Global Movie Box Office Plunged 72% Last Year
2020 was a tough year for movie theater owners and for movie producers. Global ticket sales dropped by nearly three-quarters. The bright spot, of course, was streaming digital entertainment, which grew by nearly a quarter.
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Global box office receipts in 2020 totaled $12.0 billion, a decline of 72% from the $42.3 billion in receipts during 2019. In North America, box office totals for 2020 amounted to $2.2 billion, a year-over-year decline of 80%.
The global home/mobile entertainment market, however, grew by 23% last year to reach sales of $68.8 billion. Subscriptions to streaming video services rose to 1.1 billion in 2020, a 26% increase, and global revenues for online video rose by 34% year over year to $14.3 billion in 2020.
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The data was reported Thursday by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) in its 2020 THEME Report and emphasizes the damage to the movie industry caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The following chart from the report shows the global pattern of theater closures between February 10 and December 28 of last year.
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Continuing a long-time pattern, all the growth in the home/mobile entertainment market came from the digital side, which grew by 31% to account for $61.8 billion (76%) of total theatrical/home/mobile entertainment revenue. The market for physical DVDs dropped nearly 23% to $7 billion and accounted for just 9% of total revenue. Including the $12 billion in theatrical box office, total revenues last year reached $80.8 billion in the global theatrical/home/mobile entertainment market.
As Charles Rivkin, CEO of the MPA put it, “[D]uring an otherwise punishing year for theatrical exhibition and our industry at large, home and curated entertainment boomed.”
In 2020, 80% of the U.S. population reported watching at least once a month. Nearly the same percentage watched pay TV (22%) and streaming (21%) movies every day, and 26% of streaming subscribers watch movies several times a week compared to 21% of pay-TV subscribers. Streaming subscribers also outpaced pay-TV subscribers of shows and series by 48% to 46% who watched every day or several times a week.
Here are a few other highlights from the theatrical side of the report:
- Some 338 films were released in 2020, down by nearly two-thirds from 987 released in 2019.
- The top-grossing film in North America was “Bad Boys for Life,” which grossed $206.3 million, less than a quarter of 2019’s top grosser, “Avengers: Endgame,” with nearly $860 million.
- In 2020, 447 films began production, compared to 814 in 2019, a drop of 45%.
- China topped global box office receipts with $3.0 billion in ticket sales (including online ticketing fees), while North American ticket sales totaled $2.2 billion and Japan was third with $1.3 billion. Mo other country posted sales of more than $1 billion.
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Paul Ausick has been writing for 247Wallst.com for more than a decade. He has written extensively on investing in the energy, defense, and technology sectors. In a previous life, he wrote technical documentation and managed a marketing communications group in Silicon Valley.
He has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Chicago and now lives in Montana, where he fishes for trout in the summer and stays inside during the winter.
