The Impact of Covid-19 on the Film Industry
Film Industry 2019-2021 and the impact of Covid-19 on the industry
What is life without entertainment? Whatever it is we don’t want to know because we can’t live without entertainment.
We gathered some data by scraping different film rating websites by the ParseHub Web Scraper tool and found some interesting statistics.
Let’s start with some statistics…
Top Movies in the Past 3 Years. 2019-2021
The movie industry globally is a billion-dollar industry and there is no denying the fact that yes, we cannot live without movies. According to IMDB “Avatar” was the highest-grossing movie since 2009 making around 2.8 billion globally with a rating of 7.8 but this record was almost broken by the top-grossing movie of 2019 “Avengers Endgame” making 2.79 billion globally with a rating of 8.4.
Top movies in 2019
2019 was a great year for the film industry with great blockbusters such as “Joker”, “Avengers Endgame”, “Parasite” and many more. “Parasite” being the top-rated movie with a rating of 8.6 which also won the Oscar for the best movie of the year. The top-grossing movie however was “Avengers Endgame” with a global box office of 2.79 billion.
Top Movies in 2020
2020 began with a blockbuster movie “Bad boys for life” with a rating of 6.6 and grossing 425 million worldwide but it all stopped there when the world was hit by covid-19 and the film industry suffered a heavy loss with the productions closing and the theatres being closed too.
The digital platform took over and there were many tv shows and movies released online but that couldn’t make a top worldwide gross. However, the top-rated movie released in theatres was “Tenet” later in 2020 but due to more covid-19 waves it was also available to stream online so it didn’t do well on the box office.
Top Movies in 2021
2021 is the year of recovery of most of the industries and they are still recovering as Covid-19 has not been fully cured yet. Most of the releases of some blockbusters were moved to 2021 which were supposed to release in 2020 like “Black Widow”, “A Quiet Place 2”.
These movies were released in theatres and are doing well on the market. The top-grossing movie of 2021 with a worth of 149 million is “F9: The fast saga” although it is not the top-rated movie by far and we are still waiting for a blockbuster this year.
How did Covid affect the film industry?
In 2020 the entire global theatrical and entertainment market totalled 80.8 billion, the lowest figure since 2016 and a decline of 18% from 2019.
The sharpest decline was in theatrical revenue which dropped from $42.3 billion in 2019 to $12 billion in 2020. Theatrical entertainment accounted for only 15% of the total global entertainment revenue, compared to 43% in 2019.
The 2.2 billion in box office receipts in 2020 marked a 40-year low in the domestic box office.
In 1981 the U.S./Canada market, led by Superman II, generated 918 million in ticket sales, when the average movie ticket price had been $2.78, compared to $9.16 in 2020.
With theatres closed or with restricted attendance from mid-March onward, movie attendance, which had been well over one billion for decades, dropped to 240 million for the year, in all probability, an all-time low.
This was due to the production houses closing because of which fewer movies were released and the box office took a dive from mid-March onwards.
The Rise of the Digital Entertainment Market.
The closure of theatres resulted in a blessing for the digital entertainment market as people preferred to stay home and enjoy movies with their families on their electronic devices.
There was a huge increase in the number of subscribers for the online streaming services in 2020 than it has ever been. In 2020, with new launches and more content, there were 308.6 million subscribers, a year-over-year increase of 32%. Revenue from online video subscriptions grew by 35% in 2020, totalling $24.7 billion.
For the year, Netflix had nine of the ten most-streamed original television programs (based on minutes streamed), led by Ozark. The outlier was the Mandalorian on Disney+ which ranked fifth.
The ten most-watched acquired series were all on Netflix, led by The Office (the sitcom left Netflix in 2021 for Peacock).
For movies, it was a different story, Disney+ dominated with seven of the ten most-streamed films of the year led by Frozen II. The most streamed film on Netflix was the Secret Lives of Pets which ranked third.
This digital entertainment revenue resulted in no Box-Office top-grossing movies which have led to the permanent shut down of several movie theatres all around the world.
There is no doubt that people might reconsider switching to theatres rather than watching everything online. The pandemic has affected a lot of industries and the entertainment industry has taken a huge part in that dip.
With theatres opening up in 2021 there are expectations that everything will recover soon but all we are is waiting for another blockbuster so that people get driven towards theatres again.
Closing Thoughts
That concludes the impact of Covid-19 on the movie industry!
Some of the data from this research were done by scraping data using ParseHub, a free web scraping tool.
If you would like to conduct your own research like this, you can get started for free!
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