Top Gun Memorial Day 2022
The overlords at Marvel and DC have allowed the conch to be passed to a new super hero this weekend, Tom Cruise. One of the things I had the most fun with in the 3 years (!) leading up to this release was answering the question, what do you think Top Gun Maverick will do? The answer shocked people when I pointed out that all it would take was a $65 million 3 day to make it TC’s biggest opening weekend ever. Over and over the answer was wait, WTF?, that can’t be true. But it is and it wasn’t even the Mission Impossible movies, it was War of the Worlds at $64.7, the best MI film was the last one (Fallout) at $61 million. It’s so crazy to think that someone like Tom Cruise has never had a $100 million + opening, Jeremy Renner and Paul Rudd have bigger openings than Tom Cruise. But it makes sense that the person to take it to the next level with, was the person who took him to the next level back in 1986, Jerry Bruckheimer.
It’s funny to look back on the first Top Gun in 1986 and what a different marketplace it was back then (and those of you who know me will know that for the most part I’m regurgitating this information without looking it up), it had a good opening but not a great opening. If you can believe it, even though it opened to #1 on the weekend before Memorial Day in 1986, it opened kinda limited on only 1000 screens to $8.1 million. The next week it went to #3 behind the instantly forgettable Stallone vehicle Cobra (on a more traditional wide break of 2000 screens) and Poltergeist II, but it ended up popping back into #1 for the next couple of weeks and finished at a unbelievable $180 million domestic, or a mind blowing 22 multiple. So as good as Top Gun Maverick is this weekend, the history of this IP says it might be around for a while.
The other aspect that’s interesting to point out this weekend is that Paramount is on fire. This is their 5th #1 opening in a row, but they’ve had help from those forces in the universe that do wacky things. How many times have we seen a Studio Head get fired and then their slate goes batshit crazy at the box office after they are gone? So not to take anything away from the amazing job Paramount Marketing did here, but it’s Jimmy G’s slate and there were some really big rolls of the dice he made (with a few still to come), so once again it takes upper management giving up on a studio head to make it rain money.
Anyway, based on something I heard at an NRA marketing meeting titled ‘how to turn an unspeakable tragedy into more gun sales and get those numbers up’, here are some thoughts about the weekend box-office.
Top Gun Maverick - I’m sure you’ve seen the numbers being thrown around in the trades already but this is a really big opening; especially considering that these are lofty heights that Tom Cruise hasn’t been able to achieve at the box-office, even though he’s been Mr. Consistency when it comes to avoiding bad movies and he’s been actively trying to kill himself while trying to please the audience. There is one aspect that’s going to be interesting to watch here (and it could make a difference where this ends up at the end of the weekend), as part of the sensational and highly effective campaign Paramount ran on this film, one of the copy lines was ’see it on the biggest screen possible’. So, showing the effectiveness of that sales pitch, seats at the Large Format theaters (IMAX, XD, Dolby) were the first to go and for the most part are spoken for already. That leaves the question, are moviegoers cool with going to a ’normal’ theater right away or will they wait until they can get a decent seat in a theater equipped the way they were told to see it? The sad part of this is that for the most part the non Large Format theaters in the Major circuits are really good, and I’d be perfectly happy to see it in one of those theaters. Since most of you who get this have gone to a test screening at one of the non large format theaters that we all like to use (Burbank, Sherman Oaks, Burbank, Long Beach, Burbank, Burbank, etc) and the presentation is just fine, you’ve experienced a good presentation and I can’t remember a test screening in a Large Format theater. So as we’ve got consumers to come back to theatrical using the Large Format as a hook, maybe we need to start working on the idea that the rest of the theaters in the multiplex are a really good experience too.
As for the gross this weekend, even though one of the trades has already gone there, I’m not quite to the place where I’d say this is going to break Pirates 3’s Memorial Day record (it’s Bruckheimer on Bruckheimer box office violence!) at $114 million in 3. But the 3 day should have no problem getting past $100 million, and then figure the Monday ads about another 25% on top of whatever the 3 day is. The fact that this skews a little older and doesn’t have a great hispanic component might mean it flattens enough tonight to keep it from breaking the record. On the flip side the exits are sensational, so the inertia it could develop from word of mouth over the weekend could overcome that and break the record.
The Bob’s Burgers Movie - The fact that 9 of the top 15 theaters on this film are Alamo Drafthouse theaters should tell you everything you need to know about it. It’s as fan based as you might think and the growth throughout the day so far has been pretty flat. We’ll see how much it grows tomorrow, there is a decent kid component to this audience but right now it looks like about $10 million in 3 days, $12 million in 4 days.
The two films from last week (Downton Abbey and Men) are taking the usual 2nd weekend hit today, but the rest of the holdovers look rock steady right now and should have very slight drops (if any) from last week.