First weekend of October 2023

Even with only one wide film this weekend, a decent success would give us a leg up on the same weekend last year (Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile and Amsterdam) and it looks like the one film will be good enough so we should have a nice 10% increase from last year. But it would have taken a massive breakout success to even get close to 2019’s total (Joker), however films with a low 20’s Rotten Tomato scores don’t break out unless you have Venom in the title. So, we’ll only be about half of 2019’s cume.

As we continue to light votive candles and pray to our bamboo plants that the strike will get settled soon, I was thinking a little more about the difference between our industry strikes and the other labor unrest happening now. As I pointed out last week, our strikes weren’t purely about money, but we also had a leg up on the other industries when it comes to pressure on the Studios. Hate. There was such a hate for the CEO’s at the studios that’s just not happening in the auto and hotel industries, and that makes sense. Strikes disrupt production of a product, and the amount of people who needed to buy a car or stay in a hotel is a very small number, however most of the population saw disruption of their shows, which leads to hate.

And Hate can be a powerful sales tool, I learned that in the weirdest of ways*. A couple of years before the pandemic, there were a couple of really disturbing fan violence issues in sports. An Alabama Football fan poisoned some very old trees used to celebrate wins at Auburn, a fan was beaten into a coma at a Dodgers/Giants game at Dodger Stadium by rival fans; and we still see it today, often. So I had this idea, what if all the major sports leagues and the NCAA banded together for a series of PSA’s built around the idea of ‘you don’t have to hate to love’ or something to that effect. Too often these sports fans were manifesting their love for a team through hate of a rival’s fans.

As many of you know, I’ve had the privilege of knowing a lot of people in the sports sector, so I had the ability to get meetings with fairly high ranking people in a couple of the sports leagues and the NCAA; and I did a couple of pitch meetings. There were two aspects that came up loud and clear; first** was how much they loved the idea, and it’s ’something we should do right now, it’s great’, but something felt off in every meeting. After the meetings…..crickets, nothing. I ran into someone who got me one of those meetings a while later, and she told me the internal conversation after the meeting was pretty funny; ‘yeah, we want nothing to do with that’. It was pretty clear that love of a team sells tickets, jersey’s, etc, but hate….that sells way more jerseys, tickets, etc….hate sells. Makes perfect sense, the industrial religious complex has known this for centuries, hate works. The religious industry is so embedded with hate, even when they love the same God, they hate the way another religion talks to God because their way is so much better. Politics is now more about hating the other candidate over the merits of your candidate. So hate works.

Could that be one of the reasons the CEO’s felt the necessity to jump in and take control of the negotiations? No one was on their side, everyone hated them. So hate might be the aspect that gets everyone back to work.

Anyway, with the expected accuracy of a Taylor Swift Travis Kelce 2nd date, here are some thoughts on the weekend box office.

The Exorcist: Believer - As I’ve written here many times before, I’m big on taking chances, especially with the art of making movies. But there’s taking chances and then there’s defying common sense. One of the key aspects that has made the Horror genre such a staple in our sector is that it’s very budget friendly. Rule #1 is ‘make it cheap’, because the upside of this genre has very little to do with production or star value and there’s no reason to spend a lot of money.

As you may have read, buying the IP rights for this series cost somewhere around $400 million (for the right to make 3 movies); so before anything else was done here, this was a 9 figure budget film……and violated common sense rule #1 of the genre. But outside of the Horror genre, rule #1 in making expensive movies is you have to prop up a big budget with movie stars. And if you’re going to spend an insane amount of money on an IP (so this is now an expensive movie), the first thing rattling around in your head should be ‘the power of movie stars compels you’; and you need Leo, Margo or someone like that in it, because otherwise it’s just a normal horror film that cost a senseless amount of money. But, instead of casting Leo or Margo, in this case they cast Who? and Huh?, so this is really is just another genre film that cost a lot of money.

I’m guessing that in the greenlight process for this, they saw Ellen Burstyn as the ‘Jamie Lee Curtis Substitute’; but as accomplished as Ellen Burstyn is, even if she had been working as much as Jamie Lee has been, it’s still nothing close to the JLC vs MM aspect of the *Halloween *IP. On top of that, if the film doesn’t turn out (of course no one sets out to make a bad movie) you’re really in trouble, and the critics here this landed somewhere between ‘head spinning bad’ and ‘I could swallow a hard drive and green puke a better movie’. However, the campaign for this was very effective, and before the reviews came in and chased consumers out of the purchase funnel, the presales were very good.

Even though this genre is pretty review proof, it’s not word of mouth proof and apparently the exits agree with the critics, so this might have a rough time after they run through those presales. As of now, this looks a little behind where The Nun II was at the same point on opening day. But I would guess it will fall behind as the weekend goes along and end up in the high 20’s. It’s a shame this got chased out of Friday the 13th weekend by Taylor Swift, films that turn out like this need a smash and grab box office accelerator like you get on that date.

The Blind - Having a better than average wk #2 Friday, down about 45% for a weekend in the mid 3’s.

Dumb Money - Also having a decent day, looks down 35% for a weekend in the low 2’s.

She Came to Me - Went 355 runs, looks like a weekend in the $300k - $400k range.

Dicks, The Musical - Went 7 runs; 3 in NY, 2 in LA and 2 in SF and it’s pretty good in all the locations; it’s running about half of what Theater Camp did, so figure a psa of about $30k.

The Royal Hotel - Went 267 runs and should end up at about $200k for the weekend.

• I’ve been around enough Philly people to understand how easy it is to hate…everything…even your own teams. And I’ll get to see that on full display Sunday at SoFi.

• The 2nd was ‘what’s in this for you?’ As usual, the response was ‘nothing, just think it should get done’, which they did not believe.