Second reopening weekend, August 2020

As the re-opening of the business continues, we’ve welcomed a couple more states back to the Theatrical world, Arizona (state motto: #49 in Education, #2 in Freedom) and the fighting Nike’s from Oregon have both allowed theaters to open today. We’ve got a couple more films opening today, but thinking back to last week I think I’m going to take a more cautious view of projecting weekend grosses. After I sent last week’s report, I had some remorse since we’re in an evolving marketplace and I was worried I’d be terribly wrong (not that it’s anything new, I’m wrong all the time), and I was worried some wrong opinions might end up in the press. Although last week’s projections were actually very good, it seems to me the press is trying to jump on anything negative and I’m probably going to talk more in generalities here for a couple of weeks. However, I know that a couple of you are stakeholders in some of these films, so if you need something more specific just hit me up. So, based on something I heard on a Zoom cocktail hour with people inside the NBA bubble, here’s my best take on this weekend’s box-office.

#1 The New Mutants - Finally arriving in theaters this week after reshoots and release date pushes, this film will clearly land in 1st place. As with Unhinged last week, looking at where this should be doing business, it really looks like what we would normally see before the shutdowns. The big problem with this film is the critics were pretty negative on it, but we’ll have to see if the moviegoing public and X Men fans agree. Depending on how this plays out over the weekend, figure this is about double where Unhinged was last weekend, so it’s clearly another step forward in the reopening of the theaters.

#2 Unhinged - They had really robust pre-sales last Friday and what goes up…….. So, it’s way down today, but we’ll have to see if it stabilizes once we get deeper into the weekend.

#3 Bill and Ted Face the Music - This well reviewed (wait, what? The critics like this? Yep, 82% currently on RT) and the long gestating sequel is going day and date with about 1000 theaters and PVOD. Although the theaters that play day and date with PVOD don’t gross that much (however, they do have the drive in’s, which might be a different story) don’t look half bad considering. But the real story here will be the PVOD gross.

#4 The Personal History of David Copperfield - Similar to what we saw last week on Words on Bathroom Walls, this is a well reviewed, upscale skewing film and the theaters that would normally gross well are in states that are still closed. So the grosses look a lot like Words on Bathroom Walls, although this film has about 300 more runs so I’d expect a gross commensurate with the wider distribution.

#5 Words on Bathroom Walls - Looking better than the average 2nd Friday drop (at least before the shutdown, who knows what it means now), this film is still not grossing a lot, but at least it’s holding up okay and might eventually find an audience.