First weekend of March 2023

As we expected, the box office keeps picking up on a consistent basis and we’ve got more promising signs this weekend; and it’s coming from places that should help the theatrical sector in the long term, more on that below. It’s not going to beat the same weekend last year because The Batman’s $131 million is a tough hill to climb, but it’s probably going to be about even with 2019’s first weekend in March. As I’ve pointed out, the long term health of the sector hinges on getting back those habitual moviegoers, and consistently attractive films like we have this weekend will help.

I got a ton of responses from last week’s email, and pretty much all of them had the same reaction to the list of the last 10 Best Picture winners, ‘yep, makes sense, no one watches the Oscars for a reason’. And just to drive the point home again…..*Coda, Nomadland, Parasite, Green Book, The Shape of Water, Moonlight, Spotlight, Birdman, 12 Years a Slave, Argo. *Ughhh, half of those films are titles that when you mention them to your civilian friends they respond with the dreaded ‘what’s that?’. As far as my thoughts about Top Gun Maverick needing to win Best Picture this year, a couple of you correctly pointed out ‘great idea, and it deserves it, but it won’t win because it’s not cool to vote for it’.

Exactly, cool seems to matter more now. As one of the 5 people in the film business (well, film business adjacent, but go with me here) who grew up in Los Angeles (and the other 4 who grew up here get this email) it makes perfect sense that most of the Academy will do the thing that’s cool, because that’s fits into the ‘too cool for where they came from’ psychographic. Most of the business migrated here from other parts of the country and moved within a 3 mile radius of Park La Brea (or, more often than not, moved into Park La Brea). Once here, they posted up every night at The Pikey or Saddle Ranch (or whatever was the similar hangout for your era) and then try to ‘out cool’ all the other migrants from Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin, Philly (a lot of Philly), Boston or New York. As they try to out cool each other, they continually bash Los Angeles (to seem cool) and repeat stereotypes like ‘people in Los Angeles don’t know how to drive in the rain’. Ummm, you live in an area that’s all people from somewhere else, so exactly who is the problem? And come on, Los Angeles has been a welcoming destination to migrants chasing their Hollywood dreams for the past 100 years, so it’s become really crowded here. When it rains people drive slower and the infrastructure can’t move as many cars through it; so when rainy day traffic gets worse, it’s just a capacity issue, nothing to do with regional skills*. But by repeating something that has no basis in fact, they’re showing us locals how much cooler they are than us, but it was probably just a defense mechanism. But that’s why they migrate here, because it’s cool.

So when you look at that list of the last 10 best picture winners, it completely tracks; we think we’re way cooler than the typical movie goer, and we can’t seem to shut up about it. We look at a nominee that has the only A+ Cinemascore of the group and the highest Rotten Tomatoes score, but say, nope, not cool enough for us. #oscarstoocoolforyou. Maybe we should change the name of the award from Best Picture to Best Cool Picture, and even though that name sounds very MTV Movie Awards, it’s pretty much what we’ve become.

Anyway, based on something I heard from Aaron Rodgers during our darkness retreat (although, embarrassingly neither of us noticed the rate was ‘double occupancy’ when we signed up), here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Creed III - Looking terrific today, but not only is this film an important component in bringing back moviegoers on a regular basis, it’s something all the streamers should pay close attention to. Since Amazon acquired a fully baked Theatrical Marketing and Distribution team with the purchase of MGM, this is an example of how the revenue streams that Theatrical (and the other revenue streams from the various levels of VOD that are pretty much pure profit) not only can generate true ROI for the studio, it elevates the value of the film once I migrates to the platform. And the key phrase here is ‘fully baked’, since the ability to get a consumer to the theater is a significantly more challenging task than getting someone to turn on their TV, so it takes considerably more expertise. That expertise is very difficult to find, and isn’t cheap. Since Amazon has made it clear this is the direction they are headed, it’s not going to be long until the other players wake up (and it’s not a question of if, it’s when, because otherwise I’m not sure they’ll continue to make movies at the current budget level), and start hunting for the expertise needed to compete here. So if you have some of these seasoned and successful Marketing and Distribution folk working for you, hold on to them, they don’t grow on trees.

Back to grosses, they’re really good here. The first two Creed films did very well over thanksgiving, but when you release over Thanksgiving that gross gets spread out over 5 days. Now we can see the truer box office power of this franchise, and this weekend’s gross is going to be much higher than the 3 day gross of either of the first two films. What’s interesting here is that the critics, even though it’s RT score is in the 90’s, kept using the word ‘predictable’ in their reviews and you get the impression they were thisclose to saying it’s rotten. But the exit polls here are a sensational 5 stars, so the audience is saying ‘predictable…why do you think we came?’ Once again the critics are out of touch with normal movie goers. Anyway this looks like it’s headed to a franchise best mid 40’s.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yalba: To the Swordsmith Village - Yeah, a title with two colons, that’s apparently cool. 2 years ago the Anime genre took a big step forward gross wise with Demon Slayer The Movie: Mugen Train and opened to over $20 million. Clearly this IP has a faithful fan base because this is 3 episodes of the Japanese TV series, and it’s doing really good business. It’s running about 2/3 of where the Demon Slayer movie was at the same point in the day, but that film had fair (for this genre) staying power over the weekend. For now, assuming this doesn’t fall to pieces tomorrow, figure it’s in the low teens.

Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania - The buzz continues to catch up here, it’s down again a decent amount today, which makes that upward arc over opening weekend more amazing. But figure it’s down another 55 or 60% this weekend for a gross around $12 million.

Cocaine Bear - Showing some resiliency today, looks down a little better than you would normally see. Probably a weekend around $12 million.

Jesus Revolution - Because these faith based films have a big surge of first day attendance, the 2nd Friday is down a lot. But this is down about the same as I Can Only Imagine was in its 2nd Friday, but that film righted itself on Saturday and Sunday, and ended up only down 20% for the weekend. This film did have an outsize chunk of its opening weekend from preview grosses, so it’s in a -20% hole just because of that. But figure it’s down 40% overall for a weekend just short of $10 million.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre - This Guy Richie actioner has been around a while and it’s opening on 2200 screens this weekend, supported by a late breaking campaign. It’s struggling to find a place among the 5 films above right now and looks like a weekend of about 3 or 4 million.

• It’s not like Texas where the rule is ’that light has only been red for 3 seconds, let’s plow right through the intersection’.