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Box Office: 36 Burning Questions In A Year With No Clear Front-Runners

This article is more than 4 years old.

Will Fast and Furious 9 be the year's biggest grosser? Will Dune be the next The Hobbit or the next Blade Runner 2049? All that and more below!

After $120 million in ten days, Bad Boys For Life is looking at a domestic total somewhere between John Wick: Chapter 3 ($173 million from a $56 million cume) and Mission: Impossible – Fallout ($220 million). It is about a week away from besting Paul Blart: Mall Cop ($146 million in 2009/$177 million adjusted for inflation) to become the biggest “new” movie (not counting Oscar expansions) released in January and days away from passing Bad Boys II ($133 million in 2003/$192 million adjusted) to become Will Smith’s biggest R-rated movie. Contrary to what I surmised, Birds of Prey will only be, at best, the year’s second blockbuster. It is, one hopes, the first of many surprises to come in the next 11.5 months.

In a year without a preordained front runner, where even Marvel and Disney are (comparatively) offering B+ offerings (commercially speaking) after unloading all of their A+ releases in 2019, this is a rare “anything can happen” year at the domestic and global box office. The other studios saw the Disney hurricane coming and held back some of their biggest flicks for this year. No matter which studio wins the market share race, Disney won’t necessarily rule over the entire theatrical landscape with an iron fist. The next year will be less about surefire predictions and ironclad guesstimates and more about burning questions. So, with that said, here are 36 burning questions in terms of theatrical box office, here and abroad, over 2020.

I have my opinions about the answers to every single one of them, and you probably do too. And, yes, all of this presumes that A) public life in China quickly returns to relative normal and B) nothing is overtly affected by the 2020 American presidential election season. This is more-or-less ordered by studio, with an emphasis on Universal, Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount and Sony…

Will Keanu Reeves’ increased popularity make MGM’s Bill and Ted Face the Music into a bigger deal than it would have been a few years ago, or will online interest fail to translate into general audience interest?

Will No Time to Die being distributed in North America by MGM (as opposed to Sony for the last four entries) impact its domestic box office?

Speaking of relics, how will Lionsgate’s Spiral: From the Book of Saw (produced by Chris Rock, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman and co-starring Samuel L. Jackson) play as a summer attraction, and will it score as a soft reboot while still playing to the franchise’s devoted fan base three years after Jigsaw and ten years after what was supposed to be the final chapter?

Will Universal’s Fast & Furious 9 emerge as the year’s biggest global grosser by default? The last two earned $391 million-a-pop in China and even Hobbs & Shaw earned $200 million last summer. Will the three-year-gap since Fate of the Furious, the longest since Fast & Furious revived the property in 2009, may make the heart grow fonder?

Will Fast & Furious 9 become the first movie to earn $1 billion worldwide without earning at least $200 million in North America?

Conversely, will 2020 will be the first year without at least one $1 billion worldwide earner since 2007?

Will it be the first year since 2014 without at least one $500 million domestic earner?

If either of those things come to pass, will overall business be down or will more movies get a bigger piece of the pie?

Will the 4.5-year gap between No Time to Die and Spectre in November of 2015, with everything that has happened in the world since then, make the fifth and final Daniel Craig 007 flick more of a global event (it’ll be distributed by Universal overseas) or more of a relic from a bygone era?

Will 3.5 years of kids obsessively watching DreamWorks’ Trolls at home turn Trolls: World Tour, now distributed by Universal instead of Fox, into a breakout sequel?

Will Minions: The Rise of Gru suffer the same comparative downturn as The Secret Life of Pets 2, or will the marquee characters prove as strong with all quadrants as the first four Despicable Me/Minions flicks?

Will Birds of Prey keep DC Films’ hot streak alive and cement the post-Justice League narrative that Warner Bros.’ DC Comics movie franchise is doing “just fine, thanks”?

Will Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 be the year’s biggest domestic grosser? Will it reach the highs of Wonder Woman’s $412.5 million domestic total three summers ago? Or will it do the normal sequel “thing” whereby it earns less in North America but more overseas for a larger global cume, especially if China continues their comparative obsession with DC/Marvel superhero flicks?

Speaking of which, will superhero movies continue to dominate in China? And if so, how will that A) benefit Disney’s Black Widow and Eternals and B) harm any other would-be “big” Hollywood blockbusters like Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick and Warner Bros.’ Tenet opening over the next 11 months?

Will Chris Nolan’s Tenet end up closer to Interstellar ($188 million) or Inception ($292 million), and will it be the first original (non-Chinese) live-action movie to get anywhere near $500 million since San Andreas in June of 2015? If there is a true sleeper mega-smash on the horizon, it could be Nolan’s “time travel spy actioner” movie opening in mid-July courtesy of Warner Bros.

Will audiences who didn’t care about Godzilla: King of the Monsters care about Godzilla vs. Kong? Will “Godzilla versus a monster you’ve heard of” be a bigger deal than “Godzilla versus monsters only hardcore fans care about”?

Will Denis Villeneuve’s Dune play for Warner Bros. like the year’s court-appointed year-end fantasy blockbuster (The Hobbit, Aquaman, etc.) or the next Blade Runner 2049 (an expensive cult property that earns rave reviews but doesn’t earn anywhere near enough to justify the budget)?

Will Jon M. Chu’s In the Heights (Warner Bros./June 26) be bigger than Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (20th Century/December 25)?

Will Walt Disney’s lack of A++ releases cost it a market share victory, or will it just win the day through sheer amount of merely A-/B+ product, including 20th Century releases like Death on the Nile and New Mutants, over the year?

Will less overall earnings from Disney compared to 2019 mean bigger bucks for the other studios or a depressed theatrical marketplace?

Will Pixar’s Onward, a kind of “Bright meets Weekend at Bernie’s for kids” about two teens embarking on a journey to complete a spell that might return their late father back to life, play like a “normal but not insanely huge” Pixar original, grossing closer to $225 million than $325 million domestic? Ditto for Soul in June and Walt Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon in November.

Will Disney’s three original animated films be able to keep up with DreamWorks’ Trolls: World Tour in April, Illumination’s Minions: The Rise of Gru in July and DWA’s The Croods 2 in December? Sure, any one of those three Disney flicks could pull Zootopia ($1 billion)/Inside Out ($854 million)/Coco ($800 million) numbers while Minions 2 is arguably the only surefire mega-grosser in Universal’s animation slate.

How will Marvel’s Black Widow play in the aftermath of Avengers: Endgame, a film which sent Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha on a long walk off a short cliff? Sure, it’ll be “big,” but are we talking about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 ($869 million), Captain Marvel ($1.1 billion) or something closer to Doctor Strange ($677 million)?

Will Eternals be the next Guardians of the Galaxy or, comparatively speaking, the next Ant-Man?

Can Jungle Cruise, starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, be Disney’s first new successful live-action franchise (outside of the MCU and Lucasfilm and those mostly one-and-done live-action remakes) since National Treasure in 2004?

Will the folks clamoring for more “original” Disney movies actually show up for Artemis Fowl or The One and Only Ivan?

Just what will Disney’s biggest 2020 release be? Mulan? Soul? Eternals? Something else entirely?

Will nostalgia and some seemingly impressive aerial footage turn Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick into Tom Cruise’s first non-Mission: Impossible blockbuster since, comparatively speaking, War of the Worlds?  

Can Paramount pull the same magic trick twice with A Quiet Place Part II in March or thrice with The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge On The Run on Memorial Day?

Will Sonic the Hedgehog play beyond the video game fans and/or very young children? Will the money and time spent on redesigning the lead character be worth it in terms of commercial reception?

Will those claiming to want a female or minority James Bond show up to see Blake Lively in Paramount’s The Rhythm Section and/or to see Michael B. Jordan play John Clarke in Paramount’s Without Remorse or does diversity only matter for Marvel/DC superhero movies and Star Wars flicks?

Can Sony’s Venom 2 be a breakout sequel or merely a “the first time was only curiosity” installment? Can it maintain top-tier interest in China?

Will the surprising success of Venom translate into increased interest in Morbius?

Can Sony make Ghostbusters into a franchise on the third try (counting Ghostbusters II) with a Force Awakens meets Stranger Things-like legacy sequel in Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife in July?

Finally, bringing this full circle, will any of Sony’s upcoming 2020 releases earn as much, at least in North America, as Bad Boys For Life?

Will either the James Bond movie or the Fast/Furious sequel gross at least as much, in North America, as Bad Boys For Life? That’s not a question I expected to be asking a month ago, but here we are.

So many questions, too many questions, and that’s not even accounting for any local Chinese blockbusters, Warner Bros.’ Scoob, Universal’s Candyman revamp and anything else that slipped off my radar. There are plenty of opportunities for surprise hits and shocking misses… that’s what you get in a year without a preordained front runner. That’s what you get in a year where Disney isn’t bringing down the hammer on a consistent almost concurrent basis all in one year.  That’s what you get for only the second year since 1998 without a Star Wars movie, a J.K. Rowling flick, a Peter Jackson/Middle Earth movie, a Twilight flick, and/or a Hunger Games movie, where even Marvel isn’t expected to dominate.

Without a preordained destiny for any studio or any movie, it’s the closest thing we’ve had to a free-for-all since at least 2014. That’s the year when major delays (Furious 7, Fifty Shades of Grey, The Good Dinosaur) left a whole in the schedule and Marvel used Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy to assert itself as the biggest franchise in town. But even that year had a Hobbit prequel at Christmas and a Transformers movie in mid-summer.  And if the blowout success of Bad Boys for Life is any indication, it’s going to be a hell of a ride with plenty of happy (and not so happy) surprises along the way.

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