Final weekend of June 2023

It’s going to be a weekend very similar to what the norm is for the weekend before Independence Day, we’ve had some nice $100 million tentpole openings on this weekend like last year’s Minions: The Rise of Gru and 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction. But to show you how this sector is best when we’re giving the consumer a variety of offerings, the biggest total weekend for this part of the year was in 2012, when Ted ($54.4), Magic Mike ($39.1) and Madea’s Witness Protection ($25.4) all combined to drive the weekend total over $200 million. This year’s total is going to be a little short of both 2022 and 2019, but considering last year had that $100 million plus opening on Minions, and we’re still only a little behind the total this year, we’re still doing pretty good this weekend. Next week has the one box office day where absolutely anything can happen, 4th of July. If it’s nice for the most part across the country, it’s a so so day and doesn’t resemble a holiday box office at all. But if you get some serious rain in the midwest and the northeast, it’s like printing money. So when I talk about grosses below, I’m staying away from a 5 day number, it can go any direction. However, the 3rd is a very good box office day. A lot of businesses are closed and since pretty much everyone has the next day off, it plays a lot like a Friday night. I always wondered why some of the films that are opening the weekend after the 4th don’t do a sneak on the 3rd, seems like the perfect place to get momentum going.

As we get into this part of the year, there’s a lot of talk around town about the Fall movies and one of the things that is being considered is the Festival Trinity; Venice, TIFF and Telluride. But there have been a few things happening lately that say that films have to really be careful about how they approach the festivals, because if you’re wrong about the film, you’re digging out of a hole that you might not get out of.

But let me back up a little. Since we’re in the era of easy information, and the core moviegoers tend to monitor and participate in that information funnel, there’s an emerging art to how you disperse that information. The distance you have your Red Carpet Premiere from the release date matters, the timing of the review embargo lift matters and if you hit both of those events right (and throw in a media campaign crescendo that is equally well timed) you can get a springboard where the whole equals more than the sum of the parts and the box office soars. And if there’s one data point that seems to be the trickiest, it’s that review embargo lift. If it’s gonna be great and the IP of the film has a big core, waiting until the end seems to really be effective, Marvel films seem to really bounce when they pull one of those high 90’s Rotten Tomatoes scores when they time it right with the Premier and the late breaking campaign. But when I refer to the embargo lift as ’tricky’, it’s as tricky as it gets.

Because of the way Rotten Tomatoes works, where the critic can declare a film fresh or rotten, it’s really hard for even the best Studio Publicity department to forecast where the score is gonna land. And there’s a culprit here, the 2 1/2 star review, it’s the DMZ of review metrics and it can go either way. So you can take two films that have the same average star rating, but one ends up with a 45% rating that will chase moviegoers away and one can be an 88% rating that promises a good time. So as often as not, the score isn’t quite what the studio thought it was going to be.

So when you decide to go to a festival, you’re lifting the review embargo for the critics that are at the festival and that can go either way. Last year, both Top Gun Maverick and Elvis went to Cannes, and thought a rousing Cannes reception would polish the shine of the film. Top Gun Maverick already had their premier and had lifted their embargo to a very high 90’s score, so they were pretty sure the Cannes reception would be good. Elvis was a different story, but even though some of the critics picked at it and kinda reviewed Baz Luhrman as much as the movie, the net result was very good. After the Cannes Premiere both films had great theatrical runs. But this year Disney took both Elemental and Indiana Jones to Cannes, hoping to be Top Gun Maverick and Elvis; and although the French didn’t quite say ‘non’, they unleashed their inner Lloyd Bentsen and said ‘we know Top Gun Maverick and Elvis, you’re no Top Gun Maverick and Elvis’. And because of the critical reaction in Cannes, both films came back in a hole they needed to dig out of.

Last fall, Searchlight brought Empire of Light to Telluride with the idea that they had a beautiful film that speaks to core moviegoers (and the Guilds/Academy), and could go very deep into awards season. However, in another example of how critics live in a different world than the normal moviegoer (because they see so many movies a week and elements trigger them that a normal moviegoer doesn’t care about), the critics sniffed at the film saying ’No! No! No!, you absolutely cannot have a magic black man, No!’. Huh? Why is that important? But all of a sudden they have a low RT score and they’re digging out of a hole, and they never really got out of that hole.

So as you talk about taking a film to the festivals, you have to be careful about how you’re going to come out of it. All the measurements you can look at before you commit need to be scrutinized very carefully. As someone who spent part of his career at a studio, I know how there’s a bubble, and it can be hard to get outside of the groupthink and cheering for the home team. It’s not like the films I mentioned above did anything wrong, they just loved them too much inside the studio. And you have to be careful of test screening scores. There are so many aspects to that process that aren’t applicable to a festival audience and critical response. And be especially careful of where the audience came from, there are some test audiences that are being paid cold hard cash (and a shockingly high amount with some vendors) that might lead to a false positive. So before you commit to a festival, challenge the idea in as many ways as you can and don’t automatically think that because you love the film, it’s gonna be a hit at the festivals. It can go really bad, consider that.

At any given time during a film’s campaign, the marketing department is like a person treading water in the middle of the ocean; and the more challenging the film is, the bigger the swell is in that part of the ocean. So if you ask that person treading water to hold a 25lb weight when they’re a mile from shore, they have a much smaller chance of making it to shore than if you gave them the weight 100 ft from shore. They still might drown if they’re close to shore, but they at least have a slight chance. The critical score is such a powerful element of getting consumers to go to your film (especially for those tricky tagalongs), and if you can get a good score inserted into the information funnel from a festival before the meat of your campaign kicks in, your campaign is going to be more effective. However, if you come out of the festival with something not so great, the marketing campaign is now in conversion mode instead of attraction mode, and the critics score 6 weeks from release might drown them.

Anyway, with the same expected accuracy of an ontime arrival (or even arriving) of any flight anywhere in the US this weekend, here are some thoughts on the weekend box office.

*Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny *- Got off to a nice start last night and it’s having a pretty good day today. Because this is what it is, it actually is your Father’s Indiana Jones and the big question is how late it will play tonight. The middle of the country tends to be a little more receptive to films that are on the nostalgic side, and that’s clearly the case here; Salt Lake City is playing the same way it would on a broad family film. Plus, Indy is fighting Nazi’s, and the red states love Nazi’s. Right now this is running a little ahead of where Transformers was a couple of weeks ago, and how this holds up against Transformers later tonight and tomorrow will be the difference between the two grosses. This film does have 1000 more runs than Transformers though. For now, let’s say any shortfall tonight and tomorrow gets made up by the extra runs and I’ll say it should end up in the low 60’s.

Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse/Elemental - Same same as last weekend, both running about the same level and they should both be down about 35% for a weekend of about $12 million.

Ruby Gillman Teenage Kraken - Back when they folded DreamWorks Animation and Illumination together, I had lunch with a friend working at DWA, he told me the combination wasn’t going well because the DWA folks saw themselves as Animation Artiste’s and thought the Illumination people were a bunch of hacks. I’m not sure if that’s still the case but the Illumination people are probably saying something like ’scoreboard bitch!’. This DWA film is so tepid that Universal saw it coming a mile away, went into loss prevention mode and spent less than one of the streamers spend on their platform movies. That spend shows and this looks like a DWA low point at about $6 million for the weekend.