Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning – Part One Author: Paramount Pictures
Box office data for North America and around the world came out this morning, and it's not exactly encouraging for movie theater operators. In North America, the market total of $63.4 million represented the second-worst weekend of the year. Globally, there were few new entries on the chart, with the Chinese crime thriller Last Suspect, showing only in China, taking the highest place (fourth). In the UK and Ireland the situation is even worse: American indie comedy Bottoms took seventh place among new releases on the weekend chart.
Things could have been very different if Warner Bros had stuck to its plans to release Dune: Part Two on Friday, November 3. This is the date the film was originally dated. Considering that the first Dune film grossed over $400 million worldwide and was well received by audiences, it's fair to assume that the final installment of the story will bring in similar numbers.
This is to blame for the ongoing confrontation between Hollywood actors and their employers, namely studios and streamers. With the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) and AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) unions banning actors from promoting until the current strike was resolved, Warner Bros. decided in August to delay Dune: Part Two until next March. at which time the strike must be called off.
In fact, the SAG-AFTRA strike appears to be just days – and perhaps hours – away from resolution, as union officials are currently mulling the “latest, greatest and final proposal” from AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers).
But while Hollywood will surely celebrate the end of the strike when the good news finally arrives, unfortunately, the damage from the 116-day strike (so far) has already been done. Studios set release dates for films well in advance, and on the summer calendar in particular, major films jostle for position—essentially a Darwinian battle in which films deemed to have the greatest audience appeal choose those dates deemed to have the most favorable. and other names can be used where possible.
The eighth Mission: Impossible film (currently untitled, but originally titled Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two) was originally scheduled for early July next year, but has been pushed back to July 2025. The problem for sponsors Paramount is that filming had not been completed when the actors' strike began on July 14. Even if filming resumed very soon, given the difficult post-production, it would have put the film on a race to completion, for which there was little hope.
The question remains: how many films are in the same boat? Other studios have decided not to move key games from the summer 2024 schedule, but is this more of a macho posturing as negotiations with SAG-AFTRA continue rather than a true reflection of the situation?
The second Avatar sequel is one of many films postponed from 2024 to 2025
Since the release of Iron Man in 2008, Disney has repeatedly taken pole position at the start of the summer blockbuster season, sweeping the first weekend of May (or the last weekend of April) with a string of big Marvel titles. And as usual, Marvel's Deadpool 3 is scheduled to release on the first weekend of May next year. The first Deadpool movie grossed $783 million in theaters worldwide in 2016, followed by Deadpool 2 in 2018 with a nearly identical $786 million—clearly no sequel fatigue.
Filming on Deadpool 3 began at Pinewood Studios on May 22 and was suspended seven and a half weeks later on July 14 when the strike began. Last month, Hollywood trade publication The Wrap asked director Shawn Levy if the film would be released in May 2024, and he responded, “I wish I knew.” But given that he also said, “We shot half the movie, I edited half the movie,” it seems like Deadpool 3 still has a big mountain to climb – a film that will require heavy visual effects post-production. completed.
Mystery surrounds the release of the latest live-action version of Disney's animated classic, Disney's Snow White, which wrapped filming shortly before the cast's strike and was originally scheduled for March of next year. Disney announced last month that the film was being pushed back to March 2025, prompting speculation that the film would require additional filming. Pixar's alien film Elio has also been pushed back from March 2024 to June 2025, and Marvel's Blade and Fantastic Four have also been pushed back to 2025, as has Avatar 3. Even the Dirty Dancing remake was pushed back from February 2024 to summer 2025.
Deadpool 2 Credits: AP
For Gower Street Analytics, which uses algorithms to guide movie studios to the most favorable release dates for films, the fluctuations in the 2024 release calendar are bad news. Global box office revenue has been steadily recovering since the pandemic, reaching $26 billion in 2022, but still well below the record $42.5 billion reached in pre-pandemic 2019. significant growth of 33% compared to 2022.
Robert Mitchell, director of theater research at Gower Street, predicts not a decline in 2024 as a result of the strike, but rather a loss of momentum. “The business growth we're projecting for this year compared to last year, if it could be repeated next year, we would be back to the $40 billion level we were at before the pandemic,” he says. “We have seen months this year where the global box office and many individual markets performed above the average of those months in the years immediately preceding the pandemic. This shows that audiences are back at the level needed for the right films.
“The fact that the strike has gone on for so long and caused so many delays at all levels of production, there is a risk that there will be no next year significant growth or perhaps no growth at all. This delays the industry's ability to recover. During the pandemic, movie theaters experienced a lot of difficulties for quite a long period and were just getting back to where things looked hopeful. Now this opportunity to return the business to where it was looks like it will be abandoned.”
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