Third weekend of November 2019

Yep, you guessed it, we’re down a lot from last year this weekend. Last year between Crimes of Grindewald, Instant Family and Widows there was almost $100 million in new openings, so it was a very tough hill to climb. We’ll only be able to generate about half of that this year with the new openings, and the difference between this year and last year will be about the difference between the gross generated by the new films this year vs the new films last year. Thanksgiving doesn’t line up with last year this year, so we’ll be down again next week (because last year was Thanksgiving) but the week after we’ll get a big chunk back and the all of December should be above the same week from last year. So, based on something I heard at the arcade while playing Dance Dance Revolution and Whack A Mole with Myles Garrett, here’s my best take on the weekend box-office.

#1* Ford v. Ferrari* - Ever since the deal closed where Disney took over the Fox slate its been a weird sight on opening weekend. It looked something like when you move into a new house and find all these bags of god knows what in the backyard, and you walk it out to the curb at arms length holding your nose*. Although before they walked the trash to the curb, Disney made a valiant effort to find something useful by putting on the rubber gloves and the gas mask, then rummaged though the trash that was thrown at them looking for something to polish up. But trash is trash, so you eventually have to take it out to the curb**. Now, Disney finally has a Fox title more commensurate with the quality we’ve seen out of Disney, and in typical Disney fashion they’ll easily win the weekend. It’s a (really) old skewing movie so it’s probably not going to set the world on fire tonight, but looking at it against some similar older films like Ad Astra or First Man, it’s very good. Figure it’s somewhere around $30 million give or take a million or two.

#2 Charlie’s Angels - Both the 2000 smash hit version of this IP (and its sequel), and the late 70’s ABC TV ‘giggle’ fest had star power to burn (relative to their mediums). Although his reworking of the IP for today’s sensibilities did okay with the PC police posing as critics, this film is woefully short on star power. The iffy idea of rebooting this with ‘who the fuck is that?’ and ‘I don’t give a shit about her’, a respected actress who has zero history of getting movies open without some serious IP and then putting the only legitimate star power of the package behind the camera, is showing today at the box-office. As I’ve said before quite a few times here, the theatrical sector is driven by two factors; IP and Star Power. If you have a massive IP or massive star power, you can get by with only one of them but in this case you needed both and had neither. So even though this isn’t going to be that great, with the (almost) no name cast, I’d argue that in todays market this should be a whole lot worse, so blame anyone but Marketing. Figure it’s somewhere around $10 million.

#3/#4 The Good Liar / *Midway *

• The Good Liar looks pretty decent for an older adult drama, despite what you might have read in the trades. Unless they really flatten out tonight, it looks like around $8 million for the weekend. Their screen average is actually ahead of both Charlie’s Angels and Midway right now.
• Without Veteran’s Day to prop it up, figure Midway is down a little more than the usual 50% and ends up in about the same $8 million neighborhood.

Waves - Opened exclusive LA/NY in the classic 4 and looks very strong. Unless the usual Q and A’s are skewing this gross right now, figure a PSA in the $30k range.

• Very similar to the look on many of your faces as you approve the invoice for NRG Tracking. ** and by ‘the curb’ I’m not talking about Disney +. Yet.