Second weekend of November 2019
I’m almost getting to the point of embedding the ’this week is gonna be way behind the same week last year’ line in the template for this email (similar to the ‘forward this and I’ll kill you’ line). In addition to the strong holdover last year for Bohemian Rhapsody, The Grinch opened to $67 million last year (plus Overlord and Girl in the Spider’s Web), and at this point Im not sure all 4 new movies will add up to Grinch’s opening gross from last year. So this week is gonna be down, way down from last year. With the accuracy of this report for those of you who just ’scan’ it rather than read it, and then get upset because you showed up to a theater at 7pm on Saturday for Irishman and it was all sold out (and then got upset at me because you seemed to get the impression that I said it wasn’t doing any business*), here’s my best take on the weekend box-office.
#1 / #2 / #3 Doctor Sleep / Midway / Last Christmas - All three of these look mid/high teens with the chance of getting a little better and any of these could conceivably win the weekend, but more than likely in the following order.
- *Midway - *Hmmm, there seems to be a pattern with Lion’s Gate since they let their inner Wolf out, and they are consistently getting much more gross out of films than the films seem to deserve. Smartly positioned on Veteran’s Day Weekend, they leaned heavily into the Cheesetacular aspects of Roland Emmerich and this looks terrific today. This is so far ahead of the other two right now, but it’s also super old skewing so the only reason I’ve got this grouped with the other two is I’m pretty sure this will do very little business tonight, so because of the skew of the other two films it’s conceivably anyones game.
- Doctor Sleep - By now you’ve read that this sequel to The Shining is coming in way below expectations, and as usual the industry will immediately start pointing the finger at WB Marketing. But is this a marketing issue, or is this an issue where maybe we were being a little lazy and over valuing the strength of the IP? Although Stephen King has certainly been having a good couple of years at the box-office, with the It and Pet Semetery remake; but in the world of Stephen King IP, Doctor Sleep wasn’t that big of a book. The Shining was a big book, but The Shining (like most of Kubrick’s films) opened good not great, faded away quickly and then aged well. To take you back to another world, even with the massive star power and IP of The Shining, it opened on 10 screens. That’s right, 10. Fun fact (and to show what a different world it was back then) the normal wide release in 1980 was about 1000-1200 screens; however the same weekend The Shining opened exclusive, The Empire Strikes Back opened limited too (120 theaters, it was exclusive in the top 25 markets) because clearly after Star Wars you needed to build word of mouth. What a different world. Anyway, if you back away from this and consider that this film didn’t have any of the jump scares it needed to earn its way into the Horror genre and IP wise you should be thinking about other movies that were made from sequel books such as Girl in the Spiders Web or Inferno, and then add in the very low star power here, this gross is at the top of that group. So, no one messed this up; this isn’t It or Pet Sematary, we just didn’t see it the way moviegoers seem to be seeing it. So don’t hate on WB, this business is really hard and sometimes we don’t figure this stuff out until days like today.
- Last Christmas - This all depends on how young it goes tonight. If they can get the young girls ’that just want to be held’, this also has a shot at a weekend win.
#4* Playing with Fire* - There are some kids out of school today in the NY / Philly area and this is doing really nicely there, so it should have a really nice bounce tomorrow. Figure it’s around 12 or 13 for the weekend.
#5* Terminator: Dark Fate* - Doesn’t look very good right now, figure down 60% for a weekend of about $11 million
Honey Boy - Opened Exclusive NY/LA in the classic 4 and looks really good right now, but there’s always a possibility that we’ll run through the people who don’t hate Shia LaBeouf. As usual the Q & A will skew this, but figure a PSA of about 50k.
- not what I said (and for some reason those skimmers seemed to take away other things that I didn’t say), I said it ‘was not sold out but pretty full’ and that was Friday afternoon and you went Saturday night.