With the post-pandemic recovery of the box office has been well-established, from this point we now believe that it makes sense to rank results from 2022 to those from last year in 2021. Henceforth, we will compare results from the current week and third quarter overall to those from 2021.
By this time last year, the majority of U.S. adults had received at least one shot of the COVID vaccine, and nearly all theatres were open for business and showing new releases. While the early weeks of this new comparison may favor this year’s results, as the weeks go by a fair and balanced comparison between this year and last will begin to emerge.
On the other hand, we will hold to the 2022 – 2019 comparison for year-to-date results as this is the most meaningful measure of the overall health of the industry after the pandemic. On the strength of last week’s huge opening of THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER, the third quarter of 2022 after one week stood tall at 198% compared with the same week last year, and year-to-date numbers after 27 weeks are 70% compared with this point in 2019.