Profit may have been the Wall Street watchword for the entertainment industry in 2023, but are any of our major studios actually making a profit? In the 2023 year, precisely one Hollywood conglomerate posted profit growth for the full calendar year, in a year rife with change and disruption. Today, Brandon Blake, our entertainment lawyer from Blake & Wang P.A., digs a little deeper into the state of some key studios’ balance sheets, and what we might expect by the end of 2024.



Brandon Blake

2023 in Review

We all remember a 2023 characterized by dual labor strikes, knock-on effects on the production pipeline, and a box office that is still firmly in recovery mode. However, it is easy to lose sight of the positives. 2023 also brought us a box office that jumped by 31% and closed at $33.9B globally.

However, the bottom line will always matter, and for the studio divisions of major Hollywood giants, it was a tougher year. While financial disclosures are limited and are not easy to compare like-for-like as some include TV networks, not to mention different fiscal years, we can draw some conclusions from them.

The State of 2023 Studio Profits

With those caveats in mind, let’s look at what we do know.

NBC Universal had an excellent year at the box office, kicking off with the year’s No. 2 film, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and backed up by the No. 3 (Oppenheimer) and No. 5 (Fast X) films. They took home $4.91B in global box office revenue, a 26% gain, dethroning Disney in the process. They also saw an 8% decline in expenses due to restructuring, a 7% decrease in marketing, and some other cost savings. They closed the year with $1.3B in profit and $11.6B in revenue. The studio segment continues to see strong growth.

Warner Bros. Discovery, home of the No. 1 film of the year, Barbie, saw $1.44B in worldwide revenue, with $3.94B in global theatrical revenue despite some box office underperformance. However, a 10% drop in studio unit revenue due to a softer market can’t be ignored, with studio earnings down 20%. It still took the crown for the biggest profit among studio segments at the Hollywood conglomerates. 

Paramount had Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One as its top performer, responsible for a full quarter of its worldwide box office. It released very few movies compared to other studios (8, vs 24 for Universal, for e.g.), and it showed in theatrical revenue 34% below 2022. Sony, similarly, had a top performer in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, but closed on an overall 12% drop in motion picture revenue. Their TV productions, however, went up by 15%. Despite showing growth in 3 of the 4 2023 quarters, their operating income decline knocked them 18% into the red compared to the previous year. 

No one could say Disney had a bad year, per se, with a slew of top 10 hits pulling in almost the same as 2022 ($4.8B vs $4.9B). Its overall revenue for 2023 dropped about 8%, and its theatrical performances were weaker than in 2022. Given their mass restructuring and wide focus, however, it wasn’t anything to worry unduly about.

As you can see, despite some dire mumblings, most of the ‘losses’ can be tied to the continued pandemic recovery and the need for the studio giants to restructure for a changing media landscape. This should, with luck, mean that 2024 will see further upward growth for all entities, although Paramount may be hampered by its pending M&A action.