US domestic box office revenue

As US domestic box office revenue has fluctuated, fireworks-related deaths have moved in the opposite direction, a correlation that suggests either that movies keep people safely indoors during fireworks season or that the same economy suppressing box office attendance is somehow encouraging explosive experimentation. The coefficient is -0.849 across thirteen years, during which Hollywood's fortunes and pyrotechnic casualties have traced each other's inverse with the uncomfortable precision of an action movie gone wrong.

Box office revenue peaked at about 11 billion dollars in 2019, crashed to 2 billion in 2020, and has been recovering since. Fireworks deaths spiked during the pandemic when Americans, deprived of professional July 4th displays (which were largely cancelled in 2020 and 2021), turned to amateur fireworks with enthusiasm and insufficient caution—consumer fireworks sales hit 2.4 billion dollars in 2023, up from 1 billion in 2019. The inverse correlation is largely a pandemic artifact: when professional entertainment (movies) was unavailable, amateur entertainment (backyard fireworks) filled the void with predictably dangerous results. As box office recovered, professional fireworks displays also resumed, reducing the amateur component.

Thirteen years of box office revenue and fireworks deaths moving in opposite directions is a story about what Americans do when professional entertainment disappears: they provide their own, with significantly less safety equipment. The movies closed, the fireworks opened, and the injury rate reflected the substitution. The projector went dark, the fuse was lit, and 2020 made every form of entertainment more dangerous except streaming.