Stoppage time
While robots have been rising up, American workers have been increasingly downing tools this year: strikes and lockouts have blighted multiple major American industries, with several high-profile wins for trade unions commanding, among other stipulations, protection from AI, better benefits, and bigger pay packets.
The unions strike back
Even though private-sector union membership has been plummeting for decades, with just 6% of American workers belonging to an organized group last year, data from the Labor Department reveals that October 2023 saw more days lost to work stoppages than any single month since the early 1980s.
The 4.4 million days lost to stoppages in October alone — calculated using the number of workers involved in strikes/lockouts multiplied by the total workdays that each stoppage stretched over — added to an already massive year for striking in the US, totaling ~17 million workdays lost days as of November. Even Hollywood didn’t escape strike fever: the 4-month-long WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes, the first joint writers-and-actors strike in 60 years and the longest actors’ strike in history, was estimated to have cost California’s economy almost $5bn.
Barbio
Even with strike-imposed restrictions on some movie promotions in the latter half of the year, moviemakers had a solid 2023 all told, with a few serious standouts.
Paint it pink
This year, the box office got all dolled up, with Barbie running away to become the highest-grossing movie of 2023, taking a staggering $636 million in the US, more than $1.4 billion worldwide, and breaking several cinematic records in the process.
There were other familiar faces leading this year’s movie rankings, with Super Mario, Spider-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy all smashing it on the silver screen. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer — the film that, alongside Barbie, delivered a notable boost to the US box office when the movies debuted on the same weekend in July — rounded out the top 5, taking $326 million in 150 days.
In recovery
While the box office may still be suffering a little from an ongoing case of sequelitis, with at least 6 of the top 10 films of 2023 being out-and-out reboots or follow-ups, the symptoms aren’t as intense as they were when we wrapped up the state of cinema in 2022. Domestic theater takings are recovering more generally too, with nearly $8.5 billion grossed so far in 2023 — the healthiest showing since the pandemic, according to Box Office Mojo numbers.
