Super Bowl weekend 2023

Super Bowl weekend has always been a place where the new films in the marketplace tend to be pretty light. Since you lose most of your audience Sunday, studios steer clear, unless you have a female skewing rom com. This weekend is no exception, we’ve got a female skewing film that got saved from streaming (more on that below) and a re-issue that seems to still be pretty relevant to audiences, but that’s what Super Bowl weekend is.

This week AMC announced some pricing changes based on where the seat is in the auditorium, and although it was met with mixed response, it’s really nothing new. Back in the late 70’s, UA Theaters rolled out the concept of Loge Seating, with the back 5 rows of the biggest auditoriums having a more comfortable seat (although it was still nothing close to what the current seats today are like, mostly because UA Theaters was really cheap and didn’t think the idea through) and charged $5 a seat instead of $4 a seat. It was a massive pain in the ass for the theaters, they had to explain pricing to every customer that walked up to the box office, and often they were the last seats sold on a busy night (because after customers saw what the seat looked like, they decided it wasn’t worth the upcharge). Plus you didn’t have the staff on duty to enforce it, so unless it was a busy night, you could sit wherever you want. So more than likely the same thing will happen here, unless it’s a weekend, knowledgeable movie goers will buy the cheapest ticket and then sit wherever they want. So if this works or not will be up to the consumer.

But there was another pricing issue this week that’s probably a more interesting story. Paramount got the exhibitors to do some dynamic pricing on 80 for Brady, and although it may or may not have had an effect on last weekend’s box office, something really interesting happened this week. As you know, Knock at the Cabin beat 80 for Brady last weekend by 1.4 million, and this week Knock at the Cabin’s weekdays were right in line with the decay you would see from a thriller. But 80 for Brady did not decay the same way an older skewing comedy would play out, it was much much better. The gross for Knock on the Cabin for Monday thru Thursday was $3.8 million, but the gross for 80 for Brady was $6.2 million. That’s a profound different and there are some interesting ideas and questions here. Why was this so much more effective during the week than over the weekend? Did it take some time for the idea to get to the consumer, and they didn’t know there were ‘popular prices’ for this movie until after the weekend? Generally adult movies do better on weekdays than younger skewing movies, so part of this could be age skew; but it’s just such a big difference I think there’s something there.

One of the ideas I’ve been putting out to you, the reason there’s value to theatrical (and the subsequent VOD tiers) over going straight to a streaming platform, is that you’re not capturing what a consumer will pay for a film, but instead (by going straight to streaming) you’re giving them content based on what they want to pay. So taking that idea one step farther, is it possible by identifying films that appeal to budget conscious movie goers, you keep them in your theatrical purchase funnel by lowering admission prices based on the skew of the film? It is interesting to play around with the idea of ‘what will they pay for a film’, and looking at what we saw this week, it seems like the answer isn’t always ‘more’. Of course, sometimes the answer is ‘more’, and Disney showed us that idea during the pandemic. When the theatrical sector was in an iffy state, and Disney’s slate was getting backed up like the Sepulveda Pass at rush hour they put their high value (and expensive) films on Disney +, with a premium fee. So, they tailored their model to maximize revenue based on what was available to them in the marketplace. Of course, looking at what Disney said this week, they’re intrigued by the new distribution methods but until it starts producing the level of revenue the old methods produced (Theatrical and Linear TV), they’re not about to abandon the old ways. As usual, Disney thinks a little clearer than everyone else, and if anyone has the films that might need to charge ‘more’ for, it’s them.

We already have dynamic pricing in theaters, it costs less for a 1pm Tuesday matinee than it does for a 7pm show Saturday night, so why not apply that to specific movies too? The naysayers immediately respond with ’that would identify films as bad’, and that seems a little lazy to me. I haven’t heard anyone connect 80 for Brady’s pricing strategy to the quality of the film, and maybe the lower admission price might have contributed to the strong exit numbers? It’s all very interesting, and since the pandemic (where the exhibitors have been forced to experiment with ideas that they would shut down before the pandemic because they held all the cards) a couple of ideas have turned out to be very good; such as Universal’s 17 day PVOD window, where the theatrical increased the PVOD spins, and the PVOD didn’t seem to hurt theatrical. But it seems like Paramount is on to something here, and other studios should look for opportunities to copy the strategy, it might be another way of increasing revenue streams, and that’s good for all of us.

Anyway, with the expected accuracy and efficacy of a crowd monitor on the 16th hole at the Waste Management Open holding up a sign that says ‘quiet please’, here are some thoughts on the weekend box office.

It looks like 4 films conceivably have a shot at winning the weekend, but they’re all probably going to end up in the higher range of mid single digits, so the first one to $7 million probably wins the weekend. The re-issue of Titanic, Avatar The Way of Water, *80 for Brady *and Knock at the Cabin are pretty tightly bunched together right now. As a guess, I’d say that Titanic and Avatar have a decent shot at a James Cameron 1/2 punch, but any of these 4 have a shot at #1.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance - This is part 2 of WB’s experiment in elevating films that were produced for their platform, because there are holes in the release schedule that are there for the taking, and why not. They aren’t reporting grosses today, but what it grosses this weekend is kind of just a detail anyway, there’s a different goal here. As I’ve brought up here before, what do you think when someone describes a movie to you and they use the phrase ‘it’s a streamer’? Yeah, that isn’t a good thing. So the goal here isn’t about gross, it’s more about using the cache of a theatrical release to improve the positioning when it goes through it’s distribution tiers, so consumers don’t look at it and say ‘it’s a streamer’.

The idea here is to take whatever you were going to spend launching it on the platform, then add in the money you’re going to get back from film rental and VOD revenues, then spend that to make it more valuable on the platform (immediately and long term). What’s depressing is that the concept (to anyone in the know) is pretty simple, and I’m normally depressed by the trade press missing the point and writing uninformed pieces. In this case the mainstream trade press was pretty quiet, but the lower tier trade press (the Wrap), published a piece about how ‘insiders’ around town are scratching their heads at what WB is doing. They seemed to want to push forward the idea that this is being ‘done on the cheap’ and ‘was a token gesture to exhibitors’, and seemed to want to compare it to the other Magic Mike films. Those comps are completely wrong, and If there’s any film that this should be compared to, it’s last month’s House Party, because it was the same exercise and goal. So whatever this does, if it’s about the same gross this weekend as House Party, that’s probably what they spent to and that’s a win; and if it’s better than that, it’s found money. But just like what happened on 80 for Brady, this is a template that could prove valuable to the industry going forward.