US movie receipts are set to total just $7.35 billion in 2022

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The box office revenues of blockbusters like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Top Gun: Maverick may have increased in 2022, but they did not save the industry from a disappointing year.

According to recent projections, domestic box office receipts in 2022 are expected to be close to $7.35 billion, a decrease of 33% from the pre-Covid days of 2019 when ticket sales totaled over $11 billion.

Even if the number increased by 68% from 2021 to now, many Americans used streaming services to avoid leaving their homes.

A portion of the low revenues may be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, but many in the entertainment sector appear to think that the lack of palatable output is the largest cause for concern.

According to ComScore, movie ticket sales over the Christmas holiday weekend totaled $86 million from Friday to Sunday, a sharp decline from 2021 when "Spider-Man: No Way Home" shot to the top of the box office.

Avatar: The Way of Water managed to come out a winner over the weekend, however, raking in $56 million during the holiday weekend.

Even the production company behind the year's biggest domestic film, Top Gun: Maverick ($718M), had its struggles. We're still coming out of the COVID haze, said Brian Robbins, chief executive of Paramount Pictures in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. 

"There are a couple of films that we barely got to the finish line," Robbins said. 

The studio still managed to claim five of the top 25 spots on the domestic box office list for 2022 with Maverick, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ($190M), Smile ($105M), The Lost City ($105M), and Scream ($81M). 

Despite these figures, the Paramount executive stated that he doesn't think the present output has reached all of the prospective consumers in the post-pandemic world.

"Outside of the big tentpoles, genre films and some family films, I don't think we've seen audiences fully come back," Robbins said.