When this publication surveyed the evolving landscape of Hollywood movies in early 2024, the industry was bracing for disruption. The numbers that arrived in January like a verdict delivered mid-sentence confirmed the anxiety. Global box office revenue for 2024 clocked in at approximately $30 billion, according to analytics firm Gower Street – a figure that represented a 7% decline from 2023 and sat a full 20% below the pre-pandemic average of 2017–2019. The headline, however, was not the deficit. It was the composition of the films that filled the gap. Every single title in the top ten highest-grossing films worldwide was a sequel, a prequel, or a franchise extension. Not one original screenplay cracked the domestic top fifteen. Hollywood had not merely recovered from the dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023; it had returned to the screen with an almost obsessive commitment to familiarity.
The Strike Aftermath: A Year Built on Borrowed Time
Understanding 2024 requires understanding what preceded it. The Writers Guild of America walked out on 2 May 2023, joined on 14 July by SAG-AFTRA – the first time since 1960 that both actors and writers struck simultaneously. The WGA strike lasted 148 days; SAG-AFTRA’s ran for 118, the longest in that guild’s history. The combined economic toll on Southern California alone was estimated at $6.5 billion, with 45,000 jobs lost, according to research published in Modern Economy. Productions halted mid-filming; release calendars were gutted.
The effects were structural, not merely cosmetic. With fewer scripts completed and fewer shoots wrapped in time, 2024’s theatrical slate was notably thin, particularly in the first half. Studios leaned harder on existing intellectual property – films already in development, already in post-production, already built on the scaffolding of name recognition. The result was a year in which the top ten global earners included Inside Out 2 ($1.699 billion), Deadpool & Wolverine ($1.338 billion), Moana 2 ($1.059 billion), and Wicked ($758 million). Each was a sequel, a spin-off, or an adaptation of a property with decades of brand equity behind it.
As Business Insider reported at the start of 2025: “Not a single original story cracked the top 15.” The observation was less a critique than a diagnosis. In a recovery year, with a compressed release calendar and audiences still uncertain about returning to cinemas, the studios played the safest hands in their deck.
Inside Out 2: The $1.7 Billion Proof of Concept
No film better illustrated the economics of 2024 than Pixar’s Inside Out 2. Kelsey Mann’s sequel to the 2015 original opened on 14 June to $154 million domestically – the biggest opening weekend of 2024 and the largest animated debut in history. By its second weekend, it had grossed $101 million, becoming the first animated film ever to surpass $100 million in its second frame. Within 19 days it crossed $1 billion worldwide, the fastest animated feature to reach that milestone.
It would go on to become the highest-grossing animated film of all time, surpassing The Lion King (2019) at $1.699 billion. Pixar’s Pete Docter, the studio’s chief creative officer, noted the film’s resonance with audiences navigating their own emotional complexity. “It speaks to something universal,” Docter told Variety. “Everyone, no matter their age, is figuring out how to manage anxiety and joy and all the emotions in between.” Clinical psychologists Lisa Damour and Dacher Keltner were consulted during production to ensure the portrayal of adolescent emotional development felt authentic rather than sentimental.
The film’s success was not merely commercial. It validated Pixar’s strategy of returning to properties that audiences already loved, after the studio had experimented with original fare such as Elemental (2023), which underperformed at the domestic box office. Inside Out 2 demonstrated that sequel fatigue – the assumption that audiences grow weary of returns to familiar worlds – was, at least in animation, premature.
The Sequel Problem: A $10 Billion Question
If Inside Out 2 was the best-case scenario for franchise filmmaking, the year’s broader pattern raised uncomfortable questions. The top ten global films – Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Moana 2, Despicable Me 4, Wicked, Mufasa: The Lion King, Dune: Part Two, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Kung Fu Panda 4, and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 – were all continuations of existing narratives. The only original non-sequels to appear in the top twenty were DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot ($324 million) and It Ends With Us ($351 million), the latter adapted from Colleen Hoover’s bestselling romance novel.
The pattern was not accidental. As Variety observed, studios had “leaned into the industry’s reliance on pre-existing fan bases to mitigate risks and drive consistent revenue in a recovering market.” The logic was straightforward: sequels carried built-in audiences, reduced marketing costs, and offered more predictable returns. The risk, however, was long-term. If audiences grew weary of familiar IP, or if the quality of sequels declined, the entire commercial model – which depended on a handful of $500 million-plus earners to offset the losses on smaller bets – could unravel.
A 2024 study published in the Journal of Cultural Economics confirmed that franchise performance tends to deteriorate with each installment: production budgets rose, while revenue, return on investment, and critical reception all declined. The study’s authors noted that while franchises reduced risk in terms of predictability, they did not necessarily protect against creative stagnation.
Wicked, Gladiator II, and the November Showdown
November 2024 offered a case study in how different sequel strategies could coexist. Jon M. Chu’s Wicked, adapted from the long-running Broadway musical, opened to $114 million domestically – the largest opening weekend for any Broadway adaptation in history, surpassing the $103 million set by Les Misérables in 2012. Starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, the film earned a rare “A” CinemaScore from audiences and grossed $758 million worldwide by the end of its run. Universal Pictures described it as the highest-grossing non-sequel of 2024, a designation that underscored how rare original fare had become at the top of the charts.
Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, opening the same weekend, was a different proposition. The $250 million sequel to the 2000 Oscar winner earned $55 million domestically in its first frame – a solid start, but below expectations for a production of that scale. Internationally, it performed far more strongly, with $282 million from overseas territories bringing its worldwide total to $454 million. The film’s international heft reflected a broader 2024 trend: as China’s domestic box office contracted by 22% and Hollywood release slates thinned, global audiences – particularly in Europe, Latin America, and Asia – became an increasingly decisive factor in determining a film’s commercial fate.
The pairing of Wicked and Gladiator II in the same weekend, dubbed “Glicked” by social media commentators, generated a combined $270 million worldwide. The weekend was widely described as one of the year’s most commercially significant, a reminder that the theatrical experience, when supported by marketing scale and audience enthusiasm, could still deliver blockbuster results.
Streaming, Windows, and the Distribution Question
Behind the box office numbers, a quieter revolution was reshaping how films reached audiences. The traditional theatrical window – the exclusive period between a film’s cinema debut and its availability on home entertainment platforms – had been in decline for years, but 2024 marked an acceleration. According to data compiled by 3Vision Movie Tracker and analysed by SymphonyAI, the average gap between theatrical release and transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) availability across the six major studios had plummeted from 90 days to just 30 days over the preceding five years.
NBCUniversal, the studio behind Wicked, had been among the most aggressive in compressing windows. By 2024, the studio’s average theatrical-to-transactional window stood at just 20 days, down from 64 days in 2022. Wicked itself, however, was treated as an exception: Universal allowed the film an extended theatrical run before its premium VOD release on 31 December 2024, where it earned $70 million in its first week alone – the best such performance for any Universal title.
Disney, meanwhile, recalibrated after its pandemic-era experiments with simultaneous streaming and theatrical releases. In 2024, the studio aligned its transactional launches more closely with theatrical debuts, typically a couple of weeks before Disney+ availability. The approach reflected a broader industry consensus: theatrical windows were no longer governed by a one-size-fits-all rule. Studios tailored strategies based on a film’s performance, with tentpole titles receiving longer runs while smaller releases moved quickly to digital platforms.
The shift had implications beyond commerce. As Steven Spielberg observed at CinemaCon 2025, urging studios to extend windows back to 45 days or more, the theatrical experience depended on exclusivity. “Those days have got to come back,” Spielberg told the audience, echoing concerns from exhibitors who feared that shortened windows undermined the cultural authority of the cinema release.
AI, Independence, and the Shape of What Comes Next
While the box office recovery dominated headlines, 2024 also accelerated trends that would define the industry’s next chapter. Artificial intelligence, which had been a central issue in both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, continued to infiltrate production workflows. AI-powered tools were being used for script analysis, visual effects, and post-production tasks, with studios framing the technology as an efficiency gain rather than a replacement for human creativity. The tension between those two framings remained unresolved, and the 2024 SAG-AFTRA video game voice actor strike – which began on 26 July and lasted 348 days – demonstrated that the AI question extended well beyond traditional film and television.
Independent cinema, meanwhile, found pathways to audiences through crowdfunding, reduced production costs, and the festival circuit. The only original non-sequel in the top twenty – The Wild Robot – was an animated adaptation of Peter Brown’s children’s novel, suggesting that “original” and “franchise-free” were not synonymous. A24’s Civil War, directed by Alex Garland, had debuted to $25.7 million in April, breaking the studio’s opening weekend record and proving that mid-budget original fare could still find theatrical audiences when positioned as event cinema.
The year 2024 was, in many respects, a transitional one. The strikes of 2023 had compressed the release calendar; the recovery was real but incomplete; the reliance on sequels was both a rational response to market conditions and a symptom of deeper structural uncertainty. As Gower Street’s analysis concluded: the spaces in the release calendar had, paradoxically, allowed a multitude of titles to shine. Every success – whether a billion-dollar animated sequel or a mid-budget horror – highlighted the demand for a wide and diverse slate of movies. The challenge for Hollywood was whether it could sustain that breadth, or whether the gravitational pull of franchise economics would narrow the field further still.
The answer, as ever, would be written by audiences. And audiences, in 2024, had made their preferences unmistakable. They wanted what they already knew. The question was whether that appetite was enduring, or merely a byproduct of a recovery year in which the familiar felt like the only safe bet.
