Labor Day weekend 2022

Since there’s nothing going on this weekend at the box-office I don’t have much to say today (not that that’s much of a change), but there is one interesting aspect that’s worth mentioning.

Apparently the Exhibition community, who has shown us so much intelligence over the past couple of years, has come up with something called ’National Cinema Day’ and all tickets are $3 tomorrow. Now you would think that there would be some publicity for an idea like this, but I guess the marketing deck was in one of those Top Secret Folders taken from Mar a Lago a couple of weeks ago, because no one seems to know it exists. Because the publicity for it has been so…..slight, it might not have much of an effect tomorrow or maybe it’s just the same amount of tickets at a lower cost so the day is worse, who knows? But I do have one question on how it will go tomorrow.

Many years and 5 or 6 personal reinventions ago, I used to be part of the Exhibitor community, and in the mid 80’s there was a short period where the theaters had $1 Tuesdays; and all films were $1. It was started by Cineplex in Canada, and the idea was that since Tuesday was the slowest day of the week, having a discount day wouldn’t hurt the other days and the theaters would sell a lot of concessions. Eventually everyone in the states was doing it too, but the studios lost their collective minds and eventually stopped it. But the Managers of the theaters would tell me that those $1 days would bring out a different type of consumer. Normally in your average multiplex (back then it was usually 4 - 6 screens) you wouldn’t need to put an employee on the door to a theater and make sure everyone coming in bought tickets to that film (to keep people from buying a ticket to one movie and then seeing another one or two). You would usually only do it for R movies on the weekends to keep kids out of a movie if they didn’t have a parent with them. But on $1 days something different happened. The promotion turned out to be wildly popular in the first couple of months, and every show sold out all day. But from the beginning it was an operational disaster because from the 2nd show of the day on, there were about 30% more people than seats for each show, even though the box office had only sold the right amount of tickets for that show. So the consumer they attracted was given an inch and took a yard, because it was clear the consumers who showed up felt like it was an all you can eat buffet and could see as many movies as they wanted….. for $1. To quote one of the great modern philosophers of our time, Randall from Clerks, ’this job would be great if it wasn’t for the fucking customers’. So it will be interesting to see what kind of customer shows up tomorrow.

Since we don’t have an idea of how tomorrow is going to be, I’ll duck the weekend numbers parlor game this week, but there are a couple of general ideas worth mentioning. Sony re-released *Spider- Man: No Way Home *on 4000 screens with 11 minutes of additional footage, and Universal re-released Jaws reprocessed in 3D in 1200 theaters. Both look like they had a decent amount of pre-sales, but they’ve been super flat all day and I’m not sure what that will mean for the rest of the weekend. However, depending on what happens tomorrow, Top Gun Maverick could plausibly win the weekend…..in week 15! Other than that, the holdovers look pretty good today and we have a day and date movie Honk for Jesus Save your Soul that probably won’t crack $1 million on 1800 screens; so it’s just going day and date with Peacock to say it’s ‘in Theaters’ on Peacock, rather than going in theaters for any sort of positive gross outcome. There’s also a specialty film called Gigi & Nate on 1200 screens that probably won’t cross $500k. So, not much going on, but tomorrow will be interesting.

Everyone have a nice Labor Day.