Wakanda Forever weekend 2022

Happy Veterans Day to all of you, and on that subject I’d like you to consider a request, since many of you who receive this email are job creators. As someone who has become involved in the Iraq War Veteran community over the last 10 years, please make an effort to add Iraq War Veterans to your DEI goals. They’ve been very well trained in areas like project management and would be a great asset to any organization; however they are also a very damaged group, and many feel used and discarded, as evidenced by the high suicide rate we’re seeing. Unfortunately, many people think saying ’thank you for your service’ washes their hands, but it’s become something the Vets wince at. Our industry specializes in helping the marginalized and the forgotten, please add this very important demo to those efforts. And if you meet one of these fine Americans, don’t say ‘thank you for your service’, ask them how they are and talk to them, they’ll appreciate that more.

Back to movies. I thought this would be a pretty quiet week and I’d only talk about Disney/Marvel conquering the world (again), but as the lone teller of truth tm in this town, I wanted to bring up a couple of this week’s news items. Two items that are connected to each other, but also continue what I’ve been saying here; AMC reporting a quarterly loss and explaining it with ‘we need more movies’, and then Disney showing great growth with Disney Max subscriptions but also showing an operating loss. Of course my favorite lazy entertainment press only considered looking at this through a current lens, rather than a more accurate lens of what the norm was 18-24 months ago (when the decisions were made), and it was a different world. Back then Theatrical had an iffy future and the streamers all felt like they could bludgeon their way into being the top dog. So as far as AMC, creators weren’t leaning towards theatrical because they weren’t sure where it was going, and the streamers of the world (including Disney) were buying everything they could get their hands on……and over paying for it. So we’re seeing the effect of those actions, and a lot of projects wandered to where the money was. However, as many of you know the appetite was so voracious back then, not only were the streamers over paying, a decent amount of projects were being put into production when that maybe needed a little more time in the oven (and in some cases, projects had been around a long time without a green light for a reason, so they had all the time they needed in the over and still weren’t ready). So of course there was a bill to pay for those actions, but it made sense at the time.

There was another news item from Wednesday that is so head scratching, I’m still not sure what happened. Steven Spielberg told The NY Times that WB/HBO Max threw film makers under the bus by denying them a theatrical run and putting them on the platform in 2021*. Wait, what? It can’t be that Steven Spielberg, can it? Not the ’nicest person in the industry’ who is also a world class statesman for our business, it just can’t be. But he also can’t be talking about that WB/HBO Max, can he? The people who not only took care of all their back end participants handsomely (as the kids say today ’they gave them the bag’), but put their hearts and souls into all those films theatrically, and in a world where the streamers do as little as they can to support a Theatrical run (and often less than that) if you didn’t know it was day and date with the platform you wouldn’t know it from the marketing efforts. I’m wondering if he had someone in his ear that just didn’t know what really happened, or something even crazier where this was a weird attempt at creating clickbait to help The Fabelmans. Either way it’s so weird, and it has to be some sort of misunderstanding or misquote. I’m not sure we’d be where we are today without that Dec thru April period of WB’s 202/2021 slate, the exhibitors might not have been able to stay open, so (as I’ve said here before) it might have saved the theatrical sector.

Anyway, with the expected accuracy and foresight of the long term naming rights deals for FTX and Crypto.com, here are some thoughts on the weekend box office.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - First thing’s first, this is gonna be awesome this weekend. However, a couple of points to consider as we see this gross roll out over the weekend, because if this comes in short of where Black Panther ended up, there are very good reasons why. First, Black Panther way over performed its Friday gross, especially on Saturday; this was a movie that developed some inertia over the weekend. If it had more of a normal arc it probably would have been closer to 180 instead of 200. Second, there’s a lot of Marvel content out there these days, so we might see a little bit of a decay because the genre is a little saturated now, similar to what we saw with Star Wars. Not to mention that we just had Black Panther 2 The Woman King in theaters. So what’s it gonna do? As usual, that’s a Saturday question, since today is Veteran’s Day and 50% of K-12 is on holiday, as well as most Government offices and about 1/3 of colleges. And since Veterans Day is one of the few holiday’s that’s locked into a date (Nov 11) and moves every year, we don’t have a great handle on what tomorrow and Sunday will look like because we’ve never seen a movie of this size when the calendar lines up this way. Just as a hipshot, this looks like about 180 to me, but the exits are excellent and I wouldn’t rule out the same inertia the first film had once we get into the rest of the weekend.

All the rest of the holdovers are really good today, especially kid skewing films like Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, but they should all have soft drops this weekend propped up by today. Of course, the exception is last week’s Anime offering, One Piece Film Red. They’ve gone through their fanbase and it’s pretty much done.

The Fabelmans - Opened exclusively in 4 theaters in NY and LA and it’s…pretty good. It looks a lot like some recent high profile films like* TAR *of Banshees of Inisherin, but not quite as good right now. You would think a film of this pedigree would be blowing those films away in a 4 theater release. I’d be curious to watch the credits on this film to see if he shot this on film, because if he did they probably should have made 70mm prints for this limited release. You look at the numbers that MGM achieved on Licorice Pizza last year with those 70mm runs (and let’s be real here, neither of these films are special effects extravaganza’s, so the 70mm benefits are iffy, but it’s IMAX on steroids as a marketing tool), and you wonder why no one has copied the strategy because it drove the numbers through the roof. Right now, this looks like a pretty good 35 to 40k per screen average.

*Here’s the list of WB’s 2021 slate where the backend participants got paid, and tell me how they got thrown under the bus (or how many would have seen any backend)?

Wonder Woman 1984 The Little Things Judas and the Black Messiah Tom and Jerry Godzilla vs Kong Mortal Kombat Those Who Wish Me Dead The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It In the Heights Space Jam: A New Legacy Suicide Squad Reminincence Malignant Cry Macho The Many Saints of Newark Dune King Richard The Matrix Revolutions