Lionsgate’s Losing Streak: What’s Behind the Studio’s Seven Consecutive Box Office Flops
variety.comRebecca Rubin Senior Film and Media Reporter Lionsgate’s genre-spanning 2024 slate of heist comedies, weepy coming-of-age tales, cheeky video game adaptations and horror stories was aiming to fill a void.
Most of these were the kinds of movies that major Hollywood studios have either stopped making entirely or largely relegated to streaming services.
And yet, instead of packing seats at multiplexes due to pent-up demand, everything from director Eli Roth’s irreverent console-to-screen adventure “Borderlands” ($32 million globally), the “Crow” reboot ($23.7 million) and historical crime drama “1992” ($2.9 million) to Halle Berry’s post-apocalyptic horror story “Never Let Go” ($16.2 million), Dave Bautista-led action-comedy “The Killer’s Game” ($5.9 million), Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi epic “Megalopolis” ($11.2 million) and “Wonder” prequel “White Bird” ($6.8 million) has sputtered at the box office.
That’s a string of seven consecutive flops — each with paltry single-digit debuts — in the nine weeks between early August and mid-October. “It was a pretty diverse slate and certainly wasn’t cannibalization of films,” says Matthew Harrigan, a senior analyst at Benchmark Co. “It was more that nothing really worked.” Lionsgate tends to keep budgets in check and sells foreign rights to its theatrical titles, which helps recoup losses for underperforming movies.
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