Third weekend of September 2020

Although the domestic box-office is still pretty quiet, there’s a couple of interesting things going on out there. Although we still haven’t had a film open with the TV ad support normally associated with a big time wide release (or anything even close to it) since we re opened, and the those small TV spends showed in the results, we have a film today that is trying something new and unique. So with the accuracy and dependability of the Clippers shooting in the 4th quarter of a playoff game, here’s my best take on the weekend box-office.

Tenet - Still not reporting grosses but word on the street is that it’s holding just fine again with a very small drop from last week.

Infidel - This film is going to be very interesting to watch this weekend. Because a lot of the theatrical markets on the coasts are still closed, this Red State targeted film took more TV ads than we’ve seen on any film since we opened back up (although still a fraction of what we would normally see), but only advertised on Red State skewing media like Fox News and The History Channel. The results are showing, for example the best gross right now is in Idaho. It doesn’t have any real star power, so it’s not going to be as good as Unhinged was a couple of weeks ago, but it’s certainly way better than any of the independent films we’ve seen so far (and some films released by major studios).

The New Mutants - For a film that had pretty low exit scores, the market is still holding this up really nicely, looks like it’s only going to be down another 25%.

The Broken Hearts Gallery - Since this is the only comedy in the marketplace, this should hold very well, and the numbers so far look very promising. Figure it’s only down about 35% from last week.

After We Collided - They had a massive Friday (the film is only playing in Canada) last week driven by a strong fan ship and then settled at a lower level for the rest of the weekend, but still ended up with a better opening weekend than the film this sequel is based on. Looking at the drop today it’s clearly high because it was so hot last Friday, but tomorrow and Sunday should bring it back a little.

The Nest - This upscale film from IFC opened on 300 screens and on a per screen average, looks a lot like the other upscale films we’ve seen lately (Words on Bathroom Walls, Personal History of David Copperfield). The screen average is very similar to those films because they’re still missing the best upscale markets on the coasts.