The MCU Begins

At The Box Office, Part Two

The film that arguably reinvigorated the superhero genre after Superman IV was 1989’s Batman. The movie was destined to be the year’s biggest picture and it attracted long lines of ticket buyers. The sky was the limit when it came to the movie’s grosses and the film was certain to be number one on its opening weekend. Obviously, no film would want to go against this juggernaut; even if a studio tried to go up against Batman it would be trounced and its film would be forgotten, right? Walt Disney Pictures didn’t think so.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids premiered on the same day as Batman and instead of getting trounced and forgotten, it became a hit for Disney, spawning sequels and theme park attractions. Disney’s strategy was to serve as counterprogramming to Batman and a second choice to people who couldn’t get into the bigger film. This bold strategy worked, giving Disney a quiet hit that became a classic despite its formidable competition.

Disney’s strategy would not work today. In 1989, Warner Brothers was limited by how many prints of Batman it could produce and make available. With finite resources, it was impossible to add many screens to Batman’s total. This opened up the opportunity that Disney took advantage of to quietly create a hit film. With Avengers: Endgame, however, crowded movie theaters could quickly add showings to meet demand. Rather than be forced to watch a different film, audiences could just wait for additional showings to get added. As a result, Avengers: Endgame took over 90% of the box office over the weekend, leaving mere crumbs for the other films. (Captain Marvel, strangely enough, took the majority of those crumbs.)

At The Box Office, Part One

Hollywood box office records were broken this weekend with the massive success of Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Endgame. Despite its length, the film broke nearly every box office record. While some of this success has to do with simple inflation, much of it can be traced back to other changes that we will examine this week.

Adjusted for inflation, the biggest Hollywood hit is 1939’s Gone With The Wind. The film’s record haul was once considered to be insurmountable. It seemed as though everyone in the United States who could afford a ticket and lived near a theater showing the film saw the picture.

While motion pictures had very little competition at the time, there was still a very real limitation that even the biggest films from the largest studios would bump up against. Movies needed to be reproduced on film and distributed to theaters in heavy film canisters. Even a huge movie like Gone With The Wind, released by the largest movie studio at the time could not be widely distributed. Movie studios would produce as many copies of the film as they could afford and begin exhibiting them in the bigger cities. If the picture was big, it would remain in the larger markets, with some copies filtering out to lesser cities. People who lived in small towns far away from big cities would have to wait weeks, months and even years to see the biggest hits.

This limitation lasted for decades. While the studios would increase the amount of copies they’d produce for each release, they were still unable to fully produce as many copies as they might have liked for some of the more popular pictures.

Today, however, films such as Avengers: Endgame are distributed digitally. If a film did much better than expected in the past, it was virtually impossible for a studio to increase the number of screens on opening weekend. In a digital world, adding additional screens can be as easy as a flip of a switch. It is this new ability to quickly react to a film’s popularity that makes it possible for movies to make ever larger amounts of money.