'Barbie' Ruled the Box Office in 2023

For quite a few years leading up to 2023, the only way to have a guaranteed hit at the box office was to make a sequel in a proven franchise or put a superhero in your movie. This year, the script was flipped, as franchise sequels and superhero movies struggled to live up to expectations and many of the most successful movies of the year were original stories. The biggest movie of the year, Barbie, was built on a franchise, but it was a venerable toy franchise, not a series of blockbuster movies. It wasn't a total wipeout for superheroes, though, as both Spider-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy headlined some of the year's biggest films. Read on for details.

Via Variety.

In 2023, the rules didn’t apply to many of the year’s biggest success stories.

For the past two decades, superheroes and sequels have dominated at the box office. But in the last year, many of the movie business’ Tiffany franchises had all the appeal of an Old Navy clearance bin, with the likes of Indiana Jones and Ethan Hunt swinging back into action for more high-flying adventures only to be greeted with grosses that were decidedly Earthbound. And cinema’s mightiest heroes, from Ant-Man to Aquaman, were told to hang up their tights and tridents as comic book movies suffered a historic collapse at the box office. Marvel, once seen as the movie business’s most indestructible brand, is asking tough questions about its creative direction, while DC Films has brought in new leadership in James Gunn and Peter Safran and tasked them with undertaking a total reboot.

Those films that did succeed emphasized the fresh over the familiar. “Oppenheimer,” a $100 million-budgeted historical drama about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb, is the kind of pitch that, on paper, is an insane gamble. That the film, backed by Universal and directed by Christopher Nolan, became an unmitigated box office smash only punctuates this crazy, upside-down year at the box office. For the first time in more than a decade, none of the three biggest movies — Barbie” ($1.44 billion), Universal’s animated “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” ($1.35 billion) and “Oppenheimer” ($951 million) — were part of existing film franchises or inspired by comic books.

“Original content, rather than sequels, ruled the day in 2023,” says Richard Gelfond, the CEO of Imax.

“Oppenheimer” proved that not only will audiences still get excited about new movies, but they’re also willing to cross state and country lines to watch it on the best possible screen. Cinephiles boarded planes, trains and automobiles to witness “Oppenheimer” in Imax 70mm – available on just 30 screens across the world – and experience the movie the way Nolan intended it to be seen.

Of course, “Oppenheimer” is just half of the moviegoing phenomenon that defined 2023 at the box office. The cultural craze of “Barbenheimer,” complete with double features of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” two seemingly different films with matching release dates, helped to fuel not just the largest collective weekend at the box office since the pandemic, but one of the biggest of all time. For a shimmering moment, movies were the dominant art form again, with the twin blockbusters monopolizing the cultural conversation.

“‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Barbie’ couldn’t be more different, but in basic ways, they were similar because they were compelling stories told in masterful ways,” says Michael O’Leary, president and CEO of the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO). “You don’t want to make assumptions about your audiences. It’s possible to overthink why people go to the movies. They just want a compelling story with great actors.”

Other original stories also rose to the top by catering to very specific audiences and relying on unorthodox promotional strategies. “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” became a must-see event for teen girls, who were encouraged to use their phones and sing and dance in the aisles in a break with “no talking and texting” edicts. Its $250 million global gross makes it the second-biggest concert film of all time. Swift gets to keep the bulk of the profits because she partnered with AMC Theatres to release the film in cinemas instead of working with a traditional studio, which would have charged her a steeper distribution fee.

Released in the height of summer, “Sound of Freedom,” a low-budget drama about a former government agent rescuing child sex trafficking victims, was able to compete against the latest “Mission: Impossible” and “Transformers” films. Released by Utah-based Angel Studios, “Sound of Freedom” relied heavily on faith-based crowds, encouraging audience members to “pay it forward” by buying tickets for others to see the movie. It also used crowdfunding to finance the film’s distribution and marketing.

Those films bypassed legacy Hollywood companies, but some veteran studios also embraced novel approaches to hyping their movies. Universal, for instance, turned the robotic doll at the center of “M3GAN” into a social media queen, hyping the film on TikTok and X, formerly known as Twitter, where the campy villain’s dance moves launched a million memes. The film went on to gross $181 million globally on a $12 million budget. “M3GAN” was one of several horror movies to top charts and rake in profits, joining a list that includes “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” “The Nun “and “Scream VI.” It illustrates that genre’s endurability even as other box office staples faltered.

An industry that became reliant on franchises to sell tickets learned the hard way about too much of a good thing. Big-budget tentpoles like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” and “The Flash” were primed to be the most successful movies of the year, only to wildly miss box office expectations. Part of the problem is that both the “Indiana Jones” and “Mission: Impossible” movies were saddled with budgets of nearly $300 million, meaning they had to be massive hits, which they weren’t, to turn a profit. To be fair, the rising costs were mostly the unforeseen consequence of a global pandemic that led to shutdowns and pricey safety protocols. However, they were also greenlit when China was a major market for Hollywood movies. Global tensions and the increasing popularity of local language movies in that region have led Chinese audiences to turn away from U.S. movies, scrambling long-standing business models. Add to that the disappearance of Russia as a major source of ticket sales due to the war in Ukraine, and you have a shrinking international marketplace. Privately, studio executives say there is a major push underway to get movie budgets under control.

Get the rest of the story at Variety.