The box office is bouncing back... just really, really slowly.
Thanks to a big boost from The Batman, the US box office has now taken a little over $1.2bn so far in 2022 according to data from Box Office Mojo. That's about 5x more than at this time last year, when most cinemas were still closed, but relative to the previous 15 years, it's still massively underwhelming.
A slow start
From 2005 to 2019, the US box office took anywhere from $2bn (2005) to $2.9bn (2017) in the first 3 months of the year, meaning that 2022 is tracking at roughly half the pace it used to.
Interestingly the average gross per movie this year is still around $10m, but there have only been 120 releases. Typically by the end of March US cinemas have seen somewhere between 250-300 movies come out.
Straight to streaming releases, or just a backlog of filming, have changed the game, and the box office just isn't drawing people back like it used to. Case in point: a majority of Americans have only heard of 2 of the Oscars’ 10 Best Picture Nominees (more on that here).
