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Business|Moviegoers Dealt Originality a Setback in 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/31/business/top-movies-wicked-moana.html
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Box office returns have started to stabilize. But nine of the top 10 box office hits this year were sequels. And the 10th was “Wicked.”
Dec. 31, 2024, 11:05 a.m. ET
A year ago, Hollywood’s creative community was celebrating the apparent decline of corporate, paint-by-numbers sequels and remakes. Blockbuster ticket sales for movies like “Oppenheimer,” “Sound of Freedom” and “Barbie” had shown — or so it seemed — that audiences were finally hungry for fresh stories.
You could almost hear the relief emanating from franchise-fatigued writers, directors and producers. “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the wildly inventive Oscar-winning art film that broke out in cinemas in 2022, had not been a fluke!
Alas. Mass moviegoing swung squarely back to the predictable this past year, with sequels filling nine of the top 10 slots at the North American box office. The ennead consisted of “Inside Out 2,” “Despicable Me 4,” “Deadpool & Wolverine,” “Moana 2,” “Dune: Part Two,” “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” “Kung Fu Panda 4,” “Twisters” and the 38th Godzilla movie, “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.”
“Wicked,” a song-by-song adaptation of the first half of the long-running Broadway musical, was the only top-10 outlier, counting as original, if only by a witchy whisker. (In the alternative reality of Hollywood, a movie can be “original” even if it is derivative of something else. What matters is whether the source material has previously been used for a stand-alone theatrical movie.)
Those hit franchise movies and others — the fourth chapter in the “Bad Boys” series, the 10th “Planet of the Apes” installment, “Gladiator II” — drove ticket sales in the United States and Canada to an estimated $8.75 billion for the year, according to Comscore. Theater owners are thrilled: Despite a shortage of major movies in the first half of the year — a result of two union strikes — 2024 ticket sales are expected to fall only 3 percent from 2023.
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