Hollywood’s Box Office Recovery Needs Rewrite

2023 may be over, but Hollywood’s painful reckoning isn’t—especially at the box office. 

This year’s holiday season has largely been a lump of coal for the movie industry. Domestic box office receipts for the season starting the first week of November have barely crossed the $1 billion mark. That is actually below the same period in each of the past two years, which had been helped by the release of mega-blockbusters like “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” It is also less than half the $2.3 billion average for the holiday season in the prepandemic years of 2015 to 2019, according to Box Office Mojo.