Avatar: The Way of Water weekend 2022

It was nice to hear that many of you saw through my thinly veiled cautionary tale last week about movies opening before Christmas, and knew I was talking about Avatar: The Way of Water this week. And as those of us (who have been around for a while) expected, it’s not going to be what the neophytes and amateurs at the pre-sales and tracking companies thought it would be. And I’m guessing the neophytes and amateurs in the Entertainment press will pull all kinds of lame reasons out of their ass to explain why they don’t know what they are doing (and they’ll either blame marketing or something in social media), but it’s just so simple; this is what pre Christmas films do. Like I said, all those pre-sales and all that tracking doesn’t mean the same thing this time of year, the data is good, it’s the people interpreting it that aren’t.

As I’ve spoken to people in the biz over the last couple of weeks I’ve heard ‘but….it’s like Star Wars!…but….it’s like Spider-Man!…..), uh huh, this ain’t that. How many Avatar themed weddings have you heard about? Is there an Avatar day during the year like May 4th (May the 4th be with you, and every time I hear that I throw up in my mouth a little)? Has there been an Avatar film every two years or so building a faithful fan base like* Spider-Man* did? No, this is an IP that’s been pretty quiet for 13 years, and to equate this IP with Star Wars or Spider-Man is just lazy. Up until Disney whipped the Star Wars fans into a frenzy in 2015, and grew it with younger moviegoers, no film opening in December had crossed $100 million on the first weekend. And since then, only 5 films have done so; 4 Star Wars films and Spider-Man No Way Home. So, as I said last week, the mission of every Theatrical marketer is to get high enough on a consumer’s ’to-do’ list on any given weekend to generate a purchase; and unless you have a rabid and faithful fan base that will make that happen, this is a bitch of a weekend to get anyone to the movies. So considering how insanely good the exits are, there are only 4 wide movies at Christmas this year, January is light on top tier titles, and….even though the original* Avatar* barely missed being the biggest opening ever in December (and when Fox reported the final gross and it missed I am Legend’s December record by some pocket change, people in distribution bowed their heads in shame), it still pulled 10 multiple off that opening; this film is gonna be fine. A fairly normal multiple for a film opening this weekend is about 6, so just using the norm gets this cume close to the original, and the playability here might push it to a better multiple. Again, this film is gonna be fine.

Anyway, with the expected accuracy and value of the copies of NFT’s I own, here are some thoughts on the weekend box office.

Avatar: The Way of Water - First thing first, this is a sensational opening, put aside all the pre release expectations that weren’t very well thought out; considering some of the marketplace factors this film is facing, like running time and age skew (the Marvel and Star Wars audiences are demos that are more late show friendly, where this audience doesn’t seem to have much of an appetite for showings after 8pm), this is about as good as you can do. There are two more interesting marketplace factors here. The IMAX and Large Format screens are a very large portion of this gross, which is a good thing because that shows an audience respect for how the filmmakers want them to see the movie, and I’m hearing the trend of the pre-sales showed that consumers were choosing format over immediacy. You would normally have a very small (>5%) of pre-sales for showings after Sunday on a film of this size, but it’s a much larger number here. Also, looking around the inter webs, it looks like there’s another factor that seems to be very attractive to moviegoers; theaters with Luxury Lounger seats. So the consumer is telling us ‘we’re fine with spending 200 minutes in the theater (240 at AMC with the 22 trailers they put in front of the film), but we want to put our feet up’. Looking at the numbers now, it’s consistently running about 47% of No Way Home, but this might not keep up with it later tonight. And here’s the downside of both of those formats consumers are choosing here (Large Format and Luxury Loungers), those seats take up a lot more space, so the capacities of those theaters is about half the capacity of a ’standard’ seating theater. But using that 47% percentage (of No Way Home), that would put the weekend at about $125 million. There could be a downside to that if it runs out of gas tonight faster than No Way Home did, and there could be an upside if it gets a big bounce tomorrow. But considering how the consumer has shown their preference for formats that are already tapped out on inventory, it would take a pretty severe shift in that preference.

The Whale - Still in the same 6 theaters as last week, and it’s down by about half overall, but there’s a clue in one of the theaters as to why. One theater, the Angelika in lower Manhattan is only down 14%, but the others are down 50% or more. Upon further review, the Angelika is the only theater of the 6 not playing Avatar, so the drop in the other theaters is probably all capacity issues and they lost seats to Avatar.

As far as the holdovers, the tide lifts all boats and they’re all holding in nicely, most of the drops from last week should be a little better than usual.