Fourth weekend of October 2020

It’s another slow Covid weekend at the box office, however we do have another digitally marketed wide film this week. Backing up to last week though, I received a couple of notes about my thoughts on PVOD*; and suggested I expand on them. First of all, there’s no hate here for any viable distribution platform right now, clearly these are challenging times and we have to do what seems right at the moment. 3 months ago, I’d say wait a little and theatrical will be fine in a couple of months but we’re still trapped in this loop 3 months later (with no end in sight). Since PVOD is just one tier in a film’s commercial life, if you can combine that with all the other ancillary tiers to reach or exceed your break, that’s a great achievement in today’s world. But here’s the problem with PVOD, it seemed like a viable way to go 10 years ago, but the market has changed. Unfortunately no matter how much money you spend making a film, including cast, IP, and finishing costs; once it leaves theatrical to TV (or a device) it’s just more TV. You can pretend it’s still a movie and call it whatever you want, but it’s just more TV. So it now has to compete with other TV, and because Netflix, Amazon and all the other brands that have a mathematical symbol behind them have created a strong value proposition with plentiful content and a monthly fee well below the PVOD rental price. So if you’re a normal middle class family that’s watching their spending (especially these days), you have to count on some pretty strong fanship to trigger a $20 purchase for 2 hours of TV. So, that’s why I called it ‘really expensive TV’ last week, and I believe that’s why most of the results have been pretty underwhelming; as I’ve heard over and over again ’nothing we’ve seen from PVOD makes us want to forget about theatrical’. It’s always been interesting to me that the lazy press keeps saying that ‘the streamers are a problem for theatrical’, but theatrical has been dealing with various forms of TV for 70 years and knows how to compete. It’s the satellite/cable companies that have to learn how to compete (especially price wise). In fact, if you think of the $40-$70 it costs for two people to go out to a movie (depending on the premium level of the theater), what can you go out of the house and do for that cost? So in comparison, theatrical (as a going out of the house activity) is very competitive, if not incredibly value driven, cost wise. PVOD is the opposite and at the highest price point level of things you can watch on TV. Anyway, with the accuracy and dependability of the Dodgers bullpen, here’s my take on this weekend’s box-office.

The Empty Man - One of the interesting experiments that Covid has allowed us to do is answer the question ’so what if we just marketed a film digitally?’ Many a studio marketing chief have been pushed by their higher ups to move to cheaper digital ads, but we’ve seen very little evidence that you can get something open big without a substantial TV spend. In times like we’re in, you can’t efficiently buy TV without wasting a decent amount of money on closed markets like NY and LA; but digital allows you to ‘geofence’ each market and have a more efficient spend, which is perfect for a Covid marketplace. What is interesting is that all these films that go fairly wide and only spend digitally are basically doing about the same gross, and that’s about $1 million, and it seems about the same no matter what the genre is. Now it’s possible that (because of Covid) we have a finite amount of moviegoers and they’re just going week after week no matter what the film is, but it is weird that we keep getting the same result for digitally marketed films. This film should follow its predecessors and end up about the same place.

Synchronic - This independently produced Thriller only went about 400 runs and doesn’t look like anything out of the ordinary from what we’ve seen from similar films lately.

All the holdovers are following the same pattern we’ve seen since the Covid restart. Very good holds.

*this week’s PVOD slogan: “PVOD, because the MBA’s we hired away from McKinsey (who used to be consultants for frozen pizza companies) thought it was a great idea”