First weekend of October 2022
I kept checking the weather in Hell yesterday to see if there was snow. Looks like the folks at Netflix woke up and realized that when you pay $450 million for an IP, you need to take care of it and not just dump it on your platform like it’s Set It Up 2. Shockingly they are going to give this a theatrical run with a window, but I’m not quite to the point where this will be good for the film (and the IP) because it’s Netflix and they can still fuck this up. They need to spend a decent amount to launch this as if the Theatrical tier mattered to them, and they need to report the grosses. Why do they need to do both of those things? Because if you’re going to use this tier to boost the cache of the film and it’s library value, you need to make this tier work with good grosses, and then you need to tell people about it. Don’t just do it and pretend it wasn’t there, like they usually do. As trivial as reporting grosses sounds, it creates positive noise for the film so when it migrates to the platform, it’s got the validation of a successful theatrical run and will separate from Set It Up 2.
In other news this week, it’s been fun watching the aftermath of the Bros disaster last weekend, and as they say in the TV sitcom business ‘hilarity ensued’. Let’s put aside the pathetic straightphobic meltdown of Billy Eichner, who hasn’t wrapped his head around the idea that the reason it bombed was that the marketing on this film actually told the audience not to show (more on that later), and let’s look at the equally pathetic press. My ‘press idiots of the week’ are Zach Sharif and William Earl at Variety, who got the premise right, but then flailed around with the cause in the most hilarious manner.
The first bone-headed comment was that ’the movie prioritized the films importance over the films comedy’, uh-huh, so a tagline or some copy isn’t the core, it’s an aspect. Most of the beats of the campaign were pretty normal rom com beats. They doubled down on the ‘don’t play up the importance of the film’ reasoning with some word diarrhea about In the Heights, saying ’ it didn’t market its storyline or characters and instead went all-in on the movie being a game-changer for Latinx representation on the big screen’; excuse me? All in? Considering the filmmakers decided to make the movie with no stars and the show had no hit songs to attach a campaign to, WB’s campaign was sensational and packed with energy, which was about as good as you could do with that film. Next up was ‘October is a non starter for Rom Coms’….Jeez…so dumb. Yeah, just like the weekend after Labor Day is death for films and no one should release a movie there, and that $123 million opening for It was the wrong move by WB? And then when they laundry listed the films that back up their ’don’t go in October with a Rom Com’ claim, they pointed out that 10 in 1979 was only the 48th highest grossing Rom Com and wasn’t a ’titan of the genre’. WTF???? They should be fired for just that statement. 10 was a movie that dominated the box office all Fall and launched the careers of both Dudley Moore and Bo Derek, and it grossed $78 million….in 1979. These morons didn’t even google ‘what would $78 million in 1979 dollars be today?’ (It’s $319 million, and that’s just domestic). There are no bad weekends anymore, just bad movies or misguided marketing campaigns. And lastly (and this is my favorite),’ between Blonde, *Hocus Pocus 2 *and Dahmer, there were just too many reasons to stay home’. So Netflix took their latest expensive deuce on their platform and that kept everyone home? I still haven’t talked to anyone that even thought it was fair, and with sucky scores on RT for both critics and audiences, the gays stayed home to watch bad soft core porn……featuring a girl? Uh huh.
But let’s go back to why this film did what it did; because if the LGBT community even moderately supported this movie it would have opened to 10 -12 million. It’s not that the straight community stayed away, a lot of the gay community said ’nope’ as well. Why? Three simple letters. TMI. You could have traded out everything gay in that trailer for a guy and a girl (but kept the same edgy sexual events) and it still would have died, because of the TMI. There’s a reason there are doors on Bedrooms and Bathrooms, we just don’t want to know. Imagine this was a movie about Dog Lovers (and the movie business has leaned on them heavily in the past for big grosses) but you made the movie about Dog Lovers who like to tongue kiss their pets; ew, you threw up a little in your mouth just reading that right? That’s what happened here, and if half the gay community threw up a little in their mouths watching that first trailer, how do you think straight people felt?
As far as the Gay Rom Com angle, the reason Rom Coms do so well (especially with Females) is because they’re aspirational. They want to be that girl, and have that wedding, and they want to imagine themselves with the guy in the movie. And if you do it right, the guys that get dragged along want to be the guy in the movie and be with the girl in the movie. So when you look at what this film was selling, who wanted to aspire to that? At the bare basics, is Billy Eichner the vessel to get a LGBT version of the standard Rom Com going? When he’s doing his standard man on the street character (which is very funny), it’s super angry; and it’s closer to that guy you get stuck talking to at a party who just started CrossFit, not someone who you aspire to be. So maybe Billy should look into the mirror and understand that the angle he took into this character didn’t work, and perhaps crafting a character that kept the wit and the intelligence but lost the abrasiveness could have changed this result. But all that aside, it still all goes back to that first trailer; and it was just the TMI that was so hard to get past, and it had very little to do with anything gay or straight.
Anyway, with the expected accuracy and efficacy of the Levi’s Stadium field security, here are some thoughts on the weekend box office.
Smile - Obviously since this showed some legs last weekend by not doing the usual Horror Film Saturday collapse, and actually picked up some steam, it might have a chance at holding strong in weekend 2. The drop from last Friday looks a lot like the week 2 drop for Barbarian a couple of weeks ago, and that ended up down only 38% in the 2nd weekend. So this looks like it could be around for a while, but figure it’s down an impressive 40% for a weekend of about 13 or 14.
Lyle, Lyle Crocodile - This one is hard to read today. Since this is an IP that skews really young and there are very few kids out of school today, this is all about the bounce tomorrow. It’s running about 3/4 of last fall’s Clifford the Big Red Dog, but even that IP was bigger and had a little bit more of an adult appeal than this. But assuming this does what a little kids movie does on Saturday during the Fall, it should end up in the 12 to 13 range. And for an IP with a very young skew, that’s pretty good.
Amsterdam - Ughh, it feels like I was watching Don’t Worry Darling all over again for the last 10 days (to a lesser degree though). Similar to DWD, 20th put together a good campaign for this star studded film, and just when they started to get some momentum the messiness of the film makers behavior and the mediocre reviews came in to stomp any interest out. Of course, the filmmakers didn’t help at all by calling the film Amsterdam. When there aren’t any elements in the film that allow marketing to make the title make sense, it flies in one ear and out the other of the consumer, so there were a lot of issues here, but none of them were Marketing’s fault. How bad is it? Well, it’s not quite Bros bad, but it ain’t much better. Figure a weekend of about 6 or 7.
Terrifier 2 - They opened yesterday on about 800 theaters with a very skinny support campaign and did about $400k, but it looks a little funky today. Of the theaters reporting today, they are only down a little from yesterday, but there’s only a little more than half the theaters that reported yesterday are reporting today, so I’m wondering if some of those theaters only played one day. But just based on what is there today, it looks like it will be about $600k in 3, bringing the 4 day to $900k.
TAR - Opened in 4 theaters, 2 in NY and 2 in LA and the grosses are really good, and the audiences that go will see the front runner for Best Actress next March. Looking at the numbers here so far, where this goes over the weekend depends on the seating capacity, and how the theaters adjust to business. Figuring a normal weekend gross arc, it should end up between a 35k and 40k psa.
Triangle of Sadness - Speaking of things that make an audience say ’nope’, this oddly titled Palm D’or winner opened in 9 theaters in NY, LA, SF and Toronto. The grosses in most of the theaters are good (but nothing special for a film of this pedigree), but two of the theaters (the Metreon SF and Toronto) are really soft. Even though they have over twice the theaters as TAR, they’re gonna gross less overall, and it looks like a weekend psa in the low 20’s.