August box office tops £120m as summer ends on high note
Total box office in the UK and Ireland reached £120.2m in August, according to latest figures from Comscore.
It is the highest monthly total since last year’s “Barbenheimer” July (£160m).
Year-to-date box office is now tracking 12% behind 2023 — a slight improvement from July, when year-to-date box office totals were tracking 15% behind.
The tough comparable of Barbenheimer remains a core reason 2024’s box office totals are still lagging that of last year.
Tom Linay, content business director at cinema sales house Digital Cinema Media, told The Media Leader that August was a “decent month” in terms of both box office and attendance, led by the success of Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine, which debuted in late July.
The superhero film earned £29.7m in August, with its cumulative total now at £55.3m — more than £20m higher than the previous entry in the series, 2018’s Deadpool 2.
“Adding Wolverine is clearly a big boon to the series,” added Linay.
Surprise hits
The biggest surprise of August, however, was the success of It Ends With Us, which earned £19.4m in box office revenue to be the second-highest-grossing film of the month. It was thus a strong month for Deadpool‘s Ryan Reynolds, whose wife Blake Lively stars in It Ends With Us.
Linay called those earnings “bonkers”, adding: “We got the sense it was going to do well, but I didn’t feel it was going to do this well.”
He suggested that the success of It Ends With Us demonstrates “perhaps an underserved [target] audience” among women.
Another surprise was the 15th anniversary re-release of Coraline, which earned £3.2m and was the eighth-highest-grossing film in August — a result that Linay referred to as “rare” for a re-release.
“We’re getting regular re-releases”, noted Linay, but “none of them have come close to this”. Other films with scheduled re-releases this year include The Terminator (40th anniversary), Pulp Fiction (30th anniversary), The Matrix (25th anniversary), Shaun of the Dead (20th anniversary) and Interstellar (10th anniversary).
Other top films in August included Despicable Me 4 (box office revenue of £16.9m in August; £45.2m year to date), Alien: Romulus (revenue of £11.6m) and Inside Out 2 (revenue of £7.2m in August; £58.5m overall).
Quiet September before big Q4
Looking ahead, Linay acknowledged September has historically been “quieter” due to children going back to school, and distributors tend to schedule releases earlier in the summer or in Q4 to target the Halloween and Christmas periods.
However, Linay expects Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which debuts this weekend, to “do very well” despite its September release.
For advertisers, much of the interest is already ahead in Q4, however. Linay told The Media Leader that at least one premium ad slot has already been sold for each of the autumn’s major films, including Joker: Folie à Deux, Gladiator II, Moana 2, Wicked and Paddington in Peru.
In particular, both the Joker and Gladiator sequels have already sold out all three of their premium ad slots.
Linay suggested that advertisers wanting to target the 16-34 male audience have used those films (and Joker in particular) to do so, whereas there is likely more audience overlap between the family-friendly films of Wicked, Moana 2 and Paddington in Peru.
