Strange Darling

A 1100-screen micro-budget thriller from a brand-new specialty distributor, and a clean, calm $1M-weekend expectation that the rest of the trades wouldn't have bothered to make.

This is the Strange Darling moment: an early release from a brand-new specialty distributor, the kind of micro-budget specialty title that the wide-release-focused industry tends to wave off as untrackable. (A specialty release opens on a few hundred to a few thousand screens with a craft-forward marketing posture, as opposed to a wide release that opens nationally on 2,000+ screens with broad TV spend.) The read on this one was the cleanest, calmest in the archive: about a million bucks. That’s the whole expectation. No hedge, no range. Just the number.

Predict the opening

Weekend of August 23-25, 2024

Setup

Late-August release-schedule doldrums (Labor-Day-week average of $20M total new-release gross). Strange Darling (a Miramax micro-budget thriller, written and directed by JT Mollner, shot on 35mm by Giovanni Ribisi) is being released wide on roughly 1100 screens by a brand-new specialty distributor. First sizable release for the new distributor.

Comparable films

Late-August micro-budget specialty wides historically: usually open in the low-to-mid six figures and fade
1100-screen launches without major TV: calibrated for a per-screen average in the hundreds, not thousands
Strong-RT-but-quiet-marketing thrillers: a category that almost never breaks out wide, but occasionally does on word-of-mouth

Marketing context

Modest spend. The distributor was a new specialty house finding its footing; the campaign leaned on the film's craft credentials (96% RT, the Mollner-Ribisi-Gallner-Fitzgerald creative pedigree) rather than a TV-driven push.

Reviews / exits going in

96% on Rotten Tomatoes. Strong critics' notices. No exit-poll infrastructure for a release this size; awareness numbers limited by the campaign's scale.

The full Friday note that weekend was an essay on the LA/NY-vs-the-rest-of-the-country gap (Blink Twice’s $12M/$6M split, the ‘will it play in Peoria?’ question, the question of whether the industry was making movies only for the people the industry knows). Strange Darling didn’t make the public note; it didn’t have the screen count to. But the private read is the one a specialty distributor should study. It’s how the work actually gets done at this level.

“It’s about a billionaire sexual predator, and perhaps that idea doesn’t sound like a fun night out for areas outside of NY and LA… we have to think about who this is for, and needs to be for a few people outside of the 310 and 212 area codes.” [2024-08-23]