The Theater is for Art, Streaming is for franchises
I saw a really fascinating chart on /r/dataisbeautiful showing Daily Box Office revenue in the US every day since 2004 to today.
Obviously, the focus of the chart is to show how absolutely insane 2020/2021 was for the box office, with the vast majority of those years being totally red. Scary stuff, especially if you're a movie theater trying to stay alive. However, a closer look at the chart also shows a steady decline in Daily Box Office revenue since 2014 or so, with the greens getting slightly less green, and the reds becoming more and more frequent as time goes on.
Post 2021, it's clear the damage has already been done, and likely forever. I don't know if we will ever see the revenue numbers we were seeing in 2004 ever again. One explanation for this change is the prevasiveness of streaming (which by 2020 had already become a very integral part of most peoples lives, but during and after covid, has now become most people's essential media consumption point) for better or for worse.
Before 2020, I would have said this was a good thing. I remember being excited at the prospect that I might someday be able to watch a film on day one release from the comfort of my own home. The model seemed like it was working. Netflix was putting out banger shows, cable companies were on life support, and the streaming era seemed about as consumer-friendly as one might hope.
I was wrong. by 2022, streaming platforms had consistently raised prices, started running out of good show ideas, and rather than killing cable, they had essentially become a worse, less accessible version of cable. To make matters exponentially worse, Hollywood has entered an era of stagnation, with studios across the industry playing it safe with repeating, hollow, vapid, useless sequels, franchise runs, and re-makes which all essentially follow the same plotline, and the majority of which are thinly-disguised advertisements for amusement parks and merchandise.
It's true that there are standout releases from independent studios, new directors, and industry leaders throughout the 2020's (Oppenheimer, Poor Things, One Battle After Another, EEAAO etc) and these films do give me hope. But if you look at their Box-office numbers, they don't have the numbers to justify long-term theater investments. The real driver of theaters seems to still be the shitty, boring, wasted spaces that are franchise films and remakes, which in both cases are so shallow, useless and uninspired that you're better off watching paint dry.
The problem is: I love movies. I love seeing movies in theaters. The experience you get seeing a great movie in person on the big screen is incomparable to anything else. A good theater experience can make a bad movie tolerable and a great movie unforgettable. It kills me to hear that viewership for great movies is down so severely, and that franchise movies are dominating so much more than ever.
So, for 2025 and forever more, I will only go to see movies in theaters which are not franchise films, remakes, or sequels. I am choosing to use my money to vote for creativity, originality, and risk-taking, and I urge you all reading this to do the same. Save the shitty franchise film for your streaming box at home. Don't give the big mouse all your hard earned cash. The market is sending signals to theater owners and filmmakers that we no longer value their creative efforts - If we let that narrative win, we will be stuck with live action remakes of shitty animated films from the 90s forever.