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Replacing a Dying Hollywood: 2023's Top 5 Suprise Box Office Successes

 By Michael Austin  February 26, 2024 at 4:43pm
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In 2023, we were all given the pleasure of watching Hollywood’s monopoly die.

It used to be if you wanted to make a good movie, you needed to be going through the Hollywood system.

But now, that system is failing, and audiences are looking elsewhere to get their movie fix.

Thanks to many factors — bloated budgets, political agendas and plain old poor filmmaking — 2023 was a disastrous year for the Hollywood box office.

Those massive losses created a window of opportunity for creators outside of Hollywood to break onto the scene, and many did so, finding massive success.

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The few Hollywood studios that did manage to find success in 2023 did so by returning to the days of old Hollywood, back when every other character wasn’t LGBT or a racist caricature of a Trump supporter.

Those films, much like the independent studio successes, became massive surprise hits.

Here are the top five surprise box office successes of 2023, along with some honorable mentions.

Honorable Mentions

Have you seen any of these films?

The first few honorable mentions go to a few faith-based films — The genre fared rather well in 2023. “Jesus Revolution,” for example, proved the viability of faith-based film studio divisions. Based on the ’60s Jesus movement in California, the biopic was produced by the faith-based Kingdom Story Company. The studio works exclusively with Lionsgate.

“Jesus Revolution” grossed a respectable $54.1 million on a $15 million budget, per IMDB. Expect at least a few more major studios to partner up with smaller Christian production companies in the coming years thanks to this gem.

Another faith-based success from 2023 was the horror flick “Nefarious.” Based on a novel by conservative commentator Steve Deace, the film is essentially “The Exorcist” meets C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters.” Though the film only managed to snag $5.7 million at the box office, it reportedly made an even greater profit on VOD. As a result, a sequel series to the film has already been greenlit.

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In recent years, Hollywood has learned the hard way that it’s not always good to bet all of your money on the success of one or two bloated-budget blockbusters. Instead of one $250 million budget film, producing several micro-budget films like “Nefarious” is a much safer bet. “Nefarious” proves those budgets can be lowered without sacrificing quality.

A few virtually agenda-free superhero films this year also managed to fend off superhero fatigue. Marvel Studios’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” felt like a fresh breath of air, or rather, of old air — as if it was made before the onset of the “M-She-U.”

That’s likely because it was written prior to 2020, back during the days of Marvel’s dominance. The film was the number four highest-grossing film at the worldwide box office last year, raking in over $845 million, per Box Office Mojo.

“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” was also one of the highest box-office earners last year, further proving that superhero fatigue might actually be the fatigue of bad superhero movies. The film made an impressive $690.6 million worldwide, making it the sixth-highest-grossing film of 2023, per Box Office Mojo.

The last and most impressive honorable mention that we couldn’t quite fit on this list was “Five Nights at Freddy’s.”

Based on the popular kids’ horror game, the film didn’t try to subvert the original story or water things down for a broader audience– it simply tried to please the fans. And it did, to the tune of $291 million and a number-one box office slot for its opening weekend.

This is especially impressive considering the film was available to stream on Peacock throughout its theatrical run, according to IGN. Peacock claimed that the film also set the streaming service’s five-day viewership record at the same time it was dominating theaters.

The key to this film’s success is a recurring theme found throughout this list — those that sought to please the fans rather than push an agenda rose above the competition.

5. Japanese Films with Family Values

The week of Dec. 8 through 14 was an eventful one for the domestic box office. That period saw not just one, but two Japanese films take top box office spots. “The Boy and the Heron,” an anime film directed by legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli, held the number one spot throughout the week while Toho Studio’s “Godzilla Minus One,” managed to maintain the number three spot. The latter film was edged out of the two spot by “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” a prequel to an incredibly popular franchise, by less than $1 million.

The success of these two films perfectly represented the changing of the guard that this article is dedicated to showcasing. While many American films nowadays force politically correct attitudes into their respective stories, both of these films did the opposite: They highlighted traditional family values.

Both films featured strong male characters fighting to protect their female loved ones, both highlighted the value of the traditional family structure as central to their stories and both portrayed female characters as loving, compassionate and feminine rather than as ballbusting, masculine Mary Sues, a trope all-too-common in modern feminist Hollywood. With the domestic success of these two movies, American audiences proved their willingness to pass over Hollywood’s drivel for good filmmaking, even if they have to read subtitles to do so.

4. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie”

One of the biggest storylines to come out of 2023 was Disney losing its spot as the top-grossing film studio. Instead, that honor shifted to Universal Pictures. This was thanks largely to the success of “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which was produced by Illumination, a studio partially owned by Universal. The film was the second-highest-grossing film of 2023, bringing in a monumental $1.36 billion worldwide.

The animated feature itself is representative of Universal’s larger approach. Plainly put, that approach is to be family-friendly and agenda-free, something Disney cannot say about virtually any of its modern films.

If Universal’s pictures continue to be agenda-free and high-quality, this could be the push needed to force the rest of Hollywood to realize that LGBT agendas and dishonest portrayals of race relations are, in fact, bad for business.

3. “Barbie”

Now “Barbie” is an interesting addition to this list. It is perhaps the most politically-minded of all the inclusions, and yet it still managed to resonate with audiences. In fact, it resonated to the tune of $1.44 billion, making it the number-one box office movie of 2023. Why was that?

Well, despite its overt politics, the “Barbie” movie actually did one very good thing that most movies refuse to do nowadays — it made a feminine movie for female audiences. The beautiful set designs bursting with color, the fashion-minded costuming, the pretty women and handsome men — in spite of some of the values it preaches, “Barbie” was a girly movie made for girly women. And women ate it up.

What that proves is that female audiences aren’t looking for female characters to be shoe-horned into traditionally male franchises (the audiences of female-led superhero movies still tend to lean male). Men and women have different interests. Hopefully, this movie was a step towards Hollywood understanding that fact.

2. “Oppenheimer”

“Oppenheimer” was a three-hour, R-rated, partially black-and-white biopic. Movies like that can perform well, but they never prove to be the biggest commercial successes. At least, that was the case before “Oppenheimer” broke the mold. The Christopher Nolan-helmed Robert J. Oppenheimer biopic raked in an astounding $957 million at the global box office, making it the third-highest-grossing 2023 flick.

After years on years of churning out sequels and prequels and remakes and reboots, the movie industry finally realized something with “Oppenheimer” — audiences are dying for good movies, even if those movies deal with complicated subject matter.

The success of Nolan’s film will no doubt lead to studios funding many more like it, which is a win for audiences everywhere.

1. “Sound of Freedom”

Without a shadow of a doubt, it was Angel Studios’s Jim Caviezel-led hit that surprised the movie industry most this year. Nobody — I mean nobody — thought this film was going to perform as well as it did. “Sound of Freedom” is based on the harrowing, true-life story of former CIA agent Tim Ballard and his years-long mission to save children from child sex trafficking.

“Sound of Freedom” didn’t just perform “well,” it shattered expectations and made a fool of Hollywood. With a relatively minuscule budget of $14 million, “Sound of Freedom” brought in an astounding $250.5 million worldwide. Domestically, the flick beat out “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning,” “Fast X,” “Elemental,” “The Flash” and many other high-budget blockbusters produced by high-powered Hollywood studios — again, at a fraction of the cost.

Whereas “Jesus Revolution” showed that major studios might be smart to invest in smaller Christian film divisions, “Sound of Freedom” proved that Christian companies like Angel Studios can distribute hit blockbusters all on their own without any help from the Hollywood establishment.

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Michael Austin
Manager of Writing and Reporting
Michael wrote for a number of entertainment news outlets before joining The Western Journal in 2020 as a staff reporter. He now manages the writing and reporting teams, overseeing the production of commentary, news and original reporting content.
Michael Austin graduated from Iowa State University in 2019. During his time in college, Michael volunteered as a social media influencer for both PragerU and Live Action. After graduation, he went on to work as a freelance journalist for various entertainment news sites before joining The Western Journal in 2020 as a staff reporter.

Since then, Michael has been promoted to the role of Manager of Writing and Reporting. His responsibilities now include managing and directing the production of commentary, news and original reporting content.
Birthplace
Ames, Iowa
Nationality
American
Education
Iowa State University
Topics of Expertise
Culture, Faith, Politics, Education, Entertainment




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