US Movie Ticket Sales -46% in 2023 from 21 Years Ago: AMC and the Movie Theater Meltdown

by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street:

Americans have changed how they watch movies. They watch more than ever, but at home.

Only 852 million movie tickets were sold in 2023, down by 46% from the peak year 2002 (1.85 billion tickets), so that was 21 years ago, and down by 31% from 2019 (1.23 billion tickets), despite the one-weekend wonder in July of “Barbenheimer” – the simultaneous theatrical release of Barbie and Oppenheimer.

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In 2023, there was no more lockdown, and people crammed into restaurants, airplanes, cruise ships, and Taylor Swift concerts. But streaming had risen to the next level, and people were watching movies at home. That had long been the trend. Before streaming, technologies for watching high-definition movies at home, such as DVD and Blu-ray, ate into ticket sales. But during the pandemic, streaming gained momentum in quantum leaps (ticket data via movie data provider The Numbers).

This 46% decline in ticket sales over 21 years comes despite a 17% increase of the US population over the same period.

On a per-capita basis, ticket sales plunged by 54% in 21 years, from an average of 5.5 tickets per person per year in 2002, to just 2.5 tickets per person per year in 2023:

Over the past two decades, movie theaters have responded to this structural decline with big price increases – AMC is now asking $18.49 for one adult at its AMC Metreon 16 in San Francisco – thereby speeding up the structural decline?

They also upgraded their theaters with big comfortable seats – such as the “AMC signature recliners” – and in some places offer real food, beer, and wine, trying to create an atmosphere of “experience.” But ticket sales just kept plunging over the years.

But with rising ticket prices, revenues in dollars rose until 2019. In 2023, they were back to 2005 levels, with the total box office of $5.3 billion, according to The Numbers:

What matters to movie theaters these days are blockbusters. The hype surrounding blockbusters still brings people to theaters – hence the strategy of “blockbusterization.” The result is a few blockbusters that studios and theater chains promote with huge fanfare, and that the media jump all over, amid declining overall ticket sales.

In 2023, there were a few blockbusters. Barbie and Oppenheimer opened on the same weekend, a strategic decision that multiplied the hype in the media and the phenomenon was nicknamed Barbenheimer.

So here are the top 10-grossing movies in 2023, according to data by The Numbers. Barbie sold 60.4 million tickets, and that was good. But by comparison, in 2019, Avengers: Endgame sold 93.7 million tickets.

AMC and the Movie Theater Meltdown.

Movie theaters – like the formerly symbiotic shopping malls – have come under heavy pressure years ago from the internet.

For brick-and-mortar retail, particularly the kinds of stores that populate malls, the killer is ecommerce. Americans changed how they shop. So far, gas stations, grocery stores, and auto dealers, which account for about half of total retail sales, have largely been spared. But the other 50% is getting crushed.

We’ve documented this since 2016, under the category of what we call the Brick-and-Mortar Meltdown: The innumerable bankruptcies of retail chains, from Sears Holding on down; the debt defaults by malls; the zombie malls; the bankruptcies by mall REITs; the closings of tens of thousands of stores; the losses taken by holders of retail Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities (CMBS), the worst sector of CRE years before the pandemic, etc.

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