Mother's Day weekend 2021

It’s another baby step forward today for theatrical, we’ve got another film doing a little better than what it would have done in a pre-pandemic world (especially considering the marketing spend). This was going to be the date where Black Widow was going to open, but with Europe having some pesky shutdown issues, Disney (understandably) moved to a date more friendly to a global launch. Mother’s Day usually sees at least one ‘Mom’ targeted film, and even though the core audience for Marvel is people living in Mom’s basement, it was Mom friendly and would have been great here. But Disney’s loss is MGM’s gain, and they smartly moved this Guy Richie action film here. So, based on something I heard from the workplace safety monitor in the Lakers Locker room, who keeps the board on the wall that says how many days it’s been since an ankle injury, here’s some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Wrath of Man - The last Guy Richie film, The Gentlemen, was dripping in star power and pulled a really nice $10.7 million a little over a year ago. This time it’s just Jason Statham doing most of the heavy lifting as a star, and outside of being linked to a big IP like the Fast & Furious films, he hasn’t really produced at the box office. With the considerably lower star power of this film it looks like it’s still going to end up in the $7.5-$8 million range, which is very good. The last statistic I heard about closed theaters is that we’re still only at about 75% of where we were pre pandemic. Obviously we’re still missing some really important plex’s like Arclight/Pacific theaters (and just to show how important missing a great theater like the Arclight Sherman Oaks is, the grosses in both Burbank and Universal City are MUCH bigger than they were when Sherman Oaks was open, in fact Burbank is the #1 gross in the US right now), but a lot of those theaters that are still closed are in small towns. So when you consider that we’re only dealing with 75% of the theaters when the last (star studded) Guy Richie film opened, and it looks like this film should gross a little more than 75% of that film with considerably less star power, that’s a baby step forward.

Mortal Kombat/Demon Slayer - I might as well talk about them together because they’re still locked at the hip. They’re both running out of audience and dropping like rocks, both should be down 60% this weekend.

Here Today - As usual, Sony has declined to participate. I may actually go see this tonight though…..

The rest of the holdovers look really good (again) today, with drops in the teens and 20’s, another baby step forward.