A Wednesday dispatch, December 2022
Hi everyone, yeah, it’s me on a Wednesday. Because of the way the release schedule sets up with a couple of wide films today and Christmas being Sunday this year, you have to hit delete three times this week.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish - This is kinda soft today, and it looks a little less than half of what Sing 2 did on the Wednesday before Christmas last year. However, just like Avatar last week, this IP has a history of starting slow and ending up at much better number than the beginning indicates. Back in 2011 Puss in Boots opened on Halloween weekend (actually it was Halloween-ish, Halloween was on Monday) and back when Jeffrey’s notes from his Kindergarten coloring book were opening to $60 million, this opened to disappointing $30 million. But the next weekend, without Halloween clutter, it only dropped 3% and then kept holding week after week, ending up at about $150 million domestic. Since school holidays are shifting every year, and the days of two weeks off starting the week before Christmas and ending the day after New Years doesn’t really apply anymore, we’re seeing some of the effects at the box office. Today only about half of K-12 are off school, but the data we can access doesn’t break that out between elementary, middle and high school; so that % of kids out could be a lot of middle and high schools. By Friday that changes to about 85% of K-12 out, so we should see increases in the gross here each day. For now, this looks like about $3 million for the day, give or take a couple of hundred K.
The Whale - Went wider this week and expanded to about 600 theaters. Considering how difficult it is to get adults to a theater this time of year, it’s not half bad and the tried and true upscale markets like Austin, SF and Toronto in addition to the expansions in LA and NY are all pretty good. It is kinda weird that (just like The Menu) the theaters that are doing the best all serve food. They did some previews Tuesday night so there will be a couple of bucks thrown in today, but figure the combination of the two should add up to about $600k or about $1k per screen.