US domestic box office revenue

It is a curious fact about the universe that Americans seem to have decided, sometime around 2010, that their appetite for watching other people's fictional adventures on screens would be perfectly mirrored by their appetite for standing in actual queues to watch other people having fictional adventures in person, and that both of these desires would rise and fall in almost exactly the same rhythm for fourteen consecutive years. One might have assumed these were measuring entirely different things. One would be wrong.

Disney parks and US box office both collapsed in 2020 under the same edict: no crowds indoors. Parks ran at skeletal capacity for months, theatres went dark almost entirely, and the two numbers bottomed out within weeks of each other. The correlation isn't that one causes the other — it's that they share a corporate parent and a virus.

What we're really observing here is two different ways of measuring the same basic human impulse: the willingness to pay for narrative and escape. The correlation tells us nothing meaningful about causation, and everything meaningful about how thoroughly economics colonizes our leisure time. Disney's theme parks and Disney's films rise together not because watching Frozen makes you want to visit Arendelle, but because both require you to have money and optimism in roughly equal measure. When you have those things, you spend them on stories. That's all this is really saying.