Election week 2020

For those of you that have been on pins and needles since Tuesday, welcome to what I go through every Weekend. For example, a film opens on Friday and it’s a decent amount below expectations, so everyone goes to bed Friday thinking it’s a big disappointment. Then Saturday comes along and it’s up way more than normal, and we begin to see some positive movement, and by the end of Saturday the talk is ‘maybe not so bad’. Then another over performance comes along Sunday and when the grosses get reported everyone steps back and says ’that was pretty good, why did we freak out Friday night?’ However, if you really look at why there were issues over the weekend, there’s always a clear cuprit; it was because tracking had the film $10 million higher than it should have been. So, yep, polling (and poll based tracking) still sucks. So, with the accuracy of anything polling based, here’s my best take on the weekend box-office.

Let Him Go - There’s something very important going on here. Now that we’ve got almost every market open in the US except LA County and NYC, it makes sense for a studio to release a movie backed by a real (with a good amount of TV) campaign. As much as LA County and NYC represent a decent % of the grossing potential, it’s not like you can’t generate a good gross by putting a level headed but extensive campaign out there. There’s a reason all these movies have been grossing low numbers, no one is spending any money to open them (including Tenet). This weekend, Focus has come to the rescue and hopefully other studios are going to take notice; as long as the economics make sense, you can hit your break in this marketplace. This well reviewed film is doing nicely and just like most adult skewing films should get a nice bounce tomorrow. In a normal non Covid world, an adult drama with decent star power like this (think The Good Liar, or something like that) would probably gross $6 or $7 million, and I’m not sure it will be that far off that this weekend.

True to the Game 2 - This sequel to the 2017 AA skewing indie opened on about 250 screens, which is about half of what the first film opened on. The first film opened to about a half million dollars, this one should end up about 60% of that.

The Informer - This Joel Kinnaman indie opened on a couple of hundred screens and doesn’t look like much is going on there.

Once again the holdovers look pretty strong, with very slight drops across the board.