Third weekend of June 2019
Disney is doing everything they can (and since they rule the biz these days, they have to) to pull the biz even with the same weekend last year, but that one two punch of Incredibles 2 and Jurassic World is too big of a hill to climb. It looks like we’ll be off another $50 million or so (18%) from last year, and it looks like we’ll have about the same deficit next week. So based on something I heard during a Mini Bar drinking game at the Hard Rock Hotel in the Dominican Republic, here’s my best take on the weekend box-office.
#1 Toy Story 4 - As usual, Disney moves the ball forward on sequels and this should be in the neighborhood of a spectacular 36% improvement on the opening weekend of Toy Story 3 ($110 million). Although this film will be short of the animation record of Incredibles 2 ($183 million), but that film was a male friendly film that opened on Father’s Day weekend; and with both the other big IP Pixar sequels of late (Toy Story 4 and Finding Dory) performing on a slightly lower level, it’s an interesting question whether Incredibles 2 was just an outlier or did it just get an economic lift based on release date. We’ve been seeing the same effect for films released on Mother’s Day, not just on Sunday but all weekend. This film seems like it’s playing like gangbusters and we’ve seen the weekend estimates on the Pixar films inch up as the weekend goes on, but for now I’ll say this ends up around $145 million.
#2 Child’s Play - The first film of our 5 day, two film festival of Talky Tina tribute movies, it looks like there’s still some attraction to this IP. The numbers look consistent with the previews last night, figure a weekend in the low/mid teens.
#3 Men in Black International - Looking fairly typical for a summer tentpole in the 2nd weekend, figure its down 55% for a weekend in the low teens.
Anna - The critics did their best PC police job on this film (so are they going to go back and reconsider all of Alfred Hitchcocks films now too?), so there’s not much going on with this right now. The exits are very good though, figure it’s somewhere in the 3 -3.5 range.