Final weekend of September 2022
We’ve got a typical Fall 2022 weekend this weekend; a successful horror film, another Bollywood Tentpole with an impressive PSA and a film where the grosses are a self-inflicted horror. So we’re still building the audience; and even though the number of films for a while is going to be a little ‘light’, remember the 2 year rule. Any movie takes about 2 years from the time the studio/financiers get pregnant with it to the time it’s released. So 2 years ago we were about to hit the 2nd wave of Covid and were about to shut down again, and the world was upside down. Once we get to the beginning of the next year, we’ll start seeing the fruits of productions that become real in early 2021 when we were beginning to open back up.
Anyway, with the expected accuracy of a Tua Tagavailova neurological exam, here are some thoughts on the weekend box office.
*Smile - *After taking a brief break from opening films to #1, Paramount is back with another weekend win. After a nice $2 million Thursday preview, it’s solid this afternoon; but as we’ve talked about before, Horror movies don’t necessarily show their hand during the day. Right now it’s running about 80% of The Black Phone, but since that film opened in late June when schools were out, this might catch up tonight. Figure it’s somewhere around 20 for the weekend, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a little better.
Don’t Worry Darling - This film had such a hot start last Thursday/Friday you would expect it to be down considerably today, and it is. Since the Saturday gross last week flattened out, the drop tomorrow from the Saturday before might be a better indicator of what the rest of the run looks like. But because last Thursday and Friday were so hot, figure this is down 65% for a weekend of about 9.
PS1: Ponniyin Selvin Part One - These Big Budget Bollywood films continue to do business here, and this is no exception. Went on about 500 screens and as long as it plays out normally and doesn’t collapse tomorrow, it looks like $4 million or so.
Bros - What a missed opportunity here. As you might have seen, the reviews have been very good (currently 92%) and most describe this film as a sweet rom com; so the movie here delivers and if it was successful, films like this about marginalized demos hope to move the idea forward that ’they’re not so different’. Unfortunately, Universal did something here that was so damaging to the opening of this film, I’d call it Marketing Malpractice.
Back in late April, I was sitting in the audience at the Universal presentation at CinemaCon, and Billy Eichner was onstage to present the Bros materials for Exhibitors. Now if you’ve seen his ‘man on the street’ pieces, part of his persona is to be kinda angry (and he can be very funny in those pieces). Possibly as part of that persona, he wagged his finger at the Convention crowd in a rant that (if it was a bit, no one got) and was borderline straightphobic. Eventually he stopped bloviating and ran the trailer, which as the kids say these days ‘came in hot’. Instead of the gentle funny romantic comedy that’s been the core of the marketing campaign for the last 3 weeks, they showed a hard R trailer that portrayed the world this movie lived in as sex crazed, angry, narcissistic, ageist and seemed to lean into every Red State gay stereotype. I doubt a large percentage of movie fans even made it to the end where a couple of little kids were dancing around their parents’ kitchen singing about being ‘bottoms’, and they clicked out of it before then, ironically saying ’nope’. As I watched it myself at CinemaCon in Vegas, the only thing that popped into my mind was ‘who is this for, it’s targeted so narrowly, this will open to $4 million, maybe’. But forget about the edginess and the in your face sexuality of the piece, the bigger problem was that it wasn’t funny, and it died in the room. I figured it was just a special piece for CinemaCon that Billy wanted, and because it played so flat they wouldn’t actually drop it as their first trailer; they wouldn’t do that, would they? Well….about a month later, they dropped that same piece to introduce the world to the film, and if you haven’t seen it you can watch it here <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiJoqTk08AI>. After the trailer dropped, I figured I might be too square for this, and I sent it to a couple of gay friends and asked them what they thought; the sentiment that came back was pretty severe and most thought it set back Gay rights 20 years. That’s when this weekend was cast in stone, and here’s why.
One of the aspects of my day job is to understand the economic outcome of marketing actions like trailers, and there is one rule I tell the studios I work with; get your first trailer right because you probably can’t ‘fix it’ with subsequent marketing actions. Why is that? Since 99% of all trailer views are online and you have to ‘opt in’ to watch it, that’s the downside of online ads, they are ‘opt in’ instead of passive (like TV ads or trailers in theaters). Even if your 2nd trailer is 100x better than your first trailer, you’ll get a small fraction of the views because when the consumer is served it online, they say ‘I’ve already seen that’ and don’t opt in. So once Universal dropped a 2nd trailer that was much softer and much closer to what you’ve been seeing the last couple of weeks, it didn’t make any difference because movie goers already felt like they knew what it was. Now in defense of Universal, it’s entirely possible that the filmmakers insisted on that Hard R 1st trailer, and Universal was just being a ‘go along/get along’ studio. Many of you have been in that room where those conversations take place, and it’s a tough road to navigate, especially if you have (or are trying to cultivate) a long term relationship with the film makers. And it’s especially tough when filmmakers drag out the tired phrase ‘but that’s what the movie is!’
So what’s this film gonna do? It’s running behind another of Universal’s films that was narrowly targeted, Easter Sunday (which also dropped dead), opening to $5.4 million on a similar number of screens. So right now I might have been right when I saw the trailer back in April in Vegas and it ends up at about $4 miillion.
The Good House - Opened on 1000 screens and there’s not much going on here, maybe $800k, with a shot at $1 million.