I was poking around The Numbers' website, now the default box office stats website after Box Office Mojo went south. I'm still getting used to the interface, but I'm grateful to have it. And I started thinking about past summers playing the Summer Movie Wager, and the prediction list I'd had in the works for 2020, which had "Wonder Woman 1984" in the top spot. And I wondered what the 2020 box office results actually looked like after all the COVID cancellations.
Some quick comparisons of the relevant charts and available numbers got me the following list of the Top Ten domestic summer grossers (released May 1st or later), as of Labor Day, 2020:
Tenet - $20,200,000 (est.)
The New Mutants - $12,453,322
Unhinged - $11,835,640
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run - $3,655,445
Bill & Ted Face the Music - $2,373,914
The Wretched - $1,814,193
Words on Bathroom Walls - $1,614,184
The Rental - $1,589,020
The Personal History of David Copperfield - 1,088,815
Relic - $1,046,976
The $20 million total for "Tenet" represents its opening weekend, beginning September 3rd. To date it's made roughly $52 million, good enough for eleventh place on the yearly chart. "New Mutants," "Bill & Ted," and "David Copperfield" were in their second weekends, romantic comedy "Words on Bathroom Walls" was in its third, and "Unhinged" and "Spongebob" were in their fourth. From May through July, most theaters in the U.S. were closed, and the tiny box office was lead by a handful of low budget horror movies like "The Wretched," "Relic," "Becky," "Followed," and "The Rental." "The Wretched," which held the top spot through the entire month of May, for five weekends straight, premiered in eleven drive-in theaters.
As a point of comparison, "Avengers: Endgame" won last summer with $858 million. In tenth place was "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" with $131 million. Even more sobering, "Tenet" has been out in theaters at the time of writing for two months, and hasn't been able to match the domestic total of "Onward," which made $61 million in its two weeks of release before theaters were shut down in March. The top grossing film of the year remains "Bad Boys for Life," at $204 million. "Tenet's" healthy international earnings have alleviated some of the pain, but it's clear why the rest of the 2020 slate is empty of major studio films. The theaters will be struggling with their bookings well into 2021.
This is a historic year for a lot of reasons, and the summer of 2020 is sure to be an outlier when looking at box office trends in the future. Even if the pandemic continues on to affect the summer of 2021, I expect we'll all be better prepared for it. There's a lot of gloom and doom in the exhibition industry right now as theater owners struggle to muddle through another long stretch with no new blockbusters in sight. We're likely to see a lot of venues shuttered or sold before restrictions are lifted. However, in spite of the lengthy pause, the big screen experience is not going anywhere, and they're not going to run out of movies to show.
If this pandemic has taught me anything, it's that we're never going to be short of movies, period. There are going to be fewer new releases, sure, but after months of lockdown with VOD and streaming as my only source of new titles, big budget spectaculars are the only thing that really seems to be missing, and Netflix and Disney+ are starting to make inroads in that category. I'm actually kind of enjoying the quieter lulls before next year's inevitable glut. And they're still filming more - "Mission: Impossible," "Batman," and all those Marvel movies are barreling towards us, and lockdown is only going to keep them at bay for so long.
If all goes well, the summer of 2021 is going to be crazy. And if it doesn't go well, 2022 is going to be even crazier. I hope all you movie people are prepared for this, because once the floodgates open, we're not going to see anything resembling normal for a long time to come.
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