Third weekend of May 2023

This weekend will be a good example of how the Theatrical sector has made good strides to get back to normal, but we’re not quite there yet. Last year’s corresponding weekend only had $19 million gross in new titles, illustrating how the release schedule wasn’t as filled out as it was in 2019, when the new titles grossed $70 million. The total for this weekend should blow away 2022’s total, and Fast & Furious will almost equal 2022’s total on its own; but will be well short of the total from 2019, which reflected a full release schedule. So, we’re getting there but we’re not there yet.

As many of you have heard already, this edition of the Fast & Furious series is taking another step backwards (domestically anyway) this weekend, and this is nothing new; over and over again when the consumers start showing up less often, it’s usually because they say ‘we’ve seen that movie’ and there’s not enough value there to generate a trip to the theater. We saw it with Broadway based Musicals in the early 70’s, we saw it with Star driven Action Comedies in the 80’s and 90’s, we saw it with Rom Dram’s in the 2000’s, it’s a story as old as the business itself.

Speaking of ‘I’ve seen that movie’, the writers strike. Having been in the business for my whole life, I’ve seen these strikes before. But there’s a consistency to why there was a strike, some core aspects to the business change and the compensation doesn’t, so it’s usually warranted. Since the money people aren’t going to volunteer to make everyone else whole when things change, there has to be a strike. But we’ve seen this movie before. The idea of residuals for airings on TV in the 50’s, the Home Video revolution in the 80’s and now the buyout based economics of streaming today, same same.

Thinking about the idea of another money making genre like the Fast & Furious series flaming out, combined with the idea of another strike, all the attention going to Artificial Intelligence fits right in. Why? Because I’ve seen this movie already.

AI’s use when creating creative content is a simple idea. An algorithm that can compose a sentence based on some parameters you give it. You can tell it to write a scene based on an episode of Ted Lasso, but you have to tell it ‘make it like this’. Which is amazing because (according to a lot of you) isn’t that what studio execs have been saying for a long long time? So many of you have told me you can’t get a pitch for an original idea to save your lives, it has to be attached to some sort of well known IP, or a remake/sequel.

We’ve seen this AI movie before in a slightly different way; about 5 years ago there was another angle on AI that was all the rage, the snake oil algorithm that could read a script and predict success/failure. Here again it was ‘based on….’, but even data points that might seem interesting such as ’this script has 42 characters, and scripts with that many characters have had little box office success’ could be faulty based on the films it’s looking at in the database. Do those characters make sense and are they doing anything interesting? As the saying goes in the data industry, ‘garbage in, garbage out’.

But no matter what algorithms you apply, there’s a data point I hear a lot from creatives (like many of you). You make films you want to see, and because you want to make films you want to see, you don’t have contempt for the material. So when you read a script that has 42 characters, but it’s 42 characters that sum up to a film you want to see, that’s something an algorithm can’t get at (yet). Since the reason the films you want to see are also films a lot of other people want to see, you’ve risen to the position you’re in. One of the great examples of this is the Superhero genre; the only reason it’s what it is today is because you had a couple of film makers in control who didn’t think the genre was just comic books, there were interesting complex characters and great stories to tell. Up till that point, studio heads didn’t get it and had contempt for the source material. But there were some contrarians out there (and you know who you are) who said ‘I’ve seen that movie and it sucks, this is the movie I want to see’, and that movie connected with a lot of consumers. Why did it connect with consumers? Because they hadn’t seen that movie before.

So if the suits who buddy up to AI instead of embracing the idea ’the movie business is hard and you have to be an outlier to succeed here’ (and as you know they would love to replace all of us with an algorithm), we know what will happen. Because we’ve seen that movie.

Anyway, loosely based on the same principles that ironically turned the kerfuffle between DeSantis and Disney from Don’t Say Gay into a dick measuring contest, here are some thoughts about the weekend box office.

Fast X - Many wrote off the underwhelming $70 million opening in 2021 for F9 as ‘it’s the pandemic’. But maybe the ‘it’s all about Family’ schtick is getting tired, and there’s only so many ways you can land a Corvette on the smokestack of the Queen Mary 2* in the middle of an Atlantic crossing (and the ramp to land there started in Southampton) before the fans say ‘yeah, when you drive a Ferrari through the 80th floor of the Burj Khalifa while being chased by a tank that also drives through the 80th floor of the Burj Khalifa, there’s nowhere to go but down’. This series has pretty much run it’s course, and since the non North American movie goers tend to stay with franchises like this longer than we do here, hopefully the rumored $300 million + cost of this film won’t be an issue once the rest of the world weighs in. As I’ve said many times here, there are no bad movies, just movies that got made for too much money. Right now this looks like a weekend in the low 60’s, it’s a pretty good gross, it’s still $60 million……but it’s a $300 million movie. Although it’s going to be a pretty good Summer, budgets like this opening to grosses like this will get teed off on by the press. As a one off, this isn’t a big deal but there’s another film in a couple of weeks that’s in the same budget range, and might open to a gross that’s considerably lower than this. But fingers crossed that doesn’t happen.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol III - There’s a lot of commonality between the Marvel audience and the F&F audience, so it’s no surprise this is down this weekend after it’s rock solid hold last week. Still should be good enough to get to the low 30’s though (down 50%).

The Master Gardener - Paul Schrader’s third film in this series isn’t nearly as strong as it was when Focus had the 2nd part with The Card Counter. They only went about 200 runs, and this looks like a weekend of about $400k.

Sanctuary - Neon went 5 runs in NY and LA. The Angelika in NY is good, but it’s way better than the other runs so there’s probably a Q&A there tonight. The rest are just okay, so unless there are more Q&A’s this weekend, this should get to a psa of about $11k or so.

*because otherwise having Helen Mirren in the film wouldn’t make any sense at all