Christmas Day 2022

Merry Christmas everyone. The weather is slowly getting better across the country and there are places that were impossibly cold yesterday that are just cold today. It looks like tomorrow is the day that things start getting back to normal, but we’re already seeing signs at the box office that people are willing to leave the house now. It was pretty interesting to see how the cold affected the NFL yesterday, places like Cleveland (where they will pack the house for a scrimmage) less than 10,000 people braved the cold for a game with playoff implications. I talked to a friend who went to the Cowboys/Eagles game yesterday in Dallas and he said about 25% of the seats were no shows, and that’s a stadium where you’re inside. So a lot of hunkering down across the country, and it wasn’t just the movie business, it was everything.

But putting the weather aside, there’s one thing that keeps bugging me about this year, it looks a lot like last year. Last year, both Spider-Man and Sing 2 did what you would expect a Christmas film to do (and then some), but The King’s Man, American Underdog, A Journal for Jordan, West Side Story and Licorice Pizza all struggled and didn’t come close to the business we’ve seen from similar titles over the lucrative Christmas period. Even with the weather issues this weekend, you can still look at California, Arizona and Florida (where there was no weather issue) and see it’s the same thing as last year.

So, it looks like we might need to start looking at Christmas a little differently from now on. Could it be possible that moviegoers have gotten out of the habit of seeing movies over Christmas, and unless it’s a massive IP or family film, we can’t count on a default based behavior? Of course, as I’ve said over and over again ‘it’s the movies, stupid’; but maybe we have to start considering Christmas as a very specific type of behavior and only put films here that fit that behavior, instead of a ‘you can put anything there’ goldmine.

If the weather gets as normal as it’s forecast for, we should see more growth tomorrow (looking at 2016 when Christmas was also on Sunday, Monday was a really good day and most of the films went up from Sunday), so where all these films end up is still murky. Instead of giving you grosses (which are still in flux) here’s what each film is doing today compared to yesterday and to put it in context, I’ll give you a couple of similar films from a more normal weather year. But even though these increases from yesterday are better than normal, we’ll need a similar jump tomorrow for the movies that opened Friday in order to get back to ‘normal’.

Rogue One Was up 48%. Sing 2 was up 45%. Passengers was up 134%

And here’s what today looks like.

Avatar: The Way of Water - Up 81%

Puss in Boots The Last Wish - Up 79%

Babylon - Up 150%

I* Wanna Dance with Somebody* - Up 123%

*The Whale *- Up 128%