The Numbers 2024 market forecast stands at $8.4 billion heading into the end of the year

Disappointing numbers for Joker: Folie à Deux and Transformers One put a big dent in our prediction for 2024 this month, with the two films between them coming in $270 million below our pre-release predictions. While that accounts for a big chunk of the $400-million decrease in our prediction for 2024 as a whole, it’s not the whole story.

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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice made up quite a lot of the ground lost by Joker and Transformers. It had earned $265 million when our prediction update was run, and remains on target for around $300 million by the end of its run. That’s $125 million more than the model predicted at the beginning of September.

The reason the overall prediction decreased so much was therefore not down to the performance of a few films, but rather because of poor results virtually across the board in September and at the beginning of October. The failure of films like Afraid, Never Let Go, Megalopolis, and White Bird was disappointing in its own right, but they also caused a big change in the model’s assessment of the overall strength of the market.

The model’s estimate of market strength is based on the performance of the last 20 wide releases. From the end of August to the first weekend in October, we saw a lot of films from smaller distributors that were trying to take advantage of the relative lull in major studio releases. Usually, one or two of them would have broken out, but this year hardly any reached $10 million. When the disappointing studio performers are added in, the model’s market strength score has dropped from 85% in mid-September to just 45% as of October 8.

We saw a similar drop at this time of year in 2022, and this is traditionally the slowest time of year in theaters. The question was whether this slowdown would persist into October. As we now know, it did.

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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com