Box office: Finally, a rush of big (and big-ish) movies gives theatres an end-of-the-year boost

Aquaman, Migration, The Color Purple, and more keep the Christmas season going, but Wonka reigns supreme in its third week.

No, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom wasn’t #1 this week, but it was #1 last week, and I have a soft spot for it, plus I already highlighted Wonka two weeks ago.

I skipped the box-office stuff last week because of the Christmas holiday, but I figured I’d do a bit of catching up now.

As you may have noticed, there was a glut of new movies over the Christmas long weekend—four major releases on the Friday, and three more on the Monday, which was Christmas Day itself—and thus, there are seven films on this week’s top ten that I haven’t written about before.

Towering above them all, however, is Wonka, which came out one week before Christmas, and which—after playing runner-up to Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom over the Christmas long weekend—reclaimed the top spot in its third week, becoming the first movie since September to be top of the list in its third weekend.

Wonka is the 22nd film of 2023 to gross over $100 million, and it will probably be joined soon by Aquaman and Trolls Band Together.

And given the performance of other animated films and musical Oscar contenders that have been released during the Christmas season in previous years, it is quite possible that Migration and The Color Purple could cross the century mark, as well; it’s all a question of how good their “legs” are in the New Year.

At any rate, this is already the highest number of $100 million movies to come out in one year since the pre-Covid times. It’s not quite a full box-office recovery, but it’s at least competitive with the way things were, say, 15 years ago.

The figures are from Box Office Mojo; the chart is my own. The chart starts with 1997 because that’s the year Titanic broke all the records.

However, as you can see from the chart above, there were fewer films at the super-high end of the box office in 2023 than there were in the first two post-Covid years; there were no $700 million grossers like 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, and no $800 million grossers like Spider-Man: No Way Home the year before that.

There was even a dip in the number of $300 million movies—partly because the superhero genre that provided half of them in 2022 (it accounted for four of the eight films that reached that level) flopped so spectacularly in 2023 (only Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and the animated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse got that high).

And, of course, even the “success” stories of 2023 have some big asterisks next to them:

• Ticket prices surged thanks to inflation in general, but also because many people opted to see films in IMAX and similar “premium” formats, plus there were massive specialty releases like Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour that charged higher-than-usual prices for their tickets—so a lot fewer tickets were actually being sold than in previous years. Just look at this chart from The-Numbers.com:

• Also, bloated budgets meant that even some films which grossed $200-300 million were barely breaking even, if not outright losing money.¹

Anyway. I’m not here to do a full post-mortem for the year; more than enough people are doing that already. I’m just rounding up some fun stats and facts.

And with that, here they are for this week’s top ten, title by title: