Turtles Wednesday, August 2023
Another Wednesday opening today, and we’ll see if it works out this time, since it didn’t work out that great for Mission: Impossible.
Today is good on the Spider-Verse adjacent *Teenage Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem *(look wise anyway), but the next couple of days will be the real test. There are several levels of fan ship for an IP like this and some of them are pretty rabid; so I still have a problem with opening the film on a Wednesday when the highest level of fanship consumers want to go today, but the casual fans and the tagalongs respond to the invitation with ‘it’s a Wednesday, can’t we go on the weekend when I don’t have to work the next day?’ So you blow up the idea of growing groups by making it inconvenient for the lower level fans and tagalongs. And because of the lower fan ship, you can’t count on them going on their own later. The only movies I think make sense for a Wednesday openings are 5 star exit movies *without *IP fan ship, that’s the type of movie where I don’t worry about the first day attenders being so worked up they’ll leave the tagalongs at home so they can go the first day, they’ll wait for the rest of the group.
Clearly Paramount thought it would work the other way and the strong playability would ultimately help the movie. But for three movies in a row, the studio that had a lock on #1 openings has been struggling with busting things big because of low star power (Transformers), the same but excellent movie we just saw (Mission Impossible) and an IP where the last movie was pretty bad (TMNT: Out of the Past). So a really good Marketing department has had some challenges thrown at them. Although, for some reason the pre release numbers for these 3 films in the trade press have been a little ‘aggressive’, which is weird. Normally studios do everything they can to keep the pre release numbers in the press as low as possible to manage expectations. Obviously this doesn’t have a shot at #1 this weekend, but had it opened on Friday it certainly had a shot at #2 and depending on how Meg 2 does, there’s a possibility it could come in 4th because of the Wednesday opening. But coming in #1 or #2 on a Wednesday isn’t really something we strive for in this sector.
Today looks like somewhere in the low 5’s (and maybe a little more if it does some business tonight), and when you add in the reported $3.8 million for shows before today, it’s around $9 million. That’s clearly a good start, but now let’s see where it goes for the next couple of days.