With the Hollywood writers' and actors' strikes over and production resuming on a majority of projects, the question now turns to what lies ahead for 2024? Social media, streaming, and high expenses has some speculating on more mergers in the space, with talk of a potential merger between Paramount Global (PARA) and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD).

Gitesh Pandya, Box Office Guru Founder & Editor, joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the state of the box office as well as the potential for mergers among streaming services.

Pandya elaborates on the state of media consumption: "Consumer behavior has changed a lot. There's social media, there's TikTok, there's Instagram. People are spending trillions of minutes on these free platforms and that's trillions of minutes they're not spending watching movies and tv shows. That really begs the question, will we see some M&A activity this year? I think that we will. Between streaming and television and film, a lot of them cannot survive the way that they are right now, so they're kicking the tires."

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Editor's note: This article was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And as we look at the industry, obviously, last year was all about "Barbenheimer." Do we expect that same-- can we repeat that same sort of magic this year? And what does that mean for what we're seeing in the space for M&A as well as we're really trying to get more value, especially for investors out of some of these movie franchises and stocks as investments?

GITESH PANDYA: Right. Well, you know, the studios have been relying on franchises every year, seagulls. You know, "Barbie" was not a seagull, but it was a brand. "Super Mario Brothers," another brand, not a seagull. They really drove the box office last year. "Barbie" was the number one movie of the year, $1.44 billion around the world. One year ago now, nobody could have predicted it would make that kind of money. So there's always surprises at the box office.

Right now, the calendar looks a little bit light. Because of the strikes, a lot of projects have been delayed. And so this calendar year looks a little bit weak. However, just the nature of the business, new movies will be added later. And there are surprises also around the corner every year.

So we cannot truly predict what the year-to-date box office will be come December because of all those surprises and so on. However, the studios are looking to go through a year of changes. This is a world where all these studios may not be able to survive in the long term because of all the changes that are going on, not just on the studio side but also with the audiences.