Is cinema dying? The box office results that have already set off all the alarms

It is not the first time that the bad moment that movie theaters are experiencing has become evident. However, it seems that the situation coming from the United States is especially dramatic. Is it irreversible?

Movies that have failed at the box office have always existed, even when they are large productions with enormous commercial expectations.

In many ways, the public is always unpredictable. However, the situation now seems much more worrying than ever: failing at the box office is becoming the general norm.

To make matters worse, Hollywood seems to have confirmed it in the most painful way possible: with the lowest results in twenty years.

All the alarms are ringing, and the great experts and cinephiles are looking at each other wondering whose fault it is. But above all there is a fundamental question: Does the movie theater crisis have a solution? Because yes, that is the name of what happens.

A weekend to forget

For quite some time now, various films have failed to attract people to cinemas. It has happened with many superheroes like Aquaman 2, The Marvels or Madame Web, but also with other productions, including Furiosa. In fact, it was the latest installment of the Mad Max saga that has shown that, indeed, something is happening with the public.

The main reason is that everyone expected it to be a hit at the box office, at least in the United States. There were no shortage of reasons to be optimistic: The previous installment from 2015 with Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron did work well commercially, and Furiosa was also released on a holiday (during Memorial Day)which usually guarantees excellent results.

But neither one thing nor the other has managed to convince the Fury Road prequel to convince people to go to the movie theaters. Nor to see the new installment of Garfield, which despite his poor numbers, has even managed to surpass his apocalyptic competitor. The situation seems tragic, and not even the success of specific releases like Dune 2 seems to encourage the industry.

Some want to explain what happened by arguing that prequels generally tend to gross less than the originals, but the truth is that the return of Mad Max was not an original film either. And almost everyone agrees that that’s not the problem. Simply put, people have stopped going to movie theaters, at least almost always. Because?

Is cinema dying?

There are many people who blame the poor situation of movie theaters on the pandemic. When people were confined, the public lost the habit. And you know, human beings have habits.. There are those who also denounce the high price of tickets, when before it was something rather popular.

But both explanations clash with the hundreds of euros that are paid, for example, to go to concerts by groups whose members are often already in their sixties or seventies.

Could the problem be in the great offer of movies that there are without leaving home, on platforms like Netflix (which also have their problems), or in the excess of sequels, superheroes and super squeezed franchises?

At the moment, it’s hard to know, and maybe it all adds up. What is clear is that, While trying to find a diagnosis, movie theaters languish, and there doesn’t seem to be much reason for optimism. At least, not today.

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Tags: Movies, Cinema