Year Ender 2023: Between Dunki vs Salaar, Barbenhemier, and Oh My Gadar, how box office 'clash' saw its death this year

The Heartland Institute’s Donald Kendal and Jim Lakely are joined by entertainment writer Christian Toto for our annual end-of-year look at movies, TV, and pop culture. This was, by even the accounts of the suck-up mainstream entertainment press, a disastrous year for Hollywood. Disney Studios set records for box office bombs, and delivered them one after the other in 2023: “Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantummania”; “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”; “The Little Mermaid”; “Elemental”; “Haunted Mansion”; and “Wish.” Those productions alone, predicted to make billions, instead racked up at least $1 billion in losses for the once-infallible studio. And then there is Warner Bros., whose DC Comics Cinematic Universe tried its best to keep up in the bomb department with “Shazam! Fury of the Gods”; “The Flash”, “Blue Beetle”, and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.” Those movies combined to nearly wipe out the studio’s $1 billion profit from its smash hit “Barbie.”