Big-name films boost Christmas ticket sales at Atlanta theaters

And theaters, to meet their demand, begin to show earlier and much more frequent screenings to accommodate them.

A boost in business around the Christmas season helps to carry theaters over into the first few months of the year, when fewer tentpole movies are released. It also attracts new customers to the theater who wouldn’t have otherwise visited, giving owners an opportunity to turn them into regulars.

“On big days like Christmas or Thanksgiving, that’s kind of our Super Bowl for the year,” said Brandt Gully, owner of The Springs Cinema and Taphouse in Sandy Springs. “You have a lot of people who aren’t consistent moviegoers coming in, and it’s our chance to show off.”

Christmas Day itself is a strong day for ticket sales — after all, theaters are some of the few businesses consistently open on that day.

Credit: TNS

Credit: TNS

Studios tend to release large and heavily marketed titles with broad appeal during Christmas. Holiday-themed movies are often released weeks, if not months, beforehand.

This year’s Christmas Day releases included the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” Robert Eggers’ remake of “Nosferatu” and the Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson-headlined thriller “Babygirl.” All three faced stiff competition from Disney’s “Mufasa: The Lion King,” and Paramount Pictures’ “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” which both opened last weekend.

Domestically, the highest-grossing film on Christmas Day was “Mufasa,” which brought in $14.7 million, according to revenue tracker Box Office Mojo. Between its opening and Dec. 26, the film grossed $2 million in sales in Atlanta theaters, according to worldwide film performance database Comscore.

Coming in second was “Nosferatu,” which brought in $11.5 million on its opening day. Next was “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” which landed at $10.3 million, and the Dylan biopic, which brought in $7.2 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

Credit: TNS

Credit: TNS

Sales at Springs Cinema were up 13% this Christmas compared to last year’s holiday numbers. About $40,180 worth of tickets were sold, according to Comscore.

Gully said he was a little surprised by the year-over-year increase. Earlier in the year, when he looked at the holiday release calendar, he said he really didn’t see anything that stood out as a big family blockbuster.

But all of the releases ended up providing a little something for everyone. There was a dark horror film, two children’s movies, a biopic about an American icon and multiple blockbusters that released weeks ago — “Wicked” and “Gladiator II” — that are still attracting new viewers.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

The Plaza Theatre on Ponce de Leon Avenue sold 520 tickets across seven showings on Christmas Day, accounting for about $8,000 in sales, owner Chris Escobar said. This is more than triple the amount of tickets the theater sold on Christmas last year. He suspects the increase is largely due to a greater interest in this year’s titles.

Escobar’s other cinema, the Tara Theatre, sold 549 tickets, accounting for about $8,300 in sales. This amount was slightly less than last year’s ticket total of 603.

For The Plaza, “Nosferatu” was the clear winner. The theater experienced such a high demand for the film that they replaced a showing of “Babygirl” to make room for an additional screening of “Nosferatu,” Escobar said. In fact, about 85% of the tickets the Plaza sold on Christmas Day were for the Eggers film. The No. 1 theater for “Nosferatu” showings in Atlanta was Madison Yards, which sold $12,258 worth of tickets, according to Comscore.

Credit: HANDOUT

Credit: HANDOUT

The winner at the Tara was “A Complete Unknown,” which accounted for more than half the 549 tickets sold. The same went for Springs Cinema, which led all metro area theaters in the number of sales generated off tickets for the film: $16,094.

As for the theater that generated the most amount of revenue on Christmas Day? That would be the 24-screen AMC Southlake in Morrow, which sold $68,998 worth of tickets, according to Comscore. The 18-screen Regal Cinema at Atlantic Station followed with $62,793.

Though 2024 has experienced its fair share of commercial flops, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Atlanta-filmed “Megalopolis” or “Joker: Folie à Deux,” this year’s domestic box office is shaping up to fall not far behind last year’s total.

Comscore projects the U.S. will end 2024 with $8.75 billion, trailing last year’s $9 billion. This number tracks the revenues generated from ticket sales, which gets split between the studio that produced the movie and the theaters that are showing it.

This is not a bad year-end total for an industry still recovering after last year’s writers and actors strikes, which delayed production and pushed back the release of several titles into 2025. But the box office gross is still below prepandemic levels, which averaged between $10 billion to $11.8 billion from 2010 to 2019, despite the cost of a ticket steadily increasing during that window, according to data from box office tracker The Numbers.

But this isn’t the case for all theaters. Gully’s theater in Sandy Springs sold more tickets this Christmas than on Christmas 2019.

“We continue to battle this perception that cinema is dead and the question of ‘who goes to the movies anymore?’ We had more than 2,000 people in our 8-plex on Christmas Day, when people have plenty of other things to do and plenty of other ways to consume media,” Gully said.

Theaters expect the momentum to carry forward into the weekend and the start of the year.

“It’s this wonderful weeklong weekend,” Escobar said. “Every day is Saturday.”