‘Avengers,’ ‘Lion King’ Help Disney Dominate Box Office
Studio held one-third of year’s domestic movie market, a first for any company, as other franchises struggled
A few major misfires kept Hollywood from achieving great expectations at the 2019 box office, but one powerhouse studio set a new standard for dominance.
Walt Disney Co. DIS -1.36% ended the year as the film industry’s unprecedented leader with a slate loaded with nostalgia-inducing blockbusters, but rivals failed to sell the tickets needed to make 2019 the historic year some predicted it would be. A handful of expensive films from established franchises, or starring some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, fizzled at theaters in the U.S. and Canada.
Those flops included “Terminator: Dark Fate” and “Gemini Man,” both distributed by Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures; Sony Corp. ’s “Men in Black: International”; and “Dark Phoenix,” an X-men movie from Twentieth Century Fox, which Disney acquired this year.
These disappointments helped drag the 2019 domestic box office down about 4% from 2018, according to media-measurement company Comscore, which expects a full-year total of about $11.4 billion. Last year, ticket sales rose to a record $11.9 billion.
World-wide ticket sales are likely to exceed $41 billion this year, with overseas grosses climbing to a record of more than $30 billion, according to Comscore data.
Disney became the first studio in modern times to command one-third of Hollywood’s box-office take, with a 33.1% share of the domestic market through Dec. 29. Six of its films passed the $1 billion mark on a global basis, including “Toy Story 4,” “Frozen 2” and “Captain Marvel,” another first for a studio.
Disney’s “Star Wars” sequel “The Rise of Skywalker”—marketed as the end of the narrative arc that began with the franchise’s first film in 1977—is also poised to exceed the $1 billion mark after a late-2019 release. The movie already has made more than $724 million globally.
“Disney delivered,” said Eric Handler, an analyst at equity-research firm MKM Partners. Disney’s “Avengers: Endgame,” released in April, surpassed 2009’s “Avatar” as the highest-grossing movie to date, with $2.8 billion. As “Endgame” closed in on the record in July, Disney released an updated version of the movie with additional footage, helping to nudge it past “Avatar.”
Even though 2019 could edge past 2016 to finish as the second-best box-office year, “it’s not the record year we once hoped for,” Mr. Handler said. “It ended up below expectations,” he added.
And while box-office revenues in the U.S. and Canada are expected to surpass $11 billion for the fifth consecutive year, the number of people going to the movies has stagnated. Grosses have been buoyed by rising ticket prices, which in nearly a decade rose 21% to an average of $9.11 in 2018, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners. The trade group hasn’t said what the 2019 average was. In the record-setting 2018, theaters sold 120 million fewer tickets than in 2009.
The growing popularity of subscription offerings for movie theaters kept average ticket prices lower, said association spokesman Patrick Corcoran, and might have increased attendance.
In 2020, rival studios are likely to regain some of the market share they lost this year to Disney, which might have a hard time matching 2019’s list of record-setting successes. The studio’s slate boasts a few Marvel titles, but the remakes it expects to distribute lack the firepower of this year’s lineup, which included “Aladdin” and “The Lion King.”
Separate from Disney’s dominance, this year was the first time since 2000 that five R-rated movies ranked in the domestic top 20.
AT&T Inc. ’s Warner Bros. had the most success with R-rated titles, releasing both “Joker,” a brooding spinoff starring Joaquin Phoenix as the notorious Batman villain, and Stephen King’s “It: Chapter Two.” Comcast Corp. ’s Universal Pictures also scored in the horror genre with its release of “Us.” Quentin Tarantino’s 1960s ode to Tinseltown, “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood,” also performed well for Sony Corp. ’s Sony Pictures, despite its long running time and mature narrative.
“Joker” became the highest-grossing R-rated film to date at the global box office.