Monthly U.S. Box Office Gross Line Graph

This line graph documents the box office gross of every month for every year between 2017 and 2023. While the nuances are somewhat difficult to make out, especially during 2020 (April had a measly $88,000 gross, but looks on par with May's roughly $1 million gross), the trends are still fairly clear - the pandemic led to a drastically lowered box office in 2020, and it didn't begin to rebound until May of 2021. However, ever since, grosses have largely been somewhat diminished compared to prior years, with the January-March period arguably being impacted the most; even January and February of 2020 saw higher grosses than what those months had in both 2022 and 2023. Additionally, the October-December period has also proven to be less lucrative following the pandemic, at least so far - 2021 actually surpassed both 2022 and 2023 in December, likely due to the success of Spider-Man: No Way Home. Even still, the general trends are often similar, with a particularly noticeable trend being how every year except for 2020 sees a decline going into August and a further decline going into September. Particularly surprising, though, is that the highest point of the graph represents the monthly gross in July of 2023; while the graph demonstrates that July is always a reliably profitable month when external circumstances aren't inhibiting the box office, it peaking in a post-pandemic year indicates that audiences are still fully willing to go to theaters to watch movies, even in a world where streaming often dominates. However, July also benefited from the Barbenheimer phenomenon, with both Barbie and Oppenheimer going on to become some of the highest grossing films of the year. This may indicate that trends are poised to drive future significant box office success, though both films were also critically acclaimed compared to a slew of other releases in the year - thus, quality may be seen as what matters, especially when many films, particularly ones in the once-reliable superhero genre, have underperformed while also receiving lackluster reviews. (This was particularly pronounced in 2023, with only Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse doing particularly well critically and commercially.) Either way, though, it does prove that movie theaters remain a viable avenue for releasing films, and that post-COVID, success can still be achieved on par with, or greater than, years prior to the pandemic.