Summer Box Office Success Stories Weren’t Just Tentpoles

When Hollywood looks back on the summer of 2024, megahits including “Deadpool & Wolverine” and Inside Out 2” will be remembered more than any title. But there were other, smaller success stories in theaters over the past few months that need to be remembered.

Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” remains the most successful animated film of all time, a major post-COVID feat. Likewise, another Disney film, Marvel’s “Deadpool,” unseated “Joker” as the highest-grossing R-rated film ever, a challenge the latter’s sequel will have to meet in October.

However, such tentpoles cost hundreds of millions of dollars in production and marketing, eating up budgets that could be devoted to smaller films that make the most of audiences in between the big releases.

While Warner Bros.’ “Furiosa” and “Horizon” missed out on the R-rated success of studio peers Disney and Sony, neither was alone when it came to such films. Inexpensive horror flick “Longlegs” was Neon’s highest showing to date, beating “Furiosa,” whose production cost more than $150 million. “Longlegs” also outdid a record A24 film from April — “Civil War” — while costing far less, putting the serial-killer thriller in a similar camp as Blumhouse’s highly profitable model.

But even bigger than both films was Sony’s adaptation of romantic-drama novel “It Ends With Us,” which cleared $100 million in less than three weeks from its August release.

Specialty distributor Fathom Events remains a good litmus test for which kind of films could inspire studio strategies in the streaming era.

Last month, the 15th anniversary re-release of “Coraline” made more than $30 million, the most yet for Fathom Events’ many re-releases and TV events. Even wilder: “Coraline” was already re-released last year! That’s half of the 2009 animated film’s $60 million budget made back in 2024.

As for the rest of 2024’s potential heavy hitters, “Twisters” serves as an optimistic sign. A standalone sequel to a disaster film nearly three decades old, it wasn’t a likely pick for fourth-best film of the summer.

If “Twisters” could pull off late-sequel magic like that with little connection to the original film, then “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” this Friday and “Gladiator 2” in November are likely to lend heft to the year’s box office and reverse the slate slowdowns for Warner Bros. and Paramount, respectively.

Both films were made by their predecessors’ directors, with just about the entire original cast returning for the “Beetlejuice” sequel. The film received a positive reception at its Venice premiere over the weekend.

The next four months would need to make roughly $3.4 billion — nearly as much as summer 2024 — to match 2023’s entire box office haul.

But for the studios, collectively bringing up domestic totals each year shouldn’t be the priority. Rather, observing and strategizing around less expensive successes is the way to restore the calendar with more plentiful offerings that take pressure off the biggest films to steady balance sheets. 

For more on the state of the box office coming out of this summer, click into a roundtable discussion with industry experts in this week’s edition of Variety’s “Strictly Business” podcast.