July box office hits 2024 high

July was the best month so far this year for total cinema box office, according to latest figures from Comscore.

UK and Ireland box office reached £103.3m, although year-to-date totals are still tracking 14% behind the same period last year. This is in part due to a challenging comparable for July, when Barbie, Oppenheimer and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One lifted 2023 box office that month to above £160m.

“This year, we didn’t have Barbenheimer, but we did have some great things happening,” said Tom Linay, content business director at cinema sales house Digital Cinema Media. He indicated that attendance figures were also likely to be highest in July compared with the rest of 2024 thus far.

Universal’s Despicable Me 4 was the top film of July (£28.3m) and is now the third-biggest of 2024 behind Pixar’s Inside Out 2 (£51.3m) and Warner Bros Discovery’s Dune: Part Two (£39.6m).

Linay pointed out that all Despicable Me sequels have earned between £47m and £48m in the UK and Ireland box office and he expects Despicable Me 4 to end up around that figure.

“No other film series is consistent like that,” he remarked.

The second-highest performer in July, despite opening just eight days before the end of the month, was Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine (£25.4m). Its three-day opening of £12.6m was the highest of the year (including previews: £17.0m); only Barbie had a bigger opening last year (£18.4m). After just one week, the film is already the fourth-highest earner of the year.

Inside Out 2, which significantly boosted June’s box office, ranked as the third-biggest film of the month with £16.3m in July. It is now the sixth-highest-grossing animated release of all time behind Frozen II, The Super Mario Bros Movie, Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 3 and 4.

Twisters, while a much bigger success story in the US, earned £9m in the UK and Ireland to become the fourth-highest grossing film of the month.

For Linay, the biggest story of July was the success of horror-thriller Longlegs, which earned £6.3m thanks in part to guerrilla marketing tactics that built hype for the film on social media.

Linay said the film only came on to cinema schedules four weeks before release and called it an “exciting surprise”, given the other major films in July were expected to hit big revenue figures, but not Longlegs.

Strong H2 expected

Looking ahead to the rest of the year, Linay expects a number of the family-friendly films, such as Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4, to continue their runs through the rest of the summer, particularly if the UK sees more rainfall in August.

“As soon as you get a period where the weather’s not good, family films pop off again during summer holidays,” explained Linay.

He also expects Deadpool & Wolverine to hold up well, in part due to star Ryan Reynolds’ own impressive marketing tactics, which have included a number of interviews with popular Gen Z shows like Hot Ones and Chicken Shop Date alongside co-star Hugh Jackman.

Other films releasing in August include Colleen Hoover adaption It Ends with Us, horror film Alien: Romulus and Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice.

Attention will then increasingly shift to an autumn slate that is significantly improved from last year, which was bogged down by the actors’ and writers’ strikes in the US. Feature films carrying high expectations include Joker: Folie à Deux in October and Wicked, Gladiator II and Moana 2 in November.

As Linay forecast: “November is going to be the biggest month of the year.”