Parasite, Bong Joon-ho s breakaway hit
Which films made a splash in 2020? Frankly, I haven’t a clue. Or at least, none founded on the way the industry usually measures these things: by cold, hard box office takings. For almost five months of the calendar year, all 840 cinemas in the UK were closed. Many remained shut even when permitted to reopen thanks to the lack of new mass-market releases, as Hollywood battened down the hatches. In 2019, global box office revenue hit £31.67 billion: an all-time high, for which China and the Avengers can take the lion’s share of the credit. This year’s final haul is expected to reach a little over a third of that. In a world of bubbles, tiers and two-metre rules, customer demand was bound to shrivel.