2024 is a profitable year for cinemas, but for cinema as an Art, it's a different story. As we are about to begin 2025, what can we remember from the releases of the eleven months that have just passed? Of Dune 2 has Deadpool 3which films were the most profitable at the box office? Tremble, fellow movie buffs, because a new report proves to be very worrying for the future of cinema…
2024 is a special year, but it's not happy news…
In the world, 2024 will have been a fruitful year for cinemas. In France, regarding in-house production, The Count of Monte Cristo, A little something extra et Phew Love were a hit at the box office. On the Hollywood side, these are Vice Versa 2, Despicable Me 4, Dune 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Planet of the Apes: The New Kingdom, Kung Fu Panda 4 who come complete the top 10 highest-grossing films at the cinema of the yearwith between 2 and 9 million spectators each. In tenth position, a outsider concludes the ranking with two million entries, the biopic on Bob Marley. What do these six films have in common? These are sequelsand all are stamped as franchise.
On a global scale, this observation is even more marked. According to Box Office Mojo (via our colleagues at Games Radar)here are the ten highest-grossing films of 2024 as of November 21:
Vice-Versa 2 with 1.6 billion dollars
Deadpool & Wolverine with 1.3 billion dollars
Despicable Me 4 with 968 million dollars
Dune 2 with 714 million dollars
Godzilla x Kong: The New Kingdom with 571 million dollars
Kung Fu Panda 4 with 547 million dollars
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with 451 million dollars
Venom : The Last Danse with 439 million dollars
Bad Boys : Ride or Die with 404 million dollars
Planet of the Apes: The New Kingdom with 397 million dollars
Two of these films, produced by Disney, have exceeded $1 billion in revenue. This is the first time since 1974 (and therefore, in the history of the Seventh Art, we can say without fear of being wrong) that all of the ten most profitable films at the box office are sequels.
In 2015 and 2022, 8 of the 10 highest-grossing films at the box office were sequelsbut this is the first year where this figure rises to 10 out of 10. An observation that is not unanimous. If these results are profitable for the majors, they also demonstratean absence of creativity and originality. Some well-known directors, such as George Lucas, have spoken out on this subject. The latter declared to our colleagues at Brut:
The stories they tell are just old movies. “Let's make a sequel, let's make another version of this movie“…There is no original thinking…the big studios…they have no imagination.
Although these statistics are truly heartbreaking to movie fans, the phenomenon is not new. For several decades, spectators have been coming in droves to discover the continuation of the adventures of their favorite characters in cinemas, to the detriment of independent stories.
Of Twilight has Pirates of the Caribbean, passing through Terminator, Rocky, James Bond or even Star Wars, franchises have always had a special appeal for audiences. The number of sequels found in the top 10 was between 1 and 5 until 2002, when this figure increased. Earlier this year, Disney CEO Bob Iger reacted by saying that they will “balancing sequels and originals, especially in animation. We are going back a little to build on the sequels“Only the future will tell us if it is still possible to reverse the trend.
