First weekend of June 2022

Since there’s not a lot new going on (but there is something pretty amazing that’s not new), there is a movie ‘opening’ that reminds me of my least favorite subject, Mehflix. With the stock in the shitter and talk of scaling back to ‘Bigger, Better, Fewer’ as the new battle cry, Ted Sarandos vomited out the idea that ‘Today, we’re releasing some of the most popular and most watched movies in the world’, uh-huh. You know Rolls Royce could be the best selling car company in the world if they sold their cars for 25% the price of an entry level Hyundai? The math behind Netflix seems to be pretty close to the math that applied to MoviePass, and it’s just a matter of time before the bottom falls out. So what could save them? It’s not making less movies because they still seem to be addicted to tentpole sized budgets when they don’t have tentpole sized revenue streams. They need additional revenue streams, and as long as every time they drop a big ticket movie on the platform without any significant marketing spend and it mimics the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s not a question of if the end comes, it’s when. And (as I’ve pointed out here several times) if they don’t take care of those IP’s they’ve paid a fortune for by keeping it in the public eye for more than 10 minutes with a chase campaign or a multi platform release, at the end of the line they’ll not only be broke, but they’ll be broke with a library full of expensive IP that no one cares about.

So what do they have to do? Well, there are two choices; the first is to look directly in the mirror and keep repeating ‘we are a TV Network and we need to make movies that are TV movies and have TV movie sized budgets’. There are no bad movies, only bad budgets, and they have a lot of insane budgets; they had a lot of early success with low budgeted films, go back to your roots. Second, if they really want to be in the tentpole business, treat them like tentpoles. Theatrical releases with a reasonble exclusive window backed up by a tentpole sized marketing campaign run by marketing professionals, keep it in the news and the public eye for 6-8 weeks. Of course, that’s issue #1, the marketing dept has become enough of an industry joke that Netflix Marketing gets added to the list of Oxymorons like Military Intelligence and Jumbo Shrimp. They need to aspire to something like The Batman, where a very profitable theatrical release gave it a lift so it was far more valuable to HBO + once it dropped there. The answer is right in front of them, they just have to accept what they are.

Anyway, with the accuracy of the new ‘OMG here comes the mask mandate again’ from our LA County Health Advisor (who doesn’t have a degree in Medicine, she has a Sociology Degree) when they keep reporting skyrocketing data of people in the Hospital with Covid. But they don’t mention that they don’t know if they’re there because of Covid as opposed to the patients with Covid, here are some thoughts about the weekend box-office.

Top Gun Maverick - Holy shit is it good today…again. But the fact that it’s outlier good today changes who gets to take a bow this week. Last week it was a nice (and surprising) story that Tom Cruise had never had a $100 million opening, and in fact never broke $65 million, and those records were gone by Saturday afternoon. And of course Paramount Marketing killed it for the 5th time in a row. But because this is so good today, some other records are now in play. Up until this point, Jerry Bruckheimer’s biggest total cume gross was on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest at $423 million domestic and $1.06 billion Worldwide. Because of what’s happening today, I don’t see a path where this doesn’t shatter that Domestic Record and there’s a very good chance this will pass his Worldwide cume record as well. Second, to have 5 different release dates on this film and still get it right, plus the bonus of a clear week behind it, it’s fair to call out the Distribution folks for a job well done, because this was a bullseye date. Of course, there’s a flip side to that; for the industry to have a wide open date in June is a knock on everyone else in town.

So what’s it gonna do this weekend? It’s running 30 points better than a 2nd Friday of a really good holding $100 million plus opening, and if it didn’t have to contend with last Sunday’s gross being a holiday weekend, it would be down less than 30% from the pure 3 days last week (taking out the previews). That’s insane and we’ve never seen anything like this. Because it’s a normal Sunday this week, it won’t drop the 3% from Saturday like it did last weekend (the norm is about 30% this time of year), so it looks like a weekend of about $70 million. Just amazing, but the way this film keeps over delivering, that 70 might be low.

Crimes of the Future - Went a little less than 800 runs and just like most of the upscale films that go this wide, it’s pretty good in the Art Film markets (NY, LA, SF and Austin) and falls off pretty quickly after that. Looks like a little over $1 million for the weekend.

*Watcher *- Went about the same number of runs as Crimes of the Future and it’s grossing about 2/3 of it. So figure it’s in the $600k to $700k range.

*Vikram *- The Bollywood films just keep popping up and doing a little business. Not sure how many runs (looks like about 450) but it’s not bad, figure about $1.3 million.

Hustle - And we circle back to my opening rant. Netflix is releasing this film in Theaters for 5 days (almost all Cinemark Theaters) before it drops on the platform next Wednesday. What’s odd is that it seems to have escaped the quality vortex over there, and it’s currently 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. Hustle has a proven star in Adam Sandler, but they’ve only supported the theatrical with about $300k in TV. And next Wednesday that dolly from Raiders of the Lost Ark will get rolling, moving it into the warehouse to vanish into the darkness. The question is (and continues to be) why even bother? Of course they don’t report their grosses, but it will probably gross about the same as the sticker price for an entry level Hyundai.

Thread continued

Reply 1, the reader · 2022-06-05

I love these reports. I get why you don’t want your newsletters going out wide. But I kinda wish more people listened to what you have to say. sigh.

Reply 2, the writer · 2022-06-05

Appreciate it. However, I think someone gives them to the trades especially deadline. I see the same ideas a couple of days later.