Second weekend of July 2023

We’re back in the tentpole part of Summer and Mission Impossible is doing normal Mission Impossible stuff; so even though the 3 day gross is a little watered down, because of our new found Red State moviegoers on Sound of Freedom, we’ll probably beat both the similar weekends in 2022 (Where the Crawdads Sing, Paws of Fury and Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris) and 2019 (Crawl and Stuber*). With OppenBarbie storming in next week, we’ll probably absolutely annihilate 2022 (Nope) next weekend and unless something goes sideways next week, we should even beat 2019 (The Lion King). We’re still about 14% ahead of 2022’s cume gross, so with the more normal roster of Summer films coming in after OppenBarbie, we’ll keep building on that lead.

As you’ll read below, Sound of Freedom is actually up today from last Friday, so we’ve now got a bonafide phenomenon here. How could this possibly happen? Well we have 4 people to thank, Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks and Bill Gates. Because the part of the internet that leans from pretty right all the way to Qanon has a pretty wide reach, child trafficking is an issue that they have broadened awareness on. Unfortunately they’ve chosen 3 of the nicest people in the world (and Hillary) to pick on and call them Pedophiles/Baby Eaters/etc. But as a viral idea, child trafficking is something Red State America cares about now, and they’ve used the star power of innocent people to get there. That angle, oddly enough, has created fan-ship.

This is a group of consumers that probably doesn’t go to the movies, and it’s great to have them in the theaters watching trailers and understanding what a great ‘out of the home’ entertainment value theatrical is (so hopefully they’ll come back), but there’s something very normal about why this is happening. In order to get someone out of the house and into the theater, you need some sort of fan-ship to trigger a trip to the multiplex. For the most part, the triggers here are star fan-ship, IP fan-ship or Genre fan-ship. But here’s a situation where it’s ‘issue’ fan-ship, and actually that’s not a terribly new idea either. For years, Participant has built a brand on ‘issue’ based fan-ship, just for issues that go in different political direction than Sound of Freedom. Participant has done some nice work here, although every time I see their logo in front of a film I think ‘Uh-oh, I forgot to bring my helmet today because I’m about to get pummeled with a sledgehammer’. And that might be an interesting angle of why this is doing what it’s doing, it’s the same idea but just serving a different demo that’s been ignored, so this pond is stocked with fish instead of all fished out.

Ok, all that is great, but if this has been done before why is this so much better? Well, as some of the great philosophers of our time (The Bee Gees) said, ‘How Deep is your Love?’. The ‘pay it forward’ idea here is something that’s just genius, it’s like taking word of mouth and adding a satisfaction guarantee from the person recommending it, they’re allowing the recommender to put their money where their mouth is. Of course, a lot of this might be the issue and the demo, which feels like everyone is against them and they need to show all of us pinko liberals in Hollywood what’s good. If you don’t believe me look into the AMC Theaters Air Conditioning conspiracy theories that are out there. It’s so….dumb and it’s so dumb that it’s essentially asking people to give AMC Theaters more money, because AMC theaters is against them. Going back to Bee Gee’s philosophy, ‘we’re living in a world of fools’. So I’m not sure how we can learn from this and do a cut and paste job for another movie, but it seems like the ticketing services need to start reaching out to ticket buyers after they see a movie and ask them ‘if you love this, pay it forward and pay for a friend’. But if this is something that could be used again, it could be very good for some other movies.

Anyway, with the accuracy of @belighve1112’s understanding of Theater A/C (“There was air conditioning in the lobby, there was air conditioning in the hallway, there was air conditioning in the bathrooms, not the theaters? AMC pulling some sketchy crap with #thesoundoffreedom”), here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning - Part One - First thing first, this is pretty good. The optics aren’t because they stretched a 3 day into a 5 day, but it’s a little better than the last film (Fallout) did. However, it’s still Mission: Impossible and just like a couple of these IP’s that keep going back to the well, it’s like Country Music and to a non-fan, it’s ’is this the same song over and over again or is it a different song over and over again? Trucks, Dogs, Girlfriend left with my Truck and my Dog…okay I got it the first time, I don’t need another bite at this’. As I’ve said here before, the consumer responds with ‘I hear it’s great, but I’ve seen that movie already’. They’ll get beat up by the press for having a gross in the same neighborhood as* Indy*, Transformers and Flash (with a similar negative cost), but you take some chances in this business and this one just didn’t work out, but the gross here is a little better than those. As you know, I’m always rooting for something special to happen in this sector so I was really rooting for this to pop in a big way today (it’s happened before with Wednesday openings), but right now the jump from yesterday only looks a little better than the norm. Unless we see something special happen later tonight (unlikely with the older skew of this) or tomorrow (possible with the older skew of this), this looks like it’s headed to a 3 day of about $50 million, bringing the 5 day to $74 million. There are rumors of some shenanigans going on with the weekend gross; there might be some revenue from the fan shows that could wander into the FSS 3 day gross. That’s not unusual, as I pointed out on Wednesday there really are no rules these days, the distribution community is pretty tight knit and they pretty much police themselves. I only bring it up because I might be a little low with those estimates. The other interesting question with this film is how it does next week against Oppenheimer, they have a lot of commonality to their skew.

Sound of Freedom - Again, first thing first, this film is going to scream by $100 million cume, and God knows where this will stop (rimshot). It’s up today and it keeps building momentum, we haven’t seen legs like this for a long long time, especially not at this level. But let’s not lose track of something that’s important here, this is a good movie that the target audience is responding to; and even though there are a lot of reasons this shouldn’t be doing any business (it’s a super dark subject) this is activating a group of consumers we tend to ignore. Sony has made some great strides here with A Man Called Otto and Where the Crawdads Sing, but we’ve got to be careful how we proceed with this group of consumers, and we should look no farther than the Superhero/Comic Book IP for answers. The reason the Superhero genre has become such a cornerstone of our business is because we supported film makers and executives that had deep love and understanding for the IP, instead of contempt. When we’re in an industry where DEI is thrown around a lot, why doesn’t that apply to red state America? Maybe being in rooms with people that have opinions that make you throw up a little in your mouth can lead to art that touches a segment of the population that we’re missing. This looks like it’s going to gross around $20 million or maybe a little more for the weekend, and the cume by Monday should be at $80 million. Amen.

Theater Camp - Speaking of religion, the Sundance hit that speaks to those kids who were a little weird in High School and hung out by the Amphitheater (I’m guilty) is doing some really great business today. They went 6 theaters, 3 in NY and 3 in LA and they’re all really good. Figure a psa of $50k or so.

Psycho-Pass Providence - Another title from Sony/Cruchyroll and this IP clearly isn’t a sticky as what we’ve seen earlier this year. The only went 400 runs and it looks like a weekend of maybe $200k.

The holdovers are all doing normal stuff. The films that have audience commonality to Mission Impossible are all down a decent amount, but the kids films led by the Elemental are holding rock solid.

• The Dave Bautista movie, not Scott, you can’t beat Scott.