There aren’t enough big movies around, warns the boss of a major US cinema chain, and it’s threatening multiplex revenues.
This is interesting. As much as summer blockbuster season seems back up and running in full this year, there’s still a greater than usual number of gaps in the schedule. Currently, Marvel’s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness is the only big blockbuster show in town, and it’ll have several weeks to itself before another similarly-sized movie – Top Gun: Maverick – comes along to give it some competition.
Pre-pandemic, it wasn’t unusual to have a big blockbuster a week. Studios, it seems, are still playing things on the cautious side.
This has been noted in the cinema exhibition industry certainly, with the CEO of major US multiplex chain Cinemark warning of a film shortage. In an earnings call to the company’s investors, he said that “many switched into 2023” when chatting about big film releases. With streaming taking a chunk of those releases too, he said of the film shortage that “we expect that to be a challenge for the entirety of this year – we don’t see those gaps filling in”.
He said that he expects box office revenues for the chain to be at a ‘normal’ level again in 2024, although clearly there’s still work to do there.
The firm’s losses are down, it’s reported, but profit may be a way away yet. Some more films would clearly help…
Image: BigStock
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