Final weekend of March 2023

G’day from Down Under and oddly the rain followed me here. We’ve got another solid weekend at the box office this week, and similar to what we saw a couple of weeks ago with Shazam; Paramount was battling the same ’the Movie business is Hard’ forces this week, but more on that below. Falling into the same pattern that we’ve been seeing the last couple of weeks, we’ll be up about 20% from the same last weekend in 2022, but still a good deal short of where we were in 2019 before the shutdown.

Often some of you will ask me ‘why don’t you have a Podcast or a Blog and monetize this’ (the drivel I spout out on a weekly basis). Of course that’s very flattering, but there are a couple of reasons why I prefer to keep this as our own little industry clubhouse. First, I really like the privacy of this format. Because I keep a pretty tight lid on the distribution list (and I trust you to keep that lid on), I can speak in a way that you really can’t in a public forum, and I’m not sure I could accomplish what I try to do here. But in addition to being able to kick over the sacred cows, I also like being a little bit of a secret, and although there are a decent amount of people in this sector who really want to be famous, I’m kind of the opposite. I’d rather do something that has a shot of making things better, but you often have to say things people might not want to hear, so it makes sense to talk to only the people I trust (and who trust me).

So last week, when I told you about how the MGM distribution chief wasn’t completely ’that loud Philly guy’, but there was a massively effective quiet benevolence to him, the amount of love that came back from you was stunning. And there’s a couple of reasons why that couldn’t happen in a more public forum. First of all, to say those things in a public forum probably wouldn’t have made him happy, and he would have kicked my ass for doing it. One of the reasons we got along so well is that we both felt that you could be more effective in the background, so sharing those stories with you in this forum would have made him very happy. But the personal notes I got from all of you who wrote me back were just overwhelming, and in my mind solidified the idea that we are a community. And btw, just to be clear here, he was every bit that ‘loud guy from Philly’; and there wasn’t much of a difference between the volume level while sitting next to him at an Eagles game or across the table at The Palm.

But thank you again for last week, I truly appreciate all of you.

Anyway, based on something I learned at a Trump University course titled ‘ignore something long enough and it will go away’, here are some thoughts about the weekend box office.

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves - First thing first, Paramount killed it here. Although the press discourse will probably wander to the usual ’glass half empty’ direction because of the cost of the movie, getting this open was a bitch and this was one of the great positioning challenges we’ve seen in a long time. Similar to what we saw a couple of weeks ago with Shazam, there was a ‘funk’ to this movie that was really hard to overcome, and too many moviegoers seemed to react with ’nope, not for me’. Although the IP here has a really good base to draw from, that binary aspect of the IP was a big issue. If you weren’t a fan of the game, hearing the title immediately took your mind towards ’that’s the nerdy thing my nerdy friends play’, and it was really hard for this to land in the consumers mind as an entertaining couple of hours at the movies. This had a very similar resistance we see with Musicals. No matter how many people tell you how great the movie is, if you don’t like musicals it’s a no go. Clearly because this seems to be pleasing both the critics and the fans of the game, Paramount had good reason to spend the money they did making this, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out and it can overcome that IP resistance. Just to get it here, they allowed the film to be it’s own spokesperson and started doing some previews sometime back in mid 2021 (kidding of course, but they did 3 of them, which is a lot. I’ll leave it to the distribution community to weigh in on if those revenues can be added into today’s gross though), and the campaign really made the movie look like a lot of fun. They were working so hard here, I kept expecting them to have a contest where if you bought a ticket, you could win a chance to spit on Chris Pine at the Premier. The binary nature of this film is already showing itself in the grosses, it started the day 17% ahead of Uncharted, but now it’s about 8% behind it. So it’s giving off signals like it might go flat tonight. And I’m not sure we’ll see any sort of kids bounce tomorrow, the gateway to playing this game is mid teens at the earliest so I don’t think we can count on the same big bounce Uncharted got on Saturday. Because there’s so many aspects to this opening that make me want to stay conservative, I’m going to stay conservative and say right now it looks like it’s gonna do about $1.5 million for each side of the Icosahedron dice. That’s about $30 million for those of you who haven’t had your dining room table commandeered once a week (so you overhear the terminology) and it doesn’t include the 3 rolls of the dice before last night, because I don’t know how it was broken out. But even if I’m right and this will be termed ‘disappointing’ by the lazy press, Paramount made a good movie, they had a great date and the campaign kicked ass; it was just another case of ‘the movie business is hard’.

John Wick: Chapter 4 - It’s looking about the same as John Wick 3 did on its 2nd Friday, and that dropped 57% for the weekend. So if that holds up, this should finish around 30.

His Only Son - Went 2000 runs and reinforcing what Jesus Revolution did a couple of weeks ago (with some of the same cast), the faith based crowd is definitely out there and is willing to go to the movies. Right now it’s running about half of Jesus Revolution, but as you know sometimes this genre can be very pre sales heavy and falls apart on Saturday. Assuming it doesn’t do that, it looks like $4 or $5 million for the weekend.

A Thousand and One - Went 900 runs and this New York set Sundance Award winning thriller from Focus is doing really well….in NY. Looks like it’s headed for about a little more $1k psa and a weekend gross just over of $1 million.

Spinning Gold - I kinda want to see this movie, but it looks like I’m the only one. Went 800 runs and the psa looks like it’s gonna be really low here, probably only a couple of hundred dollars.