The independent box office has seen its market-share shrink for the first time in five years. Another tough year of heightened inflation and slow wage growth saw many households reduce non-essential spending – meaning global box office revenues have still not hit their pre-pandemic levels. But according to new analysis from Indy Film Library, independent productions were hardest hit in 2024.
Like so many industries depending on footfall, leisure and entertainment markets took a beating in the lockdown period of the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, the movie box office was hit hard – with physical cinema attendance hitting historic lows around the world.
Four years on, box office receipts are still struggling to recover. While there were a number of major hits in 2024, the overall figures will make grim reading for the film industry – with the slow progress since 2020 stalling and reversing over the last 12 months. The latest numbers from Gower Street Analytics estimate that global takings sank to $32.3 billion for the global box office – a 3.29% decline on the $33.4 billion it projected for 2023.
This means that box office income is still 24% lower than the last pre-pandemic year of 2019, when takings hit $42.5 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $52 billion, making it an even-worse 37.9% decrease. And with costs still riding high for theatres, while audiences continue to limit their spending on ‘luxury’ experiences, this shortfall is beginning to tell – with swathes of cinemas closing their doors across the world’s largest national markets.
In the US, a growing number of cities no longer have a multiplex cinema. For example, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (population 569,000), there is reportedly no cinema for 20 miles. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Illinois (population 1.2 million), there are just two theatres with a combined total of 18 screens.
As bad as this situation is for studio films, it is even more dire for independent movies. With the number of screens shrinking, remaining theatres are predisposed to prioritising blockbuster content, which they see as a safer bet when it comes to putting backsides in seats.
Illustrating this, the Hollywood studio system still managed to field two films which broke $1 billion at the box office in 2024. Taking the place of top-ranking 2023 movies Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie were two more outings for huge, established franchises. Raking in almost $1.7 billion, Inside Out 2 proved there is still plenty of juice in Disney’s vault of endless properties – something further shown by Deadpool & Wolverine’s $1.3 billion takings, that also demonstrated there is still room to milk comic book fans by throwing a bunch of human dolls together and making them fight.
The performance of franchise films dominated the entire top 10 at the box office, in fact. Box Office Mojo’s annual list also saw Despicable Me 4, Moana 2, Dune: Part Two, Wicked, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Kung Fu Panda 4, Mufasa: The Lion King, and Venom: The Last Dance rake in upwards of $478 million each – while each also played to the strength of fan-feeling around previous outings on either stage or screen.
This helped slow the wider box office’s decline. But in stark contrast, the drop-off was felt more keenly in the independent sector. Struggling for screen time in 2024, no indy features hit the $200 million mark at the box office – compared to two in 2023. That year’s top film, Meg 2: The Trench, actually hit $395 million, thanks in large part to colossal takings in China, accounting for more than $118 million of its takings. But even subtracting the amounts the utterly awful shark film made in China, it still would have battered the global figures of 2024’s biggest indy – the similarly awful The Fall Guy – which earned $181 million.
On the basis of those figures, with the top 10 indy films seeing a 17.7% fall in box office revenues, it is likely that the independent segment of the global box office endured a difficult 2024, beyond its biggest hits.
How big is the independent film market?
Estimating the exact size of the independent film market still remains an impossible task. The size and scope of the segment, alongside debates around what constitutes an ‘independent’ production – and a lack of data for short films and festival performance – mean Indy Film Library’s own attempts are constrained to reported box office figures for feature films which gain a theatrical release. However, if the performance of the 10 most successful independent films is taken as an indicator of the popularity of indy films more broadly, it seems that after five years of proportionally outperforming the studio system, the sector is still enduring even deeper difficulties than Hollywood.
To that end, for the first time in five years Indy Film Library believes that the portion of the global box office accounted for by indy movies fell. In 2023, with box office receipts of over $7 billion, indy movies counted for more than 21% of takings – but in 2024, with income falling by more than $1 billion, that portion has sunk to 18.5%.
Whether this trend continues deep into 2025 remains to be seen. On the one hand, it is hard to imagine how the situation in the US market could get worse, with the tiny number of theatres now largely monopolised by studio content. But on the other, that trend now seems to be hitting Europe, and in particular the UK.
It may also be the case that some cinemas keep prioritising independent features, as a means of differentiating themselves from the remaining multiplexes, and of curating an alternative experience to the increasingly samey streaming content that most viewers are seemingly growing jaded with. That could still position the indy box office to return to growth in 2025 – but with pressures around inflation persisting, and global economic turbulence said to be around the corner, there will undeniably have been less optimism in the sector at the close of 2024, than at its onset.
Economics aside, 2024 was an excellent year for quality independent art. A list of the 10 most popular indy films on IFL’s platform in 2024 can be found here.