Barbenheimer weekend 2023

There’s a lot going on this weekend and some records are gonna fall. As I’ve said many times here, movie attendance is a social activity, and when the box office is at its best it feeds into that. Because of a couple of different factors (including the Barbenheimer phenomenon this weekend), the box-office can be like a forest fire; the bigger the fire gets, it creates its own wind and that wind feeds the fire and the fire gets bigger. What that means is that when that box office forest fire gets bigger, it starts drawing in consumers who are more ‘casual’ moviegoers, then as the heat gets more intense it brings in ’seldom’ moviegoers. But this fire is so big we’re probably getting consumers who consider themselves ’never’ moviegoers. This happened on a much smaller scale last year on Top Gun Maverick, but it brought in consumers outside the frequent moviegoers to the theater because of the ‘merica’ angle. Same idea, just a different lever got pulled.

But based on what I’m looking at this afternoon, this weekend is going to scream by $300 million (the 4th time that will have happened) and will probably be the 2nd highest grossing weekend of all time. But what’s great for the business is that 4 studios are driving this (instead of just Disney in the 3 other times we’ve passed $300 million), 3 of the films are non-sequels, 3 of the films are non mega budget films, one of the films is from an Independent and all 4 movies are super satisfying to their target audiences. So there’s a lot going on here that’s good long term for the business.

There’s a lot of great marketing that has gone on to make this happen, and after seeing Oppenheimer last night there’s one angle that’s particularly interesting to me. Of the thousands of things that keep people up at night in this sector, getting PLF theaters (Premium Large Format, aka IMAX, XD, Dolby, etc) is right up there and can dictate changes in release schedules based on availability. The PLF theaters charge significantly more than standard format theaters, and are preferred by consumers; when the presale starts, they’re the first seats to go. We saw that last Christmas when Avatar opened and consumers chose to wait until they could see it with the presentation they preferred. In this case, Universal really planted the flag early with the exhibitors and their campaign heavily messaged that you needed to see this in a PLF, and invested heavily in 70mm presentations. But after seeing the film last night, geez did they sell everyone some snake oil here.

Of the 4 films that will rule the box-office this weekend (Oppenheimer, Barbie, Mission: Impossible and Sound of Freedom) I’d put this film in 4th place as far as ‘you must see this in a PLF’. I have a general rule with needing PLF’s; if most of the film is outside (that includes outer space)..PLF, if most of the film takes place inside…not so important getting PLF’s. Because this is an intimate Biographical Drama, there’s really nothing in the film that needed the PLF theaters. ‘What about the bomb explosion?’ you might say; yeah, that’s about as important a plot point as Margot Robbie going to the movies in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. If you look at Bio Dramas, Hidden Figures probably is more important to see in PLF than this (between the outer space scenes and the scenes running back and forth to the bathroom, lots of outdoors). Of course, everything is better in the PLF theaters and it’s a better moviegoing experience, so I don’t want to discount their importance, but Universal really did a brilliant job of selling a movie that really isn’t what they were selling. And if you give exhibitors the chance to fuck stuff up, they’ll do it. The 70mm angle is a great idea, but there are two reasons that it’s….well….flawed. First, like I said here with PLF’s, this didn’t cry out for 70mm; it didn’t need 70mm any more than another bio drama like Till needed 70mm. But as someone who’s run a decent amount of 70mm prints in the early days of my career, it’s a hard format to run, it’s big, unwieldy and you have to really lock in not to mess it up (and do a lot of cleaning). When I went to the AMC Del Amo last night to see the movie, I stuck my head in the 70mm theater to see how it looked (and sounded). I wondered if AMC had sound proofed the projection booth to muffle the noise that projector makes (they didn’t), but the print already had a decent sized scratch running down the side. Sigh. So if we want consumers to understand the value of 70mm, the film has to be a pretty good marriage (and the film needs to take place outside), and there’s some operational issues that need to be addressed. Obviously Nolan shot a lot of this film in 65mm, but that’s another issue, I’m not sure that needed to happen any more than Tarantino shooting Hateful Eight (which took place entirely inside) in Ultra Panavision .

But there are other marketing aspects that are in play lately. It’s crazy how the competitiveness of this business shows up in how industry folks talk about the weekend grosses, and weird narratives take hold. There’s an old industry joke that goes something like ‘when my best friend’s film opens huge, a little piece of me dies inside’, and we tend to hate the success of anyone but ourselves. One of the great success stories of this year is Angel’s Sound of Freedom, but the industry keeps saying ‘yeah, but…..’. ’The far right has their thumb on the scale buying tickets that don’t get used’, ’this is all Qanon people’, etc. Yeah, none of that makes any sense, how about ’someone made a film that speaks to a section of consumers who find the film very satisfying (as did the critics btw), and found a unique way of tapping into them?’ This film ran by $100 million this week and might even get to $200 million before it’s done, so any idea that this is ‘donated to a cause’ money is just stupid (and they’re gonna do that by giving a little more than half of it to the theater? C’mon). How about giving credit to Angel for doing something innovative; but the idea that this happened overnight is also…well…stupid. Angel has been building this audience for years and this is just the result of years of hard work and savvy audience curation. What they did here is similar to what Tyler Perry did before Diary of a Mad Black Woman set the box office ablaze back in 2005 with an opening weekend of $22 million. And what’s similar here is that he spent years and years building that IP in the black mega churches of the south, doing the show live. So of that $22 million opening weekend, 3/4 of that gross came from the markets where he built the audience doing the show live. These things don’t happen overnight, so maybe we should stop dismissing this as something sinister and start studying how to build fanship on a long term basis. One of the key aspects of the Disney Machine that’s been turning out mega hit after mega hit for the last dozen years, started around 2009 when they started a project to understand and learn how to activate the Hispanic audience. That Hispanic audience is a big driver with all those Marvel and Family movies that soar at the box office. Oppenheimer is the result of the same core fanship construction, the PLF angle is based on what took years to build with other films. Like I said on the 4th of July, there’s something going on here and we should pay attention.

Anyway, with the expected accuracy of the projectionist’s ability to correctly thread a 70mm projector at the AMC Del Amo, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Barbie - This is huge today and there should be a couple records set before the weekend is over. First, there’s probably a really nice case of Champagne being delivered to Lankershim Blvd from WB, thanking them for opening Super Mario Brothers on a Wednesday (which, as good as that film did, left some money on the table. But even though it’s Oppenheimer weekend, and doing math would be along the norm, I won’t bore you with the math to back that up). Universal could have set a new Family film record if they opened the film on Friday, but since they opened it on Wednesday, this film should fly by Mario’s $146 million 3 day number to become the biggest opening of 2023. The next record that’s in play is $169 million, which is WB’s biggest weekend of all time (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt II). And finally, $182.6 million and $191.7 million, which are the opening weekends for *Incredibles 2 *and The Lion King respectively. So depending on if you think Incredibles 2 is the biggest family film of all time, or Lion King is a family film, or Barbie is a family film; there could be a record here. This started the day with presales as good as you’ve heard, but it’s flattened out a little against the bigger family comps. However, this film has a super power that those family films didn’t have. The Gays. And that’s a demo that’s pretty nocturnal, so even though the growth here has been a little flat this afternoon against the family comps, it will probably make it up at the 9pm and 10pm shows. Obviously there’s a lot that can happen this weekend, and there’s some turbulence from the right wing media that sounds a lot like ‘waaaaaa, we’re gonna boycott a movie that was not built or marketed to us, so there’, but for now I’ll say this looks like a weekend in the 180’s. Pretty amazing.

Oppenheimer - Since we tend to get pretty full of ourselves in this business, I often think of something my dad said about ‘being powerful’. He said ‘whenever you start feeling like you have power, go try to order around someone else’s dog’. Back in late 2020 when WB announced the great day and date experiment of 2021tm (which as bad as it turned out, kept the theaters open and taught us things we probably needed to know about day and date), Christopher Nolan decided he needed to leave his home at WB and put this film out for bids. He exercised a decent amount of that power, requiring guarantees and guardrails that should have given him some extra bandwidth in the marketplace. But as fate would have it (and fate has a very sick sense of humor), he’s opening against the biggest film of the year……from WB. Of course, there is zero malice here from WB, when you looked at the release schedule back when this was dated in April ’22, putting a female skewing film against an older male skewing film like Oppenheimer was a nice fit. And now that the release schedule is almost back to normal, getting private real estate in July doesn’t really happen, so you need good neighbors on your release date. However, this is really having a great day today (thanks Barbenheimer). However, it’s not really growing as the day progresses; and as we saw with Avatar last Christmas, once those PLF theaters sell out, you’ve told the consumer to go see Barbie and come back when you can get a ‘good’ seat. Right now this looks in the low mid 70’s to me.

Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning Part One / Sound of Freedom - They are really close to each other and we’ll have to see if Q puts Xenu back in the volcano, but MI has about 1000 more runs and that will probably be the difference between 3rd and 4th place. Both look like weekends in the low 20’s. One thing about MI though, I’ve heard a lot of conjecture about why Paramount didn’t move MI up a week as Barbenheimer became a thing. Easy answer, you can’t. A film like this is so massive you can’t move it, it’s so immovable it’s kind of like the upper half of Nicole Kidman’s face (of course that’s where we go for the magic). They went where they went because when you set a massive global release like MI, you’ve got to do it over a year in advance, and a year ago you put it where they put it to give Indy some breathing room. Back then you would steer clear of that, unless you subscribed to the data from a plucky little independent forecasting company that saw all this coming a long time ago.

Theater Camp - Expanded the wildly successful exclusive runs from NY and LA to 53 runs, going wider in NY and LA and adding about 7 new markets. It’s just fair for the most part, but I wouldn’t write this movie off yet, some of the core audience is going to the 10pm shows for Barbie this weekend.  Figure a weekend of about $350k.

• Fair warning, there’s a lot of quotes/jokes/stories today, not sure why. A lot of the issues this weekend have been rattling around in my empty head for a couple of weeks, so I guess I’m just taking out the trash today…