judge who won, who lost and what surprised us — all in the hopes of making this year’s decisions more informed and smarter with the data at hand. (I hope you didn’t miss my last column delivering Christmas coal to six producers.) Today I turn to the movie business, but I asked myself a key question:
Why artificially limit ourselves to just the previous calendar year of filmgoing when, to be honest, the same trends run for a few years? Let’s break out of the shackles of 365-day analysis! As for how many years to analyze, the last 10 or 15 years is probably too broad a sample size to deduce current trends, but only looking at the last two years is only marginally better than assessing a single year. The Covid-19 pandemic offers an interesting demarcation point that gives us an optimal way to assess the state of the feature film industry. In 2021, theaters still hadn’t really recovered from Covid shutdowns, but by 2022 they had. By analyzing the last three years of box office data and comparing it, when relevant, to the 2017-2019 period, the new normal for feature films in the domestic market comes into focus. (I am mostly ignoring streaming movies and to explain why, think about this question that you may have heard me ask podcast hosts when I do guest spots: What are the five biggest live-action, straight-to-streaming films over the last three years? I’ll provide the answers at the end.) In this article, you’ll learn:
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