First weekend of June 2021
The box office continues to show signs of pre-pandemic normalcy this weekend, with another tried and true franchise rolling out its latest edition to more than respectable numbers. The holdovers aren’t doing anything that unusual either, although as we’ve seen lately the films that have a day and date release are falling a little harder than normal in the 2nd weekend. Anyway, with the expected accuracy of Miles Teller reading a line as scripted, here’s some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It - Since the beginning of the year WB has been on fire, consistently opening films way above expectations, kinda like…….let me think….oh yeah, just like Universal kept doing a couple of years ago. 🤔 Even though they’ve had to deal with a day and date plan that (the last I heard) generated almost 11 unique HBO Max sign ups (one tried to sign up when the platform crashed earlier this week, so they’re not sure if it counts), they’ve been kicking ass theatrically and generated consistently robust box office. This latest (the 6th) edition in the Conjuring/Annabelle universe is really doing well this afternoon and it’s one more reason the big screen is back. Certainly this is doing so well that some of the less informed will say ’see it’s doing so well and the pay tv thing doesn’t effect anything’. Wrong, no, they’re idiots. Since the day and date scheme only generated almost 11 unique HBO Max sign ups, and the rest of them (including me) just activated access based on already paying via satellite/cable, this didn’t generate any income outside of the almost 11 unique sign ups. What it did do is show us that if this wasn’t on HBO, a decent amount of those people would have gone to see it in a theater, and the rest would have watched it on HBO Max whenever it was available, the date of the availability probably doesn’t matter. So all we’re seeing here is lost theatrical gross to feed Wall Street’s insatiable demand for regularly recurring contracted revenue, even though there probably wasn’t much of an increase there. However it doesn’t matter that much as long as the theatrical side of the deal keeps kicking ass. And that figure about how many unique sign ups came from the most dependable source on the planet, the internet and a Facebook post from a guy named Yuri.
A Quiet Place II - Looks pretty normal for a 2nd weekend on a film that opened as big as this did last week. Of course the first Quiet Place was a superhero at the box office, but as sequels tend to do, this one is more mortal. If this didn’t give back some gross Sunday night this week because last weekend was a holiday weekend, I’d say this would probably drop a pretty normal 50%, but because it loses that great Sunday this week, it will probably drop in the mid/high 50’s for a weekend gross of about $20 million.
*Cruella *- I don’t know about all of you, but all the people I talk to who have seen this film just LOVE it. However, here’s the downside of a day and date release, it looks kind of average holdover wise. Of course, this film is also PVOD, so the revenue captured via the Disney + premium scheme is still pretty good, but not quite what they would have gotten theatrically. Looks like they’ll be down a little more than 50% this weekend for a gross of about 11.
Spirit Untamed - This one is a little bit of a head scratcher. You’ve got a studio that has a rich history in getting animated films open, a date that has about 50% of K-12 out, a decent looking film that didn’t do great with the critics but they didn’t hate it either, but the grosses here are not good at all. Assuming this gets a good bounce tomorrow it should end up in the high single digits for the weekend, but it’s not good.