No Time to Watch Movies
- By Bilal Hafeez and Amelia Morgan
- 2 min read
Cinema attendance is probably the ultimate barometer of post-pandemic normality. It means restrictions have been lifted to allow people to attend and that people are happy to sit in an enclosed space with strangers. And if we throw into the mix a slate of high-profile movies released in recent months, box office grosses should give an indication of how close to normal we are. The movie releases have included two Marvel movies (Black Widow, Shang-Chi), another Fast and Furious movie and the final Daniel Craig bond film, No Time To Die. We’ve also had a few surprise hits such as Free Guy and Halloween Kills.
So how are movie grosses looking across the world? Well, the good news is that they are much higher than pandemic-hit 2020. The bad news is that they are down compared to pre-pandemic 2019. And that year wasn’t necessarily filled with bigger movies. The major releases over the same period in 2019 were Toy Story 4, Spider-Man: Far From Home, The Lion King and Fast and Furious: Hobbs & Shaw.
The major country that has seen the smallest drop compared to 2019 is France where box office grosses are 18% lower (Chart 1). Then comes the UK (Chart 2) and Germany (Chart 3) which are around 25% lower. Surprisingly, both the US (Chart 4) and China (Chart 5) are down the most at around 35% to 40%. This suggests that even with the US’s more lax COVID restrictions and China’s apparent better COVID management – they are further from normality compared to Europe.
Admittedly there could be some special factors affecting the China numbers. Most notably that China is engaging in a movie trade war with the US, where China is not showing major US releases – neither Black Widow nor Shang-Chi have release dates for China. In fact – only two US films feature in China’s top twenty grossing films of 2021 (Fast and Furious 9 at #6, Godzilla vs Kong at #9 and Free Guy at #16). This compares to eight US films in 2019. On the US, some of the box office grosses could have been affected by simultaneous releases in streaming platforms.
Even so, the fact the US and China are not back to cinema normality suggests that the shadow of COVID still looms large. This makes us cautious in expecting a service sector boom.
Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Editor of Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.
Amelia Morgan is a training economist delving into the world of Macro journalism.