February Insights – Our Bottom-Up 2024 Forecast Estimates an 8% Drop in Domestic Box Office Revenues

This time last year, our February Insights dove into our predictive box office platform’s late 2022 forecast for the full slate of movies 2023 was about to offer. As highlighted in the graphic below, the most recent tally of last year’s domestic box office (DBO) performance points to our forecast being over 96% accurate:

Being motivated to repeat that accuracy for this year, we at Cinelytic once again decided to use a bottom-up approach to get a head start on analyzing what 2024 has in store for the domestic theatrical industry. Just a few months ago, we ran projections on all the major releases announced for the upcoming year. These forecasts were then used to produce an expanded projection of the annual and monthly DBO. Cinelytic focused on 55 major titles planned for wide release with a breakdown of the number of releases from each distributor as follows:

2024 Forecasts

While 2023’s US$8.9b rebound came as welcome news to distributors and exhibitors alike in the post-COVID-era, most industry insiders see 2024 as a step back in the wrong direction, with many signals of an annual US$1.0b drop that may come courtesy of a less attractive upcoming film slate.

In terms of our prediction, Cinelytic forecasts just over US$8.17b in 2024 DBO revenue, representing an 8% drop from 2023’s bounce back year, which in turn showcased a 21% increase from 2022. This figure was further broken down into monthly forecasts.

As a testament to our ongoing accuracy and to kick-off 2024, see the below graphic to compare actual performance against our projections in regard to the first three major titles that released theatrically last month:

Bottom-Up 2024 Per Title Forecasts:

The Cinelytic platform utilized 19 key project attributes to run predictive analyses for these titles based on our proprietary algorithms and machine learning. We also took into account late 2023 major releases that are still generating theatrical revenue early in 2024. In this case, that meant including a calculated portion of the projected early 2024 DBO revenue from some major year-end releases like THE MARVELS, THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES, TROLLS BAND TOGETHER, NAPOLEON, WONKA, ANYONE BUT YOU, MIGRATION and AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM, amongst others.

What Does Each Forecast Look Like?

Highlighting Warner Bros. Pictures’ long awaited and delayed sequel to their acclaimed Sci-Fi adaption, we can use the upcoming March release DUNE: PART TWO to provide an in-depth example of just one of these projections. Utilizing the reported budget of US$120.0m, global P&A costs totaling an additional US$160.0m, and attributes to run the AI output including budget, genre, rating, talent, IP value, etc., the platform projects DBO of US$198.2m in the base case median scenario, representing an 83% increase from its predecessor’s day-and-date release from 2021. In addition, the Cinelytic platform is capable of predicting Home Video and TV revenue ultimately based on real data:

Based on the anticipated global net revenues totaling US$365.0m for Warner Brothers (including domestic/international box office, home entertainment, TV net of distribution fees and expenses), the film is projected to result in a substantial return (10-year ultimate) for Legendary Pictures, with a projected ROI of 116.2% and assuming a 50% investor share for the production company.

Methodology

While the 55 films we analyzed in detail may represent the bulk of the DBO set to be earned in 2024, there are of course far more movies planned for release. In order to expand this analysis and conclude upon the full domestic forecast, we analyzed actual performance in 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2023 (ignoring the pandemic period) and looked to see how the Top 55 titles performed against total yearly DBO for each of these years. In 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2023, the Top 55 performing titles respectively accounted for 74%, 77%, 91% and 84% of the total DBO, the median of which equated to 81%. Utilizing this median value, Cinelytic’s DBO projection for 2024 calculates to the aforementioned US$8.17b.

There’s More Where That Came From

As previously mentioned, Cinelytic has in depth projections for not only the top major studio releases for the upcoming year, but also titles being made available theatrically by several mini-major/independent distributors.  Please feel free to reach out if you’d like more detailed information on what our projections say for each major title awaiting release throughout the next 11 months.