I found myself at the movies this year more often than last. The data suggests that I’m not alone.
The number of tickets that U.S. movie theaters sold this year is up 23 percent compared to 2022, according to The Numbers, which tracks film industry statistics. With a month left to go, the domestic box office has already grossed $800 million more than it did last year, according to Box Office Mojo. And though neither metric has yet rebounded to prepandemic levels, it finally feels like the movies are, in some sense, back.
Maybe it was the last gasp of widespread Covid precautions. Maybe it was the monotony of at-home streaming or just the desire to finally get off the couch. Maybe it was the popcorn. But I suspect that much of the reason Americans flocked to theaters this year had to do with the quality and variety of what was on offer there.
A quick scan of The New York Times’s list of the year’s best movies makes the point. The films, picked by the critics Manohla Dargis and Alissa Wilkinson, span a number of genres, including dramas and biopics. They came from legacy studios, tech companies and independent studios alike. They’re the work of veteran directors like Wes Anderson and Steve McQueen, as well as new ones like A.V. Rockwell and Celine Song.
What electrified our critics this year? For one thing, they recoiled at the “ordinary evil” — as Alissa terms it — at the center of the Martin Scorsese film “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which chronicles a spate of greed-based murders against members of the Osage Nation in the 1920s. Our critics also lauded several visually striking, sharply observed documentaries, including one that follows a Chilean journalist’s descent into Alzheimer’s, and another that explores trans and nonbinary identity.
Both Manohla and Alissa make the point that originality, freshness and subverted expectations seem to have won Americans’ wallets this year, not just the critics’ praise. Instead of an action-adventure blockbuster or franchise sequel, the year’s top-grossing movie was Greta Gerwig’s technicolor-pink “Barbie.” The “Barbenheimer” phenomenon — a pop-cultural fusion of Gerwig’s movie and the Christopher Nolan film “Oppenheimer,” which also made our critics’ lists — became a meme-able magnet for theatergoers, myself included.
The movies rebounded this year despite the labor strikes that paralyzed Hollywood for months. Still, the resurgence doesn’t settle all questions about the future of the industry, like whether theaters can fully recover their pre-Covid luster or audiences have lastingly turned the corner on big-budget superhero C.G.I.-fests.
But for now, as Manohla concludes, 2023 was “a terrific movie year.” I can’t wait for the sequel.