Super Mario's Wednesday, April 2023
Hello to all of you from a deck chair in the South Pacific. I’ll have a deeper dive on Friday once we see how the two films opening today hold up; since I’ve told you often about my feelings about non Friday openings, I’m a little wary about going Wednesday on one of the releases. Just a quick recap about Wednesday openings before I jump back onto my Surfboard, but I feel that moviegoing these days is such a ’social’ activity (if you’re into seeing a particular movie, you invite people to go with you), and I’m concerned that when you don’t open a film on a day where tagalongs are more likely to go with you, the consumers fall out of the purchase funnel and don’t come back.
The Super Mario Brothers Movie - This is the film that I’m the most curious about. Of course, this is a really big movie and always was going to be; but instead of opening on Friday when 80% of K-12 and about 1/3 of Colleges are out for Good Friday plus quite a few businesses are closed, they opened today. This is a very ‘old school’ way of thinking and the idea here is that there are still kids out of school today (29%) and tomorrow (32%), they’re ‘good days’ that you should take advantage of. Universal in particular has churned out some pretty sexy numbers on the Fast and Furious films when they opened on Good Friday, but they chose a different direction here and I’ll have more thoughts on this Friday when we see how it turns out. It’s pretty great so far, and depending on how it plays tonight (it’s still a Wednesday after all, so it probably won’t do much business after about 7pm), it’s looking like a day in the high 20’s.
Air - The Wednesday opening here makes a little more sense, you can use the Wednesday opening for films that don’t have intense built in fanship if they have very high playability. And it absolutely has to be 5 star playability, even 4 1/2 stars gets iffy. Currently this film has a 97% critics score and a 98% audience score on RT, so using the film itself as a marketing tool can help, and hopefully the first two days can create some advocates. There were some previews for this film before today, but today’s gross (not including preview grosses) looks like it’s in the $2.0 million range right now.