For the Hollywood-centric, the holiday-of-your-choice festivities and the countdown to the New Year mean a different set of seasonal rituals: the accountants tally up the box office returns and the critics make up their Top Ten lists. The first has the advantage of mathematical precision, the second the satisfaction of taste-mongering, and together they neatly encompass the commerce and art that defines the topic at hand. In short, it’s time to cue up a montage of images from the past year and take stock of the big picture.
In commercial terms, especially for the battered exhibition end of the business, the news from 2024 was, surprisingly, not bad. Total domestic box office revenue appears to be heading toward around $8 billion, down from 2023’s exhilarating post-COVID turnaround of $9 billion, but the National Association of Theatre Owners prefers to accentuate the positive, attributing the dip to a shortage of product due to the labor strikes and taking encouragement from the renewal of the movie habit. Whether because of cabin fever, Nicole Kidman, or the late-year release of films that people really wanted to see, going out to the movies seems to have returned as a swipe-right option on the entertainment menu.
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Predictably, and distressingly since it portends more of the same, the films that drew the biggest crowds fed off the allure of pre-sold properties. Every single one of the top ten box office hits of 2024 was a sequel, a remake (was Twisters a sequel or a remake?) or a prequel. The by-the-numbers formula is certified by the digit after the title, with no extra effort expended on thinking up a subtitle (Moana 2, Kung Fu Panda 4), not that explanatory subtitles helped Joker: Folie à Deux or Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Gladiator II wisely stayed on brand with the Roman numeral.
Interestingly, or thankfully, the cinematic universes of Marvel, DC, and Star Wars failed to expand: except for Deadpool & Wolverine, not one of the huge hits came from a comic book franchise or a galaxy far, far away. The good news for the theater chains is tempered by the bad news when you get there — not the film but the audience. The moviegoing experience of 2024 cannot be rewound without a curmudgeonly screed against the incursions from the moviegoers who see the movie screen as a distraction from the screen in their hands. According to anecdotal reports from regular moviegoers, that is, me, a plague of lit screens, texting, and talking has increased alarmingly, compounded this year by a fresh hell: the brazen recording of clips from the screen.
One wonders if the interruptions from the smaller screens will be a permanent blight on the big screen theatrical experience. Of course, obnoxious, inconsiderate, and self-absorbed moviegoers have always been annoyances to those members of the audience attending to, you know, see the movie — hence, the slides projected on screen at the nickelodeons to remind ladies to remove their hats and gentlemen to refrain from expectorating tobacco juice.
However, throughout the classical Hollywood era, audiences generally abided by a code of decorum that seems lifted from a Jane Austen novel. True, crowds were noisier and more raucous in audible expressions of engagement — hissing, cheering, applauding, with an occasional wisecrack shouted out — but the responses were collective and inspired by the story on screen. They enhanced the moviegoing experience rather than distracted from it.
The exhibitor-oriented trade press — notably the monthly “Better Theatres” section in Motion Picture Herald — devoted a good deal of attention to seeking ways to nurture an atmosphere conducive to pleasant night out. In those days, even small neighborhood theaters employed uniformed ushers to guide latecomers to their seats with a flashlight, patrol the aisles, and handle obstreperous customers. The escorts were issued strict instructions about how to behave on duty: “Keep obviously intoxicated persons outside,” “be tactful in quieting unruly patrons or children,” and “watch out for mashers, degenerates, and morons. Report them immediately to the management.” (Also: “never flirt with patrons.”)
Even in the 1950s, when teenagers become the dominant audience, the good kids worked with local theater managers to police their own and discourage rowdy antics. “When we attend a theater, we must remember that we purchase the right to only one seat,” advised an editorial in a high school newspaper in 1952. “An inconsiderate person is one who spoils the picture for others by excessive noise. Movie manners are for everyone.” That same year, a teenage girl wrote Colbert Culbert in Photoplay to ask whether it was appropriate to whisper to her boyfriend during the show. “It is extremely bad manners for a theater patron to keep up a conversation, either personal or critical during the performance,” replied Colbert.
Against the ubiquity of hand-held technology and the breakdown in public manners (and don’t get me started on the oblivious scrollers planted on the Nautilus machines at the gym), exhibitors have limited options. Before the feature film unspools, most theaters now screen a PSA politely reminding moviegoers to silence their devices, but compliance is unenforceable. The problem is acute enough to have inspired one of the year’s best movie tie-ins: Deadpool & Wolverine’s “Silence Your Cell Phone” PSA, which delivered the message in laudably blunt terms. If only Wolverine could make good on his threat to deal with the offender in the manner proscribed.
Certainly no responsible film critic would ever fire up an iPhone or laptop in a movie theater to take notes for what has been an annual duty of the profession for over a hundred years, the Top Ten List. The credit for originating the practice is contested by several claimants. In 1920, the National Board of Review, founded in 1909 and still on the job, organized a special Committee on Critique “to examine those film productions which seem to have unusual qualifications and to make selections from among those for a list of exceptional pictures.” Every month, the board designed a “Best Bet” in its publication Exceptional Photoplays. The first honoree: Reginald Barker’s Godless Men, a seafaring adventure produced by Sam Goldwyn.
The trade paper the Film Daily, which operated from 1915 to 1970, also claimed to have initiated the practice in 1921. Though originally the selections were made in-house, the editors soon cast a wider net by soliciting contributions from newspapers, trade periodicals, and fan magazines, collating the results, and giving front page coverage to the finalists. “The poll has become a national event and is only made possible through the enthusiastic cooperation of some 400 newspaper folk throughout the country,” the editors boasted in 1930, when the top of the Top Ten was an easy call: Lewis Milestone’s epic adaptation of Erich Marie Remarque’s anti-war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front.
In 1923, New York Times film critic Mordaunt Hall winnowed down 10 titles from the over 200 films the paper reviewed that year. His list included Charles Chaplin’s comedy of manners A Woman of Paris, Ernst Lubitsch’s American debut Rosita, Thomas Ince’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, and, to show he wasn’t overly sophisticated, crowd pleasers such as James Cruze’s epic western The Covered Wagon and Wallace Worsley’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Once validated by The New York Times, few metropolitan film critics dared to opt out of the year-end chore. “Along about Thanksgiving time, students of the cinema begin selecting the ten best pictures of the year,” declared George Gerhard of the New York Evening World in 1930. The studio ad-pub departments soon started to pay attention to the rankings and so did filmmakers. In 1935, David O. Selznick confided to The Hollywood Reporter that he hoped to produce “pictures that will be on the ten best’ list, both commercially and artistically.” MGM boasted that its 1938 line-up “has more winners on the individual nation-wide published lists of Film Critic’s Ten Best Pictures of the Year’ than any other company.”
Today, the individual critic, film society, website, and at least one ex-president continues the tradition for the selfsame reasons of mutual advantage. The announcement of the list drives traffic to the critic while the film so honored accrues cachet and, it hopes, a bump in attendance. Almost always, the critics’ picks expose the gulf between the tastes of the credentialed, who get regular invitations to press screenings, and the ticket buyer, who must queue up at the mall. David O. Selznick’s aspiration remains the Platonic ideal: a film that makes both Top Ten lists and reaps the rewards of commerce and art: The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946, Saving Private Ryan in 1998, and Oppenheimer (2023). This year, only the blockbuster Wicked and A Complete Unknown seem to have threaded the needle.
The four critic’s darlings of 2024 arrive in matched pairs: the transgendered-themed Emilia Pérez and Conclave and the flesh-for-fantasy provocations of Anora and The Substance. A genre than seldom makes it into a Top Ten but which had an exceptionally rich year was teen-targeted horror, energized by dynamic all-in performances by young female leads: Hunter Schafer in Cuckoo, Naomi Scott in Smile 2, Maika Monroe in Longlegs, and, of course, Mia Goth, who capped her trilogy of intergenerational terror with MaXXXine.
By contrast, documentaries had almost no theatrical life, with one significant exception: Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist?, a Michael Moore-ish take-down of the DEI bureaucracy. Ignored or trashed by critics, it was a textbook example of the divide between elite and popular tastes. Maybe not coincidentally, of all the films released in 2024, Am I Racist? turned out to be the most reliable indicator of the shape of things to come — the zeitgeist shift in November that many in the motion picture industry pushed back against but could not stop. The story of the commerce and art of Hollywood in 2025 will be how well it connects culturally with an audience that it is often out of synch with politically.
