Third weekend of July 2019

Thanks to the Disney Xerox machine, we’ll take a nice chunk off the year to year deficit this week; maybe as much as $80 million, and we should have a surplus next week too. One aspect that might become an issue this weekend is the heat wave gripping most of the country. There was a time that a heat wave of this magnitude was a big accelerator at the box-office, but that was before the dawn of the $199 Costco portable air conditioner, so we’ll see if it accelerates or hurts the box-office this weekend. So, based on something I heard at the sparsely attended ‘Putting away Childish Things’ seminar at Comic Con*, here’s my best take on the weekend box-office.

#1 The Lion King re-issue - Looks great so far today, and just like a couple of the recent Star Wars films, it looks like Disney Marketing has somehow convinced people (again) to go see a film that they’ve pretty much seen already. Of course, one of the most blatant lies brilliant positioning moves was to brand this a ‘live action remake’, even though it was closer in genre kin to Disney Animation than Disney Live action and was 100% CGI. It makes complete sense that the film is almost a carbon copy of the beloved original, how do improve upon a film that was nominated for best picture and Katzenberg describes as the best Animation film he ever made? Of course the answer is you really can’t and probably shouldn’t, so the best solution (under the Disney corporate mandate to leverage all vault assets**) was to throw as much technology as possible at it; and if you read the reviews there were upsides to that (the visuals) as well as downsides (the emotion). It will be interesting to see how the moviegoing public reacts to this and if there’s a downstream effect to this film. If you look at the audience pushback to sequels over the last couple of years; the idea of just making the same movie over and over again and slapping a higher number (with optional colon based suffix) on the title started with The Hangover 2. That film seemed to expose the ruse, and the audiences pushed back by staying home because they felt burnt. And until someone came along and solved the problem and regained their trust (which Disney did with the Marvel films) there was serious decay from sequel to sequel. So with a lot of these remakes in the Disney pipeline (and at this point who knows what’s Live Action and what’s essentially animation), will the bait and switch on this film have an effect later? I’m not saying this film is such an unsatisfactory experience that it will have a unilateral butterfly effect for all the future remakes, but we could see a decay in films made from IP’s that don’t have as solid a fanbase as this film. All that being said, this film is really good today. With the heatwave this weekend giving this an upside and the possibility that this might be a little front loaded giving it a downside, I’ll pick a midpoint of about $180 million for the weekend, which will comfortably be a July record.

#2 Spider-Man : Far From Home - Looks pretty normal for a 3rd weekend, figure it’s off 50% for a weekend in the low 20’s.

#3* Toy Story 4* - Looks pretty good right now, looks like low teens.

*The Farewell *- Expanded to 35 theaters this weekend and looks really good so far. They took a decent amount of runs in LA so the Arclight and the Landmark are down a lot, but there are some solid grosses for this today. Figure a pretty impressive PSA of $30 - $40k.

*The Art of Self Defense *- Also expanded off an exclusive run to 550 theaters today. There are some fair grosses in the most sophisticated markets, but it’s pretty soft overall. Figure a PSA somewhere in the $1,500 to $2,000 range.

• the ‘Art of taking your costume to the dry cleaner and convincing them you spilled some ice cream’ segment of the ‘Fun of Furry Cosplay’ seminar next door was packed.

** you can insert your own joke here about Walt’s frozen head.