PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie

In the note We’ve got a couple of bonafide Fall titles this week which should push the cume for the weekend up to (or maybe a little above) norm levels for this weekend. Obviously the NY market is having a rough day and most of the NY boroughs' and NJ theaters have shut down due to the storm. We'll have to see how deep into the weekend the rain will go, but it should have a small effect on the overall weekend. We should be well ahead of last year (Smile, Bros), and just behind 2019 (Abominable, Judy). One of the big factors this weekend is (again) the Rotten Tomatoes factor, and how the 2 1/2 star review can go either way, more on that below. But the next couple of weeks should be solid, highlighted by an invasion of Swifties and (hopefully) the realization of the streamers that the revenue (and platform value) that theatrical generates makes it a sector they need to be in on a regular basis. So lots of upside the next couple of weeks. Speaking of promise and upside, we can only hope that the WGA deal this week lays down enough of a template so the SAG/AFTRA negotiations are just a matter of adjusting some numbers. Clearly there are different needs here, but we can only hope that this doesn’t hit another wall and it takes the studio heads coming into the room to get this done (again). It’s been funny to me how the media keeps lumping all the strikes (including the Hotel Workers and Auto Workers) into one group. But there’s been a big difference between the industry strikes and the non industry strikes; for the industry strikes, the core issue isn’t really about money. As I’ve pointed out here, the money the guilds have been asking for isn’t a back breaking sum, but the method to calculate that number was one of the main sticking points. But as much as the streamers did a nice job of keeping their numbers locked in a black box, while getting the WGA enough data that they feel they’re closer to the residual level they were at before online content took hold, there are a couple of words that could eventually have and effect on how they think of that data. The words are Competition and Marketing. As the streamers continually fight for subscribers (especially the ones that ‘bounce around’), is it possible that they need to go back to the past, and when they are doing well they can tell the world how much better they are….. and revealing data to prove it is a good thing? Back before the streamers took over TV, when a show debuted at #1 in the ratings, chances are they got sampled it because the ratings got published. And just like theatrical, the mainstream press was a great tool for growing audiences because of those published ratings (or in the theatrical grosses). When the Taylor Swift at the Chiefs game thing happened last Sunday, half the conversation in sports talk was about the ratings. And now that she's apparently going to the Jets game (which actually makes sense, she's mostly hung out with broken weirdo's, so going to a Jets game tracks), the conversation is all about how good the ratings will be. For a Jets game. But no one is talking about obscure measurements like minutes watched, they are talking about actual accepted measurements of how many people watched. But these days the claim line is the '#1 show on Netflix’, which is fine if you’re Netflix, but even that only gets you so much because it’s limited to NetflixWorld. But the #1 show on Paramount + feels like a punchline. What if Paramount + goes on a run (considering their Yellowstone IP's, that’s not out of the question), and even though their overall subscriber count is considerably lower than the other streamers, what if they were able to say they have the #1 show on TV (which would include looking at viewership for both Linear and Streamers)? Or 3 of the top 10? Considering that research has pointed to the average consumer limiting their subscriptions to 3 or 4, having an overall metric where the consumer feels like the best shows are on a specific platform, wouldn’t that help capture those 'at large' subs if a platform gets hot? Of course the big difference today and the landscape where ratings were born, is that back in the early days of TV the networks weren’t able to do ratings on their own, it took an outside vendor to do the polling. These days they know exactly how many people watched, and for how long. But for reasons we’ve talked about extensively here, they don’t want to share that data. However, several companies are figuring out ways to create new ratings systems that will estimate the number of viewers and we’ll be able to compare and contrast the various content on both linear TV and Platforms; and since most of linear TV is viewed ’non live’, the linear TV measurements are going to be comparable to the pure streamer content. And the key phrase here is ‘estimated viewing’. It will be interesting to see a streamer or platform disagree with one of those estimates, and the easy response from the vendor would be ‘okay, then give us the real data and prove us wrong.’ That could be interesting. At this point, it's too far fetched to be in a place where we have a central vendor that is a clearing house for all this data, and each streamer reports in every day, similar to what EDI started in the 80’s with Theatrical grosses, and Comscore/Rentrak is doing today. But since this town is big on success driven by numbers, and winning numbers can add an updraft to strong content, would it be crazy if one of the 'also ran platforms' gets hot and starts reporting numbers that tell the world that they might not have the most subscriptions, but have the most people watching? However, as long as we have a fear that the next $200 million streamer movie gets treated the way Indiana Jones got treated a couple of months ago, the negatives will out shout the positives. Anyway, with the relative dependability and accuracy of a New York Jets fan's mental health evaluation, here are some thoughts on the weekend box office. Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie - It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out over the weekend.

PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie

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