Though there could be some surprises, 2024 looks like it will be one of the weakest years for blockbuster movies in decades. While the combined power of Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, and a beloved sci-fi property will likely make Dune 2 a massive hit, the rest of the year has very few sure things.

A few years ago, I would have expected Deadpool 3 to do as well as its predecessors, but 2023 called the viability of the superhero movie into question. More cape flicks flopped (The Flash, Aquaman 2, Ant-Man 3, Blue Beetle, The Marvels) than hit (Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse). Given that Ryan Reynolds’ Merc with a Mouth movie is the only MCU film slated for this year, there’s a bit of a vacuum where prognosticators once could pencil in the year’s biggest hits.

Deadpool and Deadpool 2 were weirdly consistent at the box office, with both grossed in the $780 million range. The first made $782.6 and the second did slightly better with $785.8.

There are some other superhero movies on the schedule, but it’s hard to imagine them faring much better than 2023’s flops. The Venom movies have been big hits for Sony, but given the lack of similar name recognition for its other villainverse characters, I’m expecting Madame Web to perform more like Morbius. Kraven the Hunter's presence in Insomniac's recent game raised the character's profile, but time will tell if it was enough to make the forthcoming film a hit.

Elsewhere, DC only has one movie on the slate, Todd Philips’ Joker: Folie à Deux. The last Joker movie was a massive hit, and this one adds Lady Gaga to the cast as Harley Quinn, so it would be unwise to count it out. But, in 2023 multiple superhero movies that were sequels to billion-grossers flamed out at the box office, with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom pulling in less than a third of the original’s gross and The Marvels failing to recoup its budget. Given that Joker 2 is a musical and sounds more than a little gonzo, it could just as easily follow that trajectory, putting off swaths of the wide audience that made the original a hit.

So what’s left? Well, largely, a variety of unlikely legacy sequels. There’s Twisters, which arrives 28 years after the 1996 original, S appended to the title Aliens-style, in hopes of generating some $. Though that film has a new filmmaker attached in Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Gladiator 2, and Beetlejuice 2 have their original helmers, George Miller, Ridley Scott, and Tim Burton, back in the director’s chairs.

Then there’s the usual run of prequels (A Quiet Place: Day One, Mufasa: The Lion King), sequels (Despicable Me 4, Inside Out 2, Bad Boys 4, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire), video game movies (Borderlands), and sequels to video game movies (Sonic the Hedgehog 3). In terms of sheer numbers, there are plenty of big-budget movies on the board.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) being attached as director does make Mufasa: The Lion King slightly more intriguing than your average live-action Disney movie.

But I can’t help but feel that Hollywood is kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel this year. Both major superhero franchises have hit the skids, Star Wars can’t seem to get a movie off the ground, Avatar 3 got delayed into 2025, and the Jurassic World trilogy wrapped up with Dominion in 2022. The only live-action Disney movie on the schedule is an ill-advised prequel to The Lion King. We’re in between Bonds. And the remaining marketable superheroes either don’t have a movie scheduled until 2025 (The Batman 2) or have one penciled in for 2024 that will inevitably get delayed (Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse). The typical franchises that Hollywood has relied on as its big earners are nowhere to be found and, even if they were, 2023’s big bombs proved that they aren’t as reliable as we thought.

That may be bad news for Hollywood execs, but it could be great news for movie fans who have longed for a sea change in what gets made and marketed for a mass audience. For decades, franchise movies have taken over an increasingly large share of the market and multiplexes, but the massive success of Oppenheimer and the disappointment of many franchise films shows that audiences want something different. That’s clear in small successes, too. The Iron Claw, a heart-wrenching family sports drama has nearly doubled its budget at the box office. Anyone But You, Glen Powell and Sistatic.aayyy.com/topic/dn/ey Sweeney’s R-rated rom-com, has similarly proven to be a word-of-mouth hit, legging it out to $81.2 million on a $25 million budget since its quiet December 22 release. It’s building on the success of No Hard Feelings earlier in 2023. The raunchy Jennifer Lawrence comedy made $87.5 million on a $45 million budget, and was another datapoint that audiences are hungry for other kinds of movies.

So, when I look ahead to 2024, I fully expect some of the biggest hits to be movies we aren’t even thinking about right now. Sure, some of those franchise films will do business, but the movies we’re talking about at the end of the year may well be movies that no one even knows are on the schedule. Marvel and DC are leaving a huge vacuum and someone has to fill it.

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2023 Has Been A Weird Year For IP Movies

Long-running IP sagas have flopped in cinemas this year, but new and more original titans have risen to take their place

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