This is expected to be a record-breaking year at the US box office, according to analysts at Morgan Stanley – after which film-industry profits will dip in 2016.
The firm predicts that blockbusters such as Jurassic World and Avengers: Age of Ultron, as well as the forthcoming James Bond film Spectre and JJ Abrams’s Star Wars reboot, will push domestic receipts to $11bn (£7.1bn) in 2015, reports Variety. That’s 2% higher than in 2013, when The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Iron Man 3 helped set the current record.
However, Morgan Stanley suggests that profits will fall in 2016, despite the planned release of reliable franchise money-makers such as Captain America: Civil War and Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
2015 has proved a bumper year for two studios in particular: Disney, which owns Marvel, and Universal. Universal had an exceptional year, with a string of surprisingly good domestic results for Pitch Perfect 2 ($183m to date), Minions ($334m) and Straight Outta Compton ($160m), each of which topped the US box office in their opening weekends. Jurassic World, a reboot of the franchise that began with Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, took a record-breaking $500m in its opening weekend, with $204.6m of that coming from the US.
Disney’s books were bolstered by the Avengers sequel, which has taken $459m, and the Pixar animation Inside Out ($354 million).
Morgan Stanley predicted in June that Star Wars: The Force Awakens will make $1bn in profit after its worldwide release in December. Disney bought the rights to the Star Wars universe for $4.05bn in 2012.
