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Although new recent releases like “Black Panther” and “Avenger’s Endgame” have made waves in the international box office market, it still hasn’t grown much in recent years. In fact, 2018, which had a 5% increase to 1.3 billion tickets sold, still experienced less ticket sales than the peak performance year of 2009, which had 1.42 billion tickets sold.
A reason for the widespread decline in box office sales is the emergence of pay-as-you-go streaming services. It is hard to compete for viewers eyes when movies like “Bird Box” come out and no one has to pay an extra fee to see them.
Film Data Analyst, Stephen Fellows believes that it may be a generational shift, “It’s not very convenient for them, especially when compared with other options like streaming when you can watch movies as many times as you want, it remembers your place if you pause it and you can watch on multiple devices.”
Since the beginning of 2017, Netflix has increased its number of total subscribers by more than 40%, from 98 million to 139 million in April 2019.
Box office revenues increased in 2018 despite the slow and gradual decline of demand. That growth is because of the unusually high number of A-List movies coming out. Even with those, international sales only increased by 1% while domestic sales increased by 7%. In subsequent years, presumably years without two of the top 10 highest grossing films of all time, earnings may not be so good.
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