Third weekend of October 2020

The Honest Thief

 It’s another Covid level weekend today, and thankfully we have a wide
release film this week.  New/old Studio Open Road is walking the walk in
support for the exhibition industry and has smartly decided to take the
limited theater availability, instead of doing what many have been doing;
sending their films to the PVOD graveyard (where films go to die*).  Maybe
when all this is over, we can have a tourist attraction with gravestones of
all the films that went to die in PVOD, naturally it would be part of the
Universal Studios Tour.  Anyway with the accuracy of a Clayton Kershaw
fastball, here’s my best take on the weekend box office.
The Honest Thief - Went about 2400 runs this week, supported by a
campaign that makes sense in today’s marketplace, including some male
skewing TV.  It looks very similar to what we’ve been seeing for these wide
films since the covid restart, and should gross in the same range as what
we saw with Unhinged or last week’s War with Grandpa.  But whatever it
ends up being, it will be better than what it did if it debuted on PVOD,
and it still gets a PVOD window……..
The War with Grandpa - Like everything else we’ve seen during the covid
period, it’s holding a little better than it would have in the pre covid
world.  Figure it’s only down about 40%.
2 Hearts - Went 1800 runs this week with a purely digital marketing
campaign, very similar to what Sony did about a month ago with Broken
Hearts Gallery.  This looks pretty similar to Broken Hearts Gallery, but
they only have about 3/4 of the runs so figure it’s about 3/4 the gross.
Love and Monsters - This little horror film from Paramount went about 400
runs and looks very similar to July’s The Rental.  Just like The Rental,
it should get a good boost from the drive-ins.

new PVOD motto, “PVOD, 2 hours of really expensive TV”