[COLUMN] Mufasa's Box Office Performance Proves Studios Can't Make it 2019 Again | by Darren Mooney

Last weekend, Mufasa opened to a fairly underwhelming $35m at the domestic box office. While it fared better internationally, with global takings of $122m, Barry Jenkins’ prequel is still very firmly in the shadow of Jon Favreau’s The Lion King, which opened to $192m domestic and $544m worldwide in 2019. While Mufasa has the luxury of a Christmas release corridor, it seems unlikely the prequel will match the $1.6bn global gross of Favreau’s film.

Mufasa is not the only follow-up to a 2019 smash hit to underperform at the box office recently. Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie á Deux earned a paltry $206m, compared to the original’s $1bn. Nia DaCosta’s The Marvels also grossed a mere $206m, which was similarly disappointing compared to its predecessor’s $1.1bn. James Wan’s Aquaman was a huge smash when it opened in December 2018, grossing a significant portion of its $1.1bn in early 2019. The sequel earned a total $439m.

Even the sequels to the more modest hits of 2019 have seen a sharp decline in their box office revenue over the past couple of years. David F. Sandberg’s Shazam! saw an impressive haul of $365m, but his follow-up Shazam! Fury of the Gods earned an appreciably weaker $134m. In 2019, Downton Abbey grossed a total of $194m worldwide, but the follow-up Downton Abbey: A New Era earned less than half of that, with a total global gross of $92m.

Of course, it seems very likely that some of the upcoming sequels to 2019 projects will perform very well. Given how much Disney has riding on their success, it would be foolish to bet against Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, which reunite the Endgame directors the Russos with Endgame stars Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. The two announced follow-ups to Frozen II seem likely to be massive hits for Disney. Still, studios have struggled to sequelize the success of 2019.

There is a reason to treat 2019 as a baseline for these comparisons. It was, at least commercially, a miracle year for mainstream cinema. Global box office revenue hit an all-time high of $42.5bn in 2019, up from $41bn in 2018, $40.6bn in 2017, $38.6bn in 2016, $38bn in 2015, and so on. Disney was a major beneficiary of this box office bump, earning $11.1bn over the course of the year, and becoming the first studio to ever have seven movies gross over $1bn in a single year.

Every year since 2019 has existed in the shadow of 2019. End-of-year box office reports inevitably remind readers of how far Hollywood’s stock has fallen in the past half-decade. The box office for 2021 was “down 61% from 2019.” The results for 2022 “lagged around 34% from 2019.” By comparison, domestic box office in 2023 saw “a drop of roughly 21% from 2019’s $11.4bn.” This year is (so far) “down 24% from 2019.”

Of course, it’s worth conceding that a lot has happened since 2019. There was a massive global pandemic that shut down theatres. The studios threw billions of dollars into the black hole marked streaming, causing irreparable damage to the theatrical model as a whole. The industry was disrupted by massive strikes late last year. Audiences have fallen out of the habit of going to cinemas and there is simply not the same diversity of movies to lure them back.

However, even setting aside the huge question marks of a massive global pandemic and the self-inflicted wound of the streaming revolution, studios were always going to have a tough time following up on the financial success of 2019. Industry analysts noted that, even without foreknowledge of the disruption of theatrical shutdowns, box office was always going to struggle and Disney were always going to have “a more subdued year at the box office in 2020.”

As such, it is insane to try to make any direct financial comparison between 2024 and 2019. However, it also glosses over the fact that the box office success of 2019 did not happen in a vacuum, and so it cannot be magically conjured into being again by simply recycling old material. The record-breaking box office performance of 2019 was the result of years of steady momentum-building, of developing franchises and building audience trust through years of grind.

This is most obvious looking at the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU). Three of the top ten highest-grossing movies of the year were part of the MCU: Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far From Home and Avengers: Endgame. Each of those movies grossed over a billion dollars. However, these were the culmination of a story that began eleven years earlier with Jon Favreau’s Iron Man. Audiences had grown up with these movies, so of course they turned out for the grand finale.

However, the early years of the MCU weren’t anywhere near as financially lucrative. Iron Man grossed a total of $585m worldwide, placing just eighth at the global box office in 2008. That was a significant success for the young franchise; The Incredible Hulk earned $264m worldwide, Thor made $449m worldwide, and Captain America: The First Avenger took in $370m worldwide. Even Iron Man 2 tapped out at $623m worldwide.

However, these movies built an audience, and those viewers funneled into the crossover event of The Avengers and then towards the culmination of the Infinity Saga in Avengers: Endgame. The success of Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far From Home and Avengers: Endgame was the result of a decade of work. More than that, these films were positioned as a “season finale” to the shared universe, the big climax of an epic story. That’s why the audience showed up; this felt like an ending.

Some of the year’s other big hits had a similarly elegiac feel to them. The Rise of Skywalker rounded out the Star Wars sequel trilogy. It: Chapter Two concluded the epic adaptation of Stephen King’s masterpiece. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World rounded out a trilogy of beloved animated films. Even Toy Story 4 sold itself on the promise that – following the seemingly final Toy Story 3 – this marked the end of the road with these characters.

This pervasive sense of finality even applied to some of these films that weren’t sequels. Disney had spent the better part of a decade converting its beloved Disney Renaissance animations into pseudo-live-action, but it had cycled through most of the classics by the time that it landed on Aladdin and The Lion King. There was perhaps a sense that there were only so many more of these sorts of projects left to be done. Did anybody really want to see a “live action” Mulan or Little Mermaid?

In hindsight, 2019 felt like a gigantic farewell tour to the forces that had dominated pop culture during the 2010s. It is notable that many of the more successful sequels within the past couple of years have been to movies within the last decade or so. In 2023, John Wick: Chapter 4 and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 felt like satisfying grace notes to wrap up franchises that launched in 2014. This year, Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine were sequels to films from 2015 and 2016 respectively.

Even this weekend, Mufasa was handily defeated at the domestic box office by Sonic the Hedgehog 3, another anthropomorphic animated animal franchise aimed squarely at the family demographic. However, while Mufasa was old news – a prequel to a remake of a three-decade-old film – Sonic the Hedgehog is a much younger cinematic franchise. The first film in the trilogy hit theatres in February 2020. Of course younger viewers flocked to something that appealed to them and their experiences.

This is the dirty little secret to cashing in on nostalgia: there has to be something for audiences to be nostalgic for. Studios have spent the past few years engaged in relentless “cultural fracking”, trying desperately to extract any remaining value from existing intellectual property. There has been no room to let anything new or interesting grow and develop, because the business is so fundamentally broken that movies performing like Iron Man or Thor would now be considered failures.

Take, for example, Joker: Folie á Deux. $206m is actually a pretty decent performance for an R-rated courtroom drama musical that seems to hate its audience and its very existence. It certainly outperformed musicals like West Side Story or Mean Girls. Had the film been budgeted responsibly, even at a modest increase from the $55m budget of the original Joker, it could have been a decent money-spinner for Warner Bros., instead of a complete financial catastrophe.

Indeed, for all the complaints about Sony’s knock-off Spider-Man films, they’re more sustainable that Disney’s tentpole productions. Despite bombing in cinemas – twice! – even Morbius turned a profit for Sony because the studio kept the budget under control. Venom: The Last Dance might “only” have made $475m at the global box office, but a modest budget of $120m means it likely made more for Sony than the $88,000 Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania earned for Disney.

Despite all this anxiety over the state of the global box office, modestly budgeted films have proven remarkably resilient. Alien: Romulus made $350m worldwide on a budget of $80m. A Quiet Place: Day One earned $261m worldwide on a budget of $67m. Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs made $126m worldwide on a $10m budget. If spending is kept under control, these projects can be financially lucrative for the studios producing them and the theatres screening them.

This is perhaps the key to understanding what is happening at the moment. The massive financial success of 2019 was the culmination of a steady growth across the better part of a decade, seeding franchises and cultivating audiences. Hollywood needs to reconnect with a new generation and build franchises that speak to them over the next couple of years. Trust needs to be re-established, and it won’t come if studios keep serving reheated leftovers of older generations’ favorite meals.

The post-pandemic box office certainly feels closer to the start of the 2010s than to the end of the decade. The $33.9bn total in 2023 and the $30.5bn estimated total for 2024 compares well enough to the $31.8bn total in 2010, the $32.6bn total in 2011 or the $34.7bn total in 2012. The industry is recovering from a series of incredible disruptive events. Indeed, given the fallout from the massive success of 2019, there’s an argument that the industry should prioritize sustainability over revenue.

Still, the box office disappointment of Mufasa is just the latest reminder that studios cannot magically make it be 2019 again, no matter how they might wish and no matter how many sequels they might greenlight. As ever, it feels like the studios have taken the wrong lessons from their own successes. That is perhaps the true circle of life.