Despite the cinema industry’s sluggish, vaccine-powered rebound, ticket sales for even the biggest films are still a quarter of what they were in 2019.
The simple truth that the battle for the most successful Hollywood film of the year, which is currently being fought between F9 and the long-awaited James Bond instalment No Time to Die, is being waged in the $700 million range, rather than the multi-billion-dollar range that the industry has become accustomed to. (It’s also odd that Marvel and Disney, which have dominated these discussions in the years leading up to the epidemic, aren’t even in the running, with Shang-Chi, the studio’s biggest performer, grossing only $431 million worldwide.)
Bond is expected to overtake Dom and the Family as the most profitable studio film of the year, according to Deadline. (It’s possible that No Time to Die may be dethroned by West Side Story or No Way Home before the end of the year—betting against Steven Spielberg or Spider-Man seldom pays off—but both December releases will only have a short window to try to displace Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film.)
Both of these series have one important similarity: they do exceptionally well outside of the domestic box office, in addition to their fondness of doing really goofy espionage stuff with vehicles. If we just include the United States, the two films would come in fourth (F9) and sixth (No Time to Die), respectively, considerably below Shang-Chi. No Time to Die, on the other hand, had a broad international appeal, grossing $124 million in Bond’s home country of the United Kingdom, $69 million in Germany, and $57.9 million in China, according to Box Office Mojo. F9, predictably, went all-in on the Chinese market, grossing $203.8 million there, outperforming its US and UK box office totals combined.
