Fourth weekend of June 2023

When we looked at how the summer tentpoles were going to line up this summer, we anticipated that this would be a week that would be a little bit of a break. But it’s considerably worse than we thought because normally a good DC film and a June Pixar film in their 2nd weekend should carry us through, but both of those ran into considerable headwinds (more on that below). The weekend should still break $100 million, but not by much, and it will be short of the Elvis/Black Phone weekend last year and about half of the Toy Story 4/Child’s Play weekend of 2019. But we’ll get back on track next week and July should be a great month, highlighted by the upcoming cage match between Barbie and Oppenheimer mid July.

So, the Academy is now Nielsen. When I worked at Nielsen, their take on ‘innovation’ looked something like this; they would take the same tired product/idea that had been around forever, make some cosmetic changes, slap a new name on it and then drop a press release about how innovative they were and were showing how they were keeping up with the industry. We’re still seeing that these days from them, as the consumer migrates away from linear TV and they keep rolling out the same stuff with cosmetic changes and different names, but it was still the same crap they’d been peddling and didn’t address the needs of their customers.

This week the Academy announced their long gestating ’solution’ to the films that play in theaters, but the theatrical run is just there to check a box for awards eligibility; and all the marketing muscle is allocated towards watching them on a platform. And in too many cases there is considerably more marketing muscle put towards the awards push than either the theatrical run or the platform release. And what did those changes sum up to? Nothing (similar to the ’solution’ a couple of weeks ago to the Andrea Risenborough issue, which was also a big nothing), the same problem will exist and all the changes were angled towards looking like they were doing something, but actually didn’t really change a thing. Why didn’t it change a thing? Even though the issue was apparently discussed at length, they aren’t going to require films to report their grosses to be eligible for Oscars. Now you would think, ‘what’s the big deal?’ If they’re not leaning into the theatrical experience (and some content leaders have been very upfront about what their intentions are), why do they care? There have been a lot of award winners that didn’t do well at the box office, including Best Picture Winners like The Hurt Locker, why would anyone push back?’ But just like everything else today, it’s all about the money.

First, let’s talk about how these decisions get made. Obviously the higher ups at the Academy are well meaning and (to get to where they are) they’ve been in the business for a while. But, just like a lot of people that sit on boards, they don’t know all the nooks and crannies of the business and they’re subject to lobbying, and often their opinions are based on the last person they talked to. So the policies that are coming down are probably the agenda successes of the voices in their ears.

If they had required all films eligible for the feature length categories to report their grosses, some of the content generators would have had to reallocate financial resources to get people to theaters. And where would that money come from? More than likely it would come out of budgets that find their way to the Industrial Awards complex. As I said above, there are several of the Award contenders from this last awards year that spent more on the Awards campaign than they did on getting normal civilians to watch it. So if they have to start caring about people watching movies in theaters, the beneficiaries will be digital and TV (and the associated agencies), and the losers would be the Industrial Awards Complex.

But there’s another reason that they’re going to continue to allow grosses to be suppressed; unfortunately it’s a big picture issue linked to the same issues the WGA (and soon SAG/AFTRA) are dealing with, and I’m pretty sure a lot of lobbying went into the decision. There’s a pretty solid financial reason the streamers don’t report grosses for their theatrical runs. It’s not like they hate theaters or anything like that, it’s that they’ve built a whole financial model on a ‘buy it now’ one time price for talent, and any transparency on revenues could lead to changing deals to include backend. They want to avoid that, they really don’t want that, and they’ve gone out of their way to lock down any measurement metrics to stop that from happening. The way the streamers have found a loophole in the guild deals that bring their talent costs down significantly over the life of a project, any crack in that door would change their model, and they like their model. As you’ve heard over and over again during the WGA strike, the income level for non-star writers on streamer projects is one of the key drivers in this strike. So, unfortunately the Academy could have done a two-fer here. They could have created a level headed rule that would have separated the truly theatrical films from the flicks that were just checking a box, plus they might have helped the two Guilds who’s fights are tied to revenue transparency. But since the Actors Branch is the largest branch of the Academy and the Writer’s Branch is substantial as well, the Academy chose to bury their heads in the sand instead of looking out for a good part of its membership. And burying their heads in the sand is something Nielsen has been doing for a long long time.

Anyway, with the accuracy normally associated with NewsNation’s Titanic Sub oxygen countdown clock, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

We’ve got a little bit of a box-office derby here, and it’s possible Spider-Man, *Elemental, The Flash or No Hard Feelings *could win the weekend, but here’s my best guess based on what I’m seeing right now.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider Verse - Looks like DC’s loss is Marvel’s gain here. This has been holding nicely and today looks similar to what we’ve been seeing since this opened. Figure it’s down only about 40% for a weekend of about $17 million.

Elemental - Disney/Pixar took another big risk with this film, making a film that was pretty intellectual (and maybe a little homework-y) in a market where the big grossing films are coming out of Illumination and other populist IP’s like Sonic and Mario Brothers. But even though this film didn’t generate the critical numbers these high minded ideas need to break them out on opening weekend, Pixar makes movies that tend to hang around for a while and it looks pretty good today. It’s down 20 points less than Lightyear was down in its 2nd weekend last year, so it looks like it’s finding its audience. Looks like it will be down 45% for a weekend around $16 million. When you take out the gross from the previews last Thursday, that means this is only dropping 39% or so from last week.

The Flash - I hate to say this but the Trolls won. There was a coordinated effort online to turn Ezra Miller into Armie Hammer, and it worked. They seemed to wait until the Premier happened last week and then they went to town. There are some data points that support this idea; for a film to have the Thursday night gross they had ($10 million), but that gross ends up as 18% of the 3 day gross (other DC films are about 11%) and still had good exits, something happened. Having a Thursday gross that’s 18% of your 3 day gross is usually associated with a D Cinemascore and bad playability. Considering those Thursday night ticket sales usually happen right away when tickets go onsite weeks before release, there’s evidence that the perception shifted late. The grosses have been leaking all week and today it’s way down. Because that Thursday preview gross was such a large portion of the weekend, they started the weekend 18% down, so if they’re down 70% this weekend, it’s really down 52%. But figure a gross of 14 or 15.

No Hard Feelings - Any time a studio takes a risk and makes a film in a genre that has been kinda left for dead by the theatrical sector, I’ll root for them (and hope there will be a downstream lift since there are a couple more on the way). The numbers look pretty good today, they’re not spectacular but they’re pretty solid. If they do what R rated comedies can do at night (and this grows), they’re in striking distance to win the weekend. For now it looks like a weekend of about 14 or 15.

*Asteroid City *- I’m breathing a sigh of relief here, the Adult/Specialty market has been pretty iffy lately and the way Focus approached this film was a little risky; and this film needed to work for so many reasons. Normally when you go exclusive and then wide you’ve got a film with no stars and needs to get word of mouth going to help it when you go wider. But this film had not only star director Wes Anderson and his loyal audience, but also had Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Steve Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, and Jeff Goldblum. But where I got scared was the reaction out of Cannes was good, not great; so what if that one week limited run on a film that didn’t have 5 star playability hurt the wide break? Why would they do this, especially with that all star cast? This might shock you but talent, their agents (and studios too) whip out some old time superstition using the battle cry ‘because we always do it this way’. Cool. Unleashing my inner Maury Povich, the Exclusive did not hurt the wide break, it’s pretty good today. And what’s especially encouraging is that in the top 15 grossing theaters it’s the #1 gross in the complex with the exception of 2 theaters (Lincoln Sq in NY and Century City). Considering the other massive films above it in total gross that’s a big accomplishment. With a film like this we’ll have to see how much it grows tonight, and we should see the normal adult bounce tomorrow, but right now it looks like $8 million or so.