This year's box office numbers may be telling a grim story. Is anyone watching?

Almost halfway through the year, 2024's box office numbers tell a very different story from last summer's Barbenheimer boom. 

Despite a few big pushes to bring people back to theatres, like The Fall Guy and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the average opening weekend numbers don't lie. Are we witnessing the slow death of moviegoing as we once knew it?

Bilge Ebiri is a film critic for Vulture. Kristy Puchko is the film editor at Mashable. They join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to imagine a future where movie theatres are full once more — if only studios started taking a few risks.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: I'll start with this question: how important is an opening weekend these days as an indicator of a film's actual success?

Bilge: I think opening weekends are still really important — not because they need to be important, but because Hollywood has basically created this entire system where everything is building up to opening weekend, right? They make these huge movies, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars marketing them, and it's all geared towards trying to get a big, huge opening weekend. Other movies move out of the way, and they open in 4000 theatres … and either it opens big, or it underperforms or it totally flops, and then they don't really have anything else to do after that. The marketing drops out of the picture, another big movie opens up the next weekend, and it's quickly forgotten. I actually believe that Hollywood can do things differently, but for the past 15-20 years and even longer, the supremacy of the opening weekend has been unmatched.

Elamin: Yeah, and then there's pressure on the opening weekend to recoup most of the cost of a movie. Kristy, why don't you think the opening weekend is as big a draw as it once was?

Kristy: I think that Hollywood has steadily been undercutting the event of an opening weekend. I think part of it is definitely unavoidable. With Covid, a lot of things went straight to streaming, and I think they had to. But now we're out of that, and the window between when things are going to theatres and going to streaming is practically nonexistent. I mean, The Fall Guy is already on VOD. The Fall Guy had a bad opening weekend. You can already rent it.

Elamin: A movie that came out three and a half weeks ago is already on video on demand.

Kristy: Right? And so there's no incentive for an audience, especially a casual moviegoer, to see it in theatress. We're seeing that with Furiosa, right? This was supposed to be the big movie. Everyone and their grandmother and their grandmother's uncle loved Fury Road. Why didn't this one do well? And I think there's a couple things contributing to that. It is a prequel … but on top of that, if people are watching Fury Road on their TV and going, "Man, this movie still rules," that doesn't necessarily indicate to them they have to see the new one in the theatre.

Elamin: For all the noise that we've been making about Mad Max: Fury Road, Bilge, it did not have the opening weekend that people are sort of romanticizing from the days of yore. It made $45 million on its opening weekend [in North America] — a pretty respectable showing. But the idea that Furiosa comes in around $30 million, I don't look at that and go "Oh, that's a collapse in the system." I go, "That kind of makes sense to me," you know?

Bilge: Yeah, and that's also part of the problem with the whole opening weekend thing is that each new movie, especially if others have underperformed, becomes the potential savior of the film industry. And it's like, guys, it's a crazy George Miller post-apocalyptic—

Elamin: And a spinoff at that!

Bilge: Right! Fury Road was a success, but it wasn't a gargantuan success. It opened at number two behind, I believe, Pitch Perfect 2, you know? I mean, at least Furiosa beat Garfield. Obviously it was an epic critical success; it won Oscars. So in our minds, it's obviously this huge movie. I think the Warner people knew that Furiosa wasn't going to be a billion-dollar blockbuster. 

I think part of the problem is also we are experiencing a bit of a dearth of "product" because there was the production backlog because of Covid, and then there were the strikes. So there are actually fewer movies, and some movies have moved out of the way. The Fall Guy was supposed to open in March, right? It moved into May when Deadpool & Wolverine moved out of the slot. I am a big The Fall Guy fan. I would like to point out to you that that movie has had very small drops after its opening, and if they'd maybe kept it in theatress for a little longer, I think that movie would actually make its money back. But again, Hollywood doesn't think that way anymore.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.