2023 is proving to be a very complex year in terms of cinema. While there are interesting new releases, very, very few have managed to make a real impact at the box office, and most studios have more failures than successes. This has led to a dismal state for the film industry, with very few movies managing to survive the disaster.
Some of the biggest failures we’ve seen during 2023 have been Ant-Man 3, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Renfield, Knights of the Zodiac, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Flash, and even The Little Mermaid. But there’s an event that seems to have turned the tables: the Barbenheimer phenomenon.
Both Barbie and Oppenheimer have become big hits this summer, with Barbie even leading the top charts for 2023 alongside Super Mario Bros. And the best part is that they haven’t been the only ones: movies like Elemental, which seemed destined to fail, have climbed up to the top of the year. And lesser phenomena like Megalodon 2 have achieved good results. But have these releases saved the box office for the year?
Barbie and Oppenheimer: two unparalleled phenomena
The biggest success of the summer has been, of course, Barbie. Greta Gerwig’s film has reached a global box office of 1,355,695,173 dollars, coming very close to Super Mario Bros., a movie it could surpass in the next week as Barbie is still in theaters. In the United States alone, it has grossed over 596 million dollars and has become the highest-grossing film in Warner Bros.’ history.
With a budget of less than 150 million dollars, this has put Warner in a strong financial position and has set an example for other companies to move away from more established franchises and invest in more original content, even if it’s based on an existing intellectual property (IP).
On the other hand, Christopher Nolan has done it again with Oppenheimer. The movie has reached the Top 4 of the year, grossing over 788 million dollars, and it’s expected to reach 800 million. This is also remarkable news since it’s a biopic with black-and-white segments intended for adults. With a budget of 100 million dollars, the success Universal has achieved with this film is almost unprecedented.
These two movies have significantly improved the health of the 2023 box office. They’ve encouraged people to return to theaters and demonstrated that there is still a considerable interest in cinema. But is everything as rosy as it seems?
A summer also filled with failures.
There are other movies that have performed well at the summer box office, such as Elemental, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, or Megalodon 2. But many others have fallen short of expectations, even though they may not be outright failures.
This is the case with Mission: Impossible – Deadly Sentence – Part 1. The movie is the tenth highest-grossing film of the year, earning 581 million dollars. However, its budget was 290 million, so it falls short of being a great success, especially considering there’s still a second part of the film to be released, which is likely to attract fewer viewers.
The same has happened with Flash, one of the biggest failures of the year, which would have been financially better off not being released at all. And Blue Beetle, the other DC summer movie, is heading down a similar path. It has barely crossed the 80 million dollar mark and had a budget of 105 million. Superheroes are struggling, and very few are surviving this ordeal.
But the biggest failure of all comes from Disney. “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the fifth installment of the adventures of the most famous archaeologist in cinema, has only managed to gross 381 million from a budget of 300 million plus marketing costs. So, it’s clear that the franchise hasn’t worked well for the company.
We’ll see how things progress, as many highly anticipated releases are on the horizon. However, with the ongoing strike of writers and active actors, it doesn’t seem like the situation will improve in the short term. We can only hope that miracles like Barbie continue to arrive.
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