A Memorial Day to quickly forget: considered the “number one” barometer of cinema attendance in the United States, Monday May 27, 2024 – a public holiday, across the Atlantic, because it pays tribute to American soldiers who died in combat – gave birth to its worst results for forty years, reports Variety.
Recipes not meeting expectations
Great blockbusters should have boosted admissions, starting with Furiosa, a Mad Max saga which, although it recorded the best attendance rate, generated “only” $32 million in four days, Memorial Day included (far from the expectations of Warner Bros., who produced it and hoped for at least 50).
Furiosa is followed by Garfield: hero in spite of himselfwhich totals 30 million (dollars) in revenue where Sony also expected more…
An unmemorable Memorial Day
You have to go back to 1981 to find a Memorial Day box office this “low” (in terms of revenue) when accounting for inflation, recalls Les Numériques : at the time, the film Bustin’ Loosewith Richard Pryorfinished first in the rankings with winnings of “only” $6.6 million.
In short, this is indeed the worst Memorial Day weekend in almost three decades with the exception of 2020, the year when cinemas were entirely closed due to Covid, underlines Variety.
Flop in France?
France, the leading producer and leading cinema market in Europe, is not really doing any better: its cinema attendance showed, in April 2024, a drop of 35.5%, to 12 million admissions compared to 18.61 million for the same period 2023, according to estimates from the National Center for Cinema and Animated Images (CNC) reported by CB News.
Here, the “ultimate” barometer is the Printemps du Cinéma, which was held from March 24 to 26, 2024… And citing the National Federation of French Cinemas (FNCF), the Écran Total website reports that “only” 1.7 million spectators attended French cinemas during these three days.
Our “Box office” file
This would therefore be the lowest attendance since the creation of the event. The fault lies in “an insufficiently renewed offer of films”, according to the FNCF: Écran Total thus indicates that apart from Dune 2which had already been released for three weeks during the Printemps du Cinéma, “few really “prominent” films were present in theaters”.