Mission: Impossible Wednesday, July 2023
There are endless debates about ‘which/who is better’ that will rage on. MJ vs LeBron, Apple vs Spotify, Spaces vs Tabs, toilet paper over the top vs toilet paper from the bottom of the roll, Peter Michael vs Chateau Pavie….the list goes on and on. But when it comes to opening a movie on a Friday, there are people who agree and there are those who are wrong.
We’ve got a massive tentpole opening today in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, and it’s very good, Paramount did a terrific job here and it’s right in line with the previous couple of Mission: Impossible films. But as good as this is (and there’s a very good reason it’s opening today), there are issues with opening on Wednesday.
So why did they go on Wednesday? Two reasons, one of them is pretty valid, one is not. The valid reason is that with Oppenheimer and Barbie opening next week they wanted a couple of extra days in the Large Format (IMAX, Dolby) theaters, where the demand and ticket prices are higher. They’ve got film makers here who are very supportive of the big screen experience, and the goal here was to support that support. But grasping at that PLF shelf space means they will leave some money on the table; it’s not a ton of money but it’s still money. However, you could probably write that off as talent relations.
What do I mean by leaving money on the table? First, and this is my big problem with non-Friday openings, there’s the social/tag along aspect. Moviegoing is a group event, the norm for people going alone to a movie is only about 15% so it’s important to make the first couple of days convenient for the casual and non-fans to say yes when someone who is an avid fan invites them, but won’t go on their own. And that’s the problem, the fans want to go right away, and if the marketing campaign has done their job they want to go as soon as they can. But getting a tagalong to say ‘yes’ on a Wednesday night is more challenging than getting a ‘yes’ on a Friday night, and it doesn’t get any easier with a nearly 3 hour movie like this one. So if you add this to the debates I mentioned before, this is what’s going on in a fan’s head: ‘do I want to see this alone on the first day or do I wait for my tagalongs to go on the weekend?’ But the question (that we really don’t have an answer to) is ‘do we ever get another shot at that non or casual fan that would tag along on a Friday, but didn’t because they had to work the next day?’.
I talked about this last Friday, campaigns are built (and a lot of money is spent) to not only activate the fans, but you need marketing reach to get those tagalongs to a place where they say ‘yes’ and go with the early attender fan. But if you put up a scheduling barrier to that ‘yes’, all that extra work might go out the window. Now the flip side of that argument is that a movie with 5 star exits gets extra word of mouth rolling into the weekend. Valid point, but when you have a movie IP like this where the brand awareness is in the high 90’s, the quality is consistently high and you’ve already got the same high 90’s Rotten Tomatoes score as the last film, who exactly is going to convert based on word of mouth? Once you get to such rarefied air that this franchise consistently achieves, attendance becomes a little binary.
The second problem with a Wednesday opening is the Distribution math we have currently. The industry started ‘preview shows’ at 12:01am on opening day about a dozen years ago, then went to 10pm the night before, then 9pm, then…., and we’re now pretty much opening all day on the day before, and all that money gets dumped into Friday. So the Distribution math for a Friday Saturday Sunday gross is now 1+1+1 = 4. We now also do ‘fan shows’ one or more times before you even get to those ‘night before’ preview shows, and that money gets dumped into the opening day gross as well. So because there are so many ways to put your thumb on the scale for opening day, sometimes you really need that extra gross on your opening weekend (i.e. Transformers week 1 vs Spider-verse week 2) for cosmetic purposes. Why? That same ol’ lazy industry press. Because of the binary nature of this IP, if this ends up about the same gross as the last film’s (MI: Fallout) weekend, the 3 day gross is going to look very similar to Indy, Transformers and Flash (which the press hasn’t been terribly kind to) because it’s going to be missing those preview dollars. The current Distribution math could have worked in this film’s favor; let’s say they opened this Friday and then did the normal previews tomorrow and had fan events a couple of times during the week. Because of the Distribution math, you can take all that gross and throw it into Friday’s gross, and the new 3 day gross probably wouldn’t have looked that much different that what they’ll report for 5 days. So any press issues they might have this weekend would have disappeared.
I mentioned above there are two reasons to go on Wednesday and one of them was bad; the 2nd is the idea that during a holiday time like this (mid summer) where the weekdays are really good, you get those extra ‘good days’. Nope, that doesn’t work in today’s marketplace, and this is something the dinosaurs in the business refuse to let go of. You know what are good days? Friday and Saturday no matter what time of year it is. And with the idea that you need those tagalongs to capture all the extra marketing spend, why do you want to give up the best days as the days your early attender avid fans are going to go (and bring the tagalongs)?
Are there non-Friday’s that work? Sure, Christmas Day is the best day that time period, instead of going on the Friday before, make it easy for the tagalongs and go on the best day. Of course Thanksgiving is the weekend where traditionally everything opens on the day before (Wednesday). But even that weekend needs some re-thinking every once in a while. Back in 2018, Robin Hood opened on that Wednesday and didn’t have playability. Why not open a film like that on Black Friday and take two days of terrible word of mouth out of the equation while still opening on one of the best movie days of the year?
Anyway, Dead Reckoning is really good today for a Wednesday. Figure it’s in the $9 million range for today, bringing the total day including previews to about $16 million. Really nice start, and it’s great to have excellent movies in the marketplace, no matter what day they open on.