“Vice-Versa 2”, “Deadpool & Wolverine”, “Despicable Me 4”… The franchises are winning the day and not a single original film slips into the top ten of the biggest hits of the year in the States -United. Crisis of inspiration or simple reluctance of the big studios?
The sequel to “Vice-Versa”, released in June 2024, sold out in North American theaters. Pixar Animation Studios – Walt Disney Pictures
By Marie Sauvion
Published on November 27, 2024 at 12:36 p.m.
Hollywood has more ideas than ever, and it’s not the 2024 American box office that will make it want to innovate. As the results approach, at the end of November, it is clear that not one original film is among the ten biggest hits of the year across the Atlantic. At first place in the ranking, unsurprisingly, is Vice-Versa 2, the teenage version of Pixar released in 2015, with $652 million in revenue. The antihero cynics Deadpool & Wolverine took second place ($636 million), well ahead of Despicable Me 4 (361 millions).
The rest is in agreement, which sees triumph Beetlejuice BeetlejuiceDune, part two, Twisters (admittedly more of a rereading than a sequel), Godzilla x Kong: The New KingdomKung Fu Panda 4, Bad Boys : Ride or Die et Planet of the Apes: The New Kingdom. At the global level, the top 10 hardly differs, except that there are three Chinese feature films that came close to 500 million dollars in domestic receipts.
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Box office: “Vice versa 2” is full of emotions
If the supremacy of sequels and franchises has been verified for at least two decades, explained by colossal budgets, crowded theaters, creative breakdown and the reluctance of the major studios, not to mention the guarantee, for the spectator, of a super-show in Charentaises, it nevertheless happens that it suffers from rare exceptions. In 2023, for example, this hegemony was shaken by a pink tornado (Barbie, by Greta Gerwig, queen of the American podium) and an H-bomb (Oppenheimer, by Christopher Nolan, in fifth position). A small country, however, persists in making an exception in 2024. With us, two French productions are in fact the pawn in Vice-Versa 2 : A little something extrafrom Artus, first with 10.8 million spectators, and Le Comte de Monte Cristo, by Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière, with 9.3 million Alexandre Dumas fans.
