First weekend of January 2023
Happy New Year everyone. There are a couple of interesting things going on at the box-office this week, and there are two films opening this week that you should pay particular attention to (and I’ll address them both individually below). But first, let’s all repeat the post covid theatrical mantra…. two year rule….two year rule….two year rule…..
The next 5 weeks or so (after this weekend) are going to be iffy at best and some weeks are going to be brutal. But 2 years ago (and just to remind you, let’s say 2 years is a norm from the time a studio/financier gets pregnant with a movie to it’s release), we were just starting the vaccine distribution and most of the biggest media markets were still restricted or shut down. But as the vaccine rolled out, the amber light of ‘maybe/let’s see’ turned to the green of ‘yes’; projects started becoming real as we started to see light at the end of the tunnel in the 2nd quarter of 2021, and we’ll see the same light at the end of the tunnel 2 years later in February 2023.
One of the reasons the box office has been all over the place is because (for the most part) we still need to build up our ‘habitual’ moviegoers, their metronome-like attendance tends to even out the box office from week to week. It’s probably one of the key reasons for the malaise in the art/specialty sector, not only are we missing a consistent stream of releases (and films that don’t have titles bathed in the poison of arrogance) we’re also missing the theaters that would offer them every week. It would be great for the industry if AMC embraced the genre at Century City, the Grove and Burbank, but that’s just not what they do. But going back to wide films, the start and stop of the release schedule is probably the culprit (and of course the long shutdown played a part), and since everything in the world was start and stop 2 years ago, that tracks. Starting around President’s Day we’ll start seeing a pretty steady stream of films and we’ll start seeing those results feed off each other, so hopefully those habituals will come back.
Anyway, with the expected accuracy of the exact date when you should stop saying Happy New Year, which we all know is January 10, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
Avatar: The Way of Water - This looks like it’s legging out the way we thought it would, it’s holding up pretty good today, but Sunday will be way down because of the Monday holiday last week. If you try to compare the weekend drop for this weekend to Avatar, it doesn’t really fit. In 2009 the the National Holiday was on Friday so the Sunday that year wasn’t inflated like it was this year (with a Monday holiday). Figure it’s off about 50% from last weekend for a weekend in the mid 30’s.
Living Doll 2023 M3GAN - This is one of the two films I referenced above, clearly the Talky Tina idea goes way back to The Twilight Zone and this story has been done to death. However, the trick of Theatrical is being familiar enough that an audience knows what it is, but it still has an angle on the idea that tells the audience ‘you haven’t seen it this way before’. Biopics are a great example of this, the ones that work let you learn things you didn’t know about someone you’re a fan of, and the ones that don’t tell you exactly what you already knew. And this is one of the tricks of our business, a film like this could be tired as hell, but apparently this is a ton of fun. As one of the great philosophers of our time, Smalls from This is Spinal Tap said ’there’s such a fine line between clever and stupid’. So in a business like ours it’s interesting to see a film about an AI driven doll get greenlit in an industry that keeps trying to bring AI into the creative space. Every day I keep hearing of a new snake oil salesman company peddling some sort of AI tool that will analyze your script, and forecast success/failure (with an error rate of +/-90%, and they say that with a straight face). But films like this don’t generally do well in those processes; maybe there’s a bowling scene or there’s 3 too many speaking roles, but if you believe the reviews this film is just a lot of fun and that’s a really hard aspect for machines to identify (and it’s also part of the magic that happens on set that’s very hard to predict). But that’s where the younger versions of some of you out there who have toiled in development come in on a film like this, and we can’t marginalize (although the C suite folks would love to) the upside of having a human with taste and biological intelligence reading scripts. Right now it’s at least mid/high 20’s with a really good shot at 30, but films like this can pick up a decent amount of inertia over the weekend and it’s not out of the question that this could win the weekend.
A Man Called Otto - This is the 2nd movie I referenced above, and there are some very important ideas going on here that Sony seems acutely aware of, and so should you. Here’s the bottom line, middle America has money and loves going to the movies, and you can make money by making movies that appeal to their sensibilities and interests. Last year, Sony grossed $90 million on Where the Crawdads Sing, driven almost entirely by Red State America, especially the South. Today they expanded A Man Called Otto to a little less than 600 runs, and I can give you one statistic that will blow your mind. Last week they opened on New Years Weekend (a great box office weekend), in some of the best theaters in the country in NY and LA, and they had a per screen average of about $13k. In a little less than 600 theaters this weekend they’re looking at a per screen average of $5k or $6k. That’s insanely good in relation to the exclusive run, and there are a bunch of theaters in Denver, San Antonio, Salt Lake, Nashville, Milwaukee, etc that are going to out gross what those (normally top grossing LA and NY) theaters did last weekend. Most of the Los Angeles Market theaters that are doing the best business today aren’t in LA county, they’re in Orange and Riverside county. Now, some might say the $3 million (or a little better) this is probably going to make this weekend isn’t a big number. Okay, if this was an awards bait rollout, had a title that you couldn’t pronounce with an umlaut in there somewhere, and you replaced Denver, Nashville and Milwaukee with Sherman Oaks, San Francisco and Toronto it would be a massive achievement. When you slow roll a film like this, the idea is that the coasts show the fly over’s what they should like. If this film works as it gets wider next week, maybe it can work both ways.
The other Holdovers - They all look pretty standard this weekend except for 2 films, which once you look at the individual theaters, there’s an interesting story. Both The Whale and Babylon are showing their polarizing qualities, although % wise they have the two lowest drops on the sheet. The Whale added a few runs, and there are a bunch of theaters that are up from last week. Babylon, which lost about 1/3 of its theaters this week is the same, there’s a bunch of theaters that are up from last Friday.