Studios are sacrificing 2024’s blockbuster movies to boost 2025’s box office

polygon.com:

Movie theaters, and the studios that provide their content, have been clawing their way out of a financial crater ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began. After Avengers: Endgame, the live-action Lion King, and Todd Phillips’ Joker helped fuel record-breaking box-office returns in 2019, the pandemic-era lockdowns froze theaters in their tracks, and the subsequent thaw has been slow and difficult for every industry that touches cinema.

An impressive 2023 box-office take, led by Barbenheimer, the Mario brothers, Miles Morales, and more, doesn’t necessarily mean movie theaters are on sustainable financial footing at this point. But it is a hopeful sign that they’re returning to full strength, with some room to grow. There’s more hope on the horizon, too: Projections from movie theater analyst Eric Wold indicate that box-office numbers will finally return to almost 2019 levels in 2025. For better or worse, movie studios are greeting those projections by saving many of their intended blockbusters for next year.

The hope for a strong 2025 was repeated over and over again like a mantra at this year’s CinemaCon, the annual Las Vegas conference that gathers studios, theater owners, and theatrical technology companies to discuss the state of moviegoing and preview the studios’ offerings for the next couple of years. Everyone from studio executives to theater owners with just one screen to program were touting the return of theaters with hope and some quiet trepidation — for good reason in both cases.

Despite the box office’s continual rise over the last few years, the post-quarantine era has still been tremendously difficult for movie theaters. And while 2024 profits are projected to exceed 2023’s, the gains are still likely to be more gradual than anyone hoped, both because of slow economic growth overall, and because of Hollywood’s Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes last year. Even with the theatrical business recovering, the margins are still pretty delicate.