Canadian movie theaters closed 2023 with their highest ticket sales since the start of the pandemic.
The Movie Theatre Association of Canada reports overall Canadian box office revenue rose to $897.7 million last year, up 34 percent from $674 million in 2022 amid a continuing Hollywood box office recovery.
But last year’s performance was still short of the $1.02 billion dollar mark reached by Canadian cinema operators in 2019, before the pandemic. Movie ticket revenue north of the border during the preceding decade moved in a $950 million to just over $1 billion range.
For 2023, credit the Barbenheimer phenomenon, with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Universal’s Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan, helping local exhibition giant Cineplex break summer box office records.
James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water and the concert movie of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour were also standout box office performers locally last year. The Canadian box office continues to be mostly from cinema-goers flocking to see Hollywood movies, often franchise fare, as the amount of screen time for local Canadian and other international films pales by comparison.
The 2023 box office performance included around $8 million in revenue from alternative content, often music concert movies and sports broadcasts at the local multiplex, against about $5 million from the same category in 2022.
As the Canadian box office gets nearer to ticket sales from before the onset of the pandemic, local cinema operators can look forward to a host of Hollywood tentpoles pushed to this year and 2025 by the production impact of the now-concluded Hollywood writers and actors strikes.
That includes Dune: Part Two and the Ghostbusters: Afterlife sequel now hitting theaters in 2024, and the next Mission Impossible film and Snow White, Disney’s live-action remake, delayed to 2025.