
Box Office Sales Tanked 80% in 2020

Sarah Whitten | CNBC.com
Ticket sales in 2020 fell 80% to $2.28 billion.
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This is the lowest tally for the domestic box office in nearly 40 years.
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The domestic box office has not topped $100 million in any month since March.
With just a few days before the end of the year, the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the film industry in 2020 is clear and devastating.
Ticket sales crumpled 80% to $2.28 billion, a far cry from the second-best box office haul ever of $11.4 billion in 2019, according to data from Comscore.
“To say that this was a challenging year for movie theaters is an understatement,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore.
The year started off strong, with the industry garnering more than $900 million in January, a 10% increase compared with the same month a year before. Much of its success was owed to films like “Jumanji: The Next Level” and “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” which were released in December 2019 and still playing in theaters during January.
February topped $651 million in ticket sales, a 4% increase over the previous February.
However, in March, the film industry entered a period of forced hibernation as the U.S. went into lockdown to stem the coronavirus pandemic.
