The shutdown weekend, March 2020

Clearly we’re in challenging times right now, and for the next 3 weeks (hopefully only 3 weeks) we’ll see how the box-office survives, but if there was a time that I wished we were still making broad comedies for theatrical release this is it. For those of us who have been around for a while, we used to have times like this all the time. No, not a national catastrophe where everything shut down; but there used to be periods of a couple of weeks where there weren’t any movies, usually right before Christmas and right before Summer. So periods like were about to go through used to be pretty common and we always came out okay on the other end. The big issues right now are clearly comfort and trust, and the exhibitors are doing their best to limit capacity to allow patrons to have some room between each other, and hopefully the testing situation improves severely and quickly.

The box-office looks off a little in general again today, it’s not like it’s a total wipeout considering there’s not much new film, and the new films are pretty much doing what we expected them to do. Come next week, it will be interesting to look at markets where they have closed schools like LA and San Diego; lower income households where both parents (or single parent) work have to do something with kids during the day so the movies have been a traditional warehouse option. We’ll see if that holds true next week.

#1 Onward - If there’s one film that’s down just a little more than it should be today, it’s Onward. There’s a decent amount of K-12 out of school today and there weren’t many out last week, so you wold expect to see a Disney holding in better than it is right now. And I’m not blaming the current consumer climate either, looking at other kid friendly films on the sheet, Sonic and Jumanji look pretty good today, so maybe this is a film that just didn’t connect. Figure it’s off in the 55% range for a weekend in the mid/high teens.

#2* I Still Believe* - This film seems to want to live in two different worlds, as the day goes on we’ll see which one is more dominant. At face value it seems to want to skew towards the Five Feet Apart/Last Christmas young girl weepy genre, but there’s also a pretty strong Christian Faith based fanship here. We’ll figure out which audience dominates this by the end of the day, since the faith based crowd tends to buy in advance and the young girls tend to show up later tonight. For now figure this is about $11 million with an upside if it goes young tonight.

#3* Bloodshot* - It really interesting to see how stars like Vin Diesel just can’t generate any significant box office revenue without a strong IP. Like I’ve said over and over here, theatrical these days is mostly driven by IP and/or Star Power, and you wold think that all that box-office from the Fast and Furious franchise would generate some unique fanship, but just like Chris Hemsworth there just doesn’t seem to be anything there. Figure this ends up in the very high single digits with a decent shot at 10.

#4 The Hunt - Another film I could never figure out. Is it political satire? And if it is, why isn’t it funny? I’m sure there will be those who say this didn’t work because it was too polarizing politically, but I’d argue there was just no there there (at least story wise), this always felt like a big shrug. Figure it ends up in the mid single digits.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always - Opened exclusive NY/LA in the classic 4 and outside of the Angelika NY (where’ there’s probably a Q and A), it’s very soft. Figure this ends up around a $4k psa, unless they have more Q & A’s, then it will be higher.