2023 had a <i>lot</i> of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".<p>On the other hand, aside from the massive big-budget hits of Barbie and Mario, there were also a number of mid-budget films that did very well: John Wick 4, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy's, Cocaine Bear and M3GAN all exceeded expectations.<p>So it's hard to interpret this as the "middle class" of movies disappearing. I'd say it's the opposite, in fact. People have gotten sick of the big-budget crap that follows the same formula (note how most of those bombs are superhero movies). It's really the big-budget films that are falling apart.
Isn't this because the mid range is going straight into the streaming services, rather than through (an I assume expensive) distribution process into theaters?<p>Theater going is expensive (I think it's expensive), the alternatives are "pretty good", so that impacts overall theater presence.<p>Having a "block buster" that can justify the expense of marketing and distributing to the now weaker theater market seems like a prudent thing for the studios and it's just part of the current reality of entertainment.<p>I know I don't see many movies in the theater. I don't know if I've seen anything since Top Gun. I was hoping to see Dune 2, but it's delayed. I will be seeing the Ferrari bio-pic, simply because I'm a Mann nut. Otherwise, we rented Barbie. We rented GoG3, we'll be renting Oppenheimer.<p>And whatever other random stuff I sleep through from Netflix.
I'm not sure 2023 is a good year to compare against, what with the actors' and writers' unions striking for several months? If you look at the list of "2023 movies", you see titles such as <i>Coraline (Remastered)</i>, <i>Star Wars Episode VI</i>, <i>Titanic (25 yr Anniversary)</i> and probably some others that I missed which are not really 2023 movies...
I miss “smart” mid-budget movies of the kind Miramax used to put out in the 90s. With a few exceptions they don’t seem to be as prevalent. The market has changed.
I wonder how valuable this is as a metric, since much of what gets viewed is a function of art as much as it is marketing, production, or other elements. Some years studios make movies that are just bad--I wouldn't necessarily expect the income distribution to remain balanced across years.<p>Furthermore, these graphs don't appear to take into account the production cost of movies. If a low-budget film garners critical acclaim, it means more than a studio movie that just broke even, although their gross incomes could be pretty similar.
I don't think that "inequality" is even a thing when it comes to movies. Who said that all movies should be equal? Some watercolor "art" sells for $15 at an art-and-wine street fair while other pieces have five figure prices (or, of course, much more).<p>Secondly, as others have pointed out, the mid-budget movies are now on streaming or cable channels.<p>But yes, special effects extravaganzas are going to die out, just like Westerns and musicals did. Until they get revived.
I think that the data is missing something crucial, because it only talks about percentages. It's also important to know the total absolute (inflation-adjusted) revenue for each year. I'd like to know if the non-top movies are doing worse than before, in absolute terms, which we can't tell from the charts.
I feel like consumer choice has kinda gone too far with movies, people never cross genres because they never have to go along with something they don’t like.