November box office doubles thanks to Wicked, Gladiator II and more
November box office nearly doubled (+95%) year on year to £145.4bn in the UK and Ireland, driven by a film slate that included Paddington in Peru, Gladiator II, Wicked and Moana 2 debuting on consecutive weekends.
It is the highest monthly gross figure since “Barbenheimer” brought in £160m in July 2023.
Year-to-date box office now totals £944m and is trailing just 2% behind the equivalent period last year — a significant improvement following a lacklustre October that saw Joker: Folie à Deux bomb at cinemas.
Wicked was the top film of the month, earning £32.4m in the two weeks since it debuted. It is already the sixth-highest-grossing musical of all time, ahead of 2016’s La La Land.
It was followed by Paddington in Peru (£27.8m), which is tracking ahead of both of its predecessors at the same stage of their release. Gladiator II (£24.8m) and Moana 2 (£14.6m) were the third- and fourth-highest-grossing films in November, with the latter debuting in the final weekend of the month.
All four films exceeded £9m in box office revenue in their opening weekends. Wicked had the biggest opening weekend of the year thus far (£13.7m), while Moana 2 (£12m), Paddington in Peru (£9.6m) and Gladiator II (£9.0m) were third, fifth and eighth respectively when it comes to biggest opening weekend of 2024.
Cinema market ‘can support four huge films’
Speaking to The Media Leader, Tom Linay, content business director at UK cinema sales house Digital Cinema Media, said he could not recall cinemas “ever really had something like that before”, with four huge releases in consecutive weeks in the same month.
He admitted he had been “a bit concerned one of these big films would suffer”, given how crowded the November film slate was: “But actually what it’s showing is there is appetite for these films.”
Unlike in the US market, the UK did not benefit from a “Glicked” effect, wherein cinemagoers were able to attend a double-feature (akin to Barbenheimer) of Wicked and Gladiator II, given their shared release date. But that did not stop both films from drawing significant audiences in the UK.
Some advertisers sought to capitalise on the strong film slate. Chiefly, Google Pixel ran a Wicked-themed “turn off your phone” ad campaign at Odeon cinemas, with the spot also running in the US at AMC venues. Other advertisers ran less bespoke material to promote their wider Christmas campaigns.
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Linay added that it was “very encouraging” that the market “can support four huge films”, arguing that it hasn’t happened since before the Covid-19 pandemic. Each film had a different distributor (Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, StudioCanal and Disney), suggesting not one company benefited during the month.
While full November admissions data will not be released until later in December, Linay estimated that cinema admissions grew approximately 76% year on year, with the last seven days being “the busiest in terms of admissions since Barbenheimer”.
End-of-year optimism
Looking at December, Linay is optimistic that 2024 will ultimately exceed 2023’s performance in terms of both box office and admissions — a boost to an industry that still has yet to fully recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Apart from the aforementioned four big films “probably playing pretty well at Christmas”, additional releases like Disney’s Mufasa: The Lion King and Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3 are likely to drive incremental audiences in the final month of the year.
Indeed, Linay expects the week between Christmas and the New Year to be cinema’s biggest of the year in terms of admissions.
Looking further into 2025, he added that there is a sense of optimism that more bankable films are coming on the horizon. Specifically, Wicked Part 2 should be a “guaranteed hit” next November, Linay said.