As a result of the pandemic, thousands of cinemas in North America have been closed for a good chunk of nine months. Meanwhile, those that have opened are operating at jaw-dropping reduced capacities.
The effects of the pandemic on the Box Office revenue
Usually mid-December is a launching pad for Yuletide fueled holiday season blockbusters. But this is not the case for Hollywood in 2020 because the theater owners are still struggling to handle the effects and impacts of the previous and current ongoing waves of the COVID-19 crisis. A virtual nine-month standstill in the movie industry has been ongoing and experts expert that this might result in the worst showing for domestic ticket sales in at least four decades.
Current Statistics
The 2020 resultant statistics arising from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic affected the release of movies in North America. There were no releases over the weekend of December 11–13. Universal and DreamWorks Animation’s “The Croods: A New Age” topped the chart for the third consecutive weekend with a pittance of $3.2 million, which by recent pandemic standards is a fortune. It also peaked at a domestic total of $24.5 million. Initial estimates show that North American ticket sales for 2020 movies inch towards $2.3 billion.
This would be the lowest since the early 1980s and probably the late 1970s. Bo’s office tracking didn’t officially begin until the early 1980s which makes a definite estimated record hard. In 1984, Motions Picture was recorded hitting a domestic revenue of 4 billion dollars. Currently, 2020 domestic revenues stand around 2.2 billion dollars according to Comscore. That is roughly an 80% fall from that of 2019 which rounded up to $11.4 billion. Foreign tickets, on the other hand, were tethering on $9 billion, thanks to the full-blown recovery in Asian markets including China, South Korea, and Japan. In 2019, a sharp contrast in the global ticket rise at a record of $42.5 billion is quite glaring compared to that of 2020.