As concerns about the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) continue, theater chains across the world continue to close their doors to adhere to social distancing recommendations. With fewer theaters accessible and experts instructing the public to stay away from large crowds, moviegoers stayed away this past weekend, leading to a 21-year low at the box office with only a paltry $54.4 million in receipts. While the cause for this current crash can be pinpointed to concerns about coronavirus, the last time the box office was this low, there were a couple of reasons as to why many members of the public opted to stay away from theaters.
The weekend in question, September 15 through the 17 of 2000, only brought in $54.5 million. One of the big reasons of that was the Millennium Olympics in Sydney, Australia. The event saw the biggest single crowd ever for an Olympic sporting event, with 112,524 attendees. In the United States, the Sydney Olympics were broadcast on NBC, drawing an average audience of 21.5 million viewers over 17 individual telecasts. Combine this historic sporting event with that weekend’s lackluster box office offerings and it's easy to see why moviegoers chose to stay home instead of charting a path to their local multiplex.
In addition to the Olympics, the movies offered that weekend were particularly poor. The first of the two major offerings that weekend was Nurse Betty, a Reneé Zellweger comedy that netted her a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical. While the film was received well by critics, audiences were not quick to jump on the Zellweger train. The movie was in its second weekend by the time the box office was stomped on by the Olympic Games, and this was after the movie already opened to a tiny $7.1 million. Nurse Betty ended up only making back $29.3 million of its $35 million budget.
To make matters worse, the other relatively film available in theaters that weekend was The Watcher. Not only did the James Spader, Keanu Reeves and Marisa Tomei-starring murder-thriller barely command an average box office performance (also in its second week), but it was panned by critics, who called the film everything from uninspired to dismal. The quality of those two films is one of the big reasons the weekend was so unsuccessful.
As more theater chains close and studios continue to delay their films, the worldwide box office will continue to suffer and many blockbusters will likely end up releasing in the fall or winter. Still, with medical authorities emphasizing social distancing, the reason this time around has much less to do with the quality of films at the box office and much more to do with health and safety.