First weekend of November 2023

As expected, this is an off week, there’s not much going on. This was supposed to be the weekend of Dune 2, but without the ability to leverage the considerable star power on the publicity trail, they tapped out. However, last year it was the same situation (One Piece Film Red and an expansion of The Banshees of Inisherin), so we’ll end up with a very similar cume gross. Because Halloween was on Thursday in 2019, opening something big the day after wasn’t that attractive, so the film that weekend was a little light (Terminator: Dark Fate, Harriet, Motherless Brooklyn, Arctic Dogs). We’ll still only gross about 60% of that weekend this year, but normally it would have been worse.

Nothing is really on my mind today, other than the usual praying and hoping for the end of the strike; so instead of writing something mediocre (again), I’ll save your eyes and address a couple of things in the film section I find interesting.

But based on something I heard in a discussion about who’s the most miserable fan base in the NFL, the Cowboys or the Eagles*, here are some thoughts about the weekend box office.

*TAYLOR SWIFT: THE ERAS TOUR *- Really good hold today so far, and yes you’re reading this right, it might beat Freddy this weekend. At this point, it’s the farewell weekend of the run, so that’s probably why it’s having such a good hold. It’s trending towards a drop of only 25% right now, which would put the weekend at $12 million or so.

Five Nights at Freddy’s - As good as this was last week (and it was very good, Universal/Blumhouse should make a lot of money here), the downside of the day and date continues to rear its head today. As we continue to figure out the theatrical/streaming puzzle, last week looked like an ‘ah-ha’ moment, but when you look at the release as a whole, it might be more of a ‘oh shit’ moment.

The reason you go day and date is to drive sign ups to the platform, and (as usual) the press releases from Universal have crowed about how many people watched it on the platform (a record number……always a record number); but as far as acquisitions…..crickets. Since we’re not hearing about the subscription acquisitions, they’re probably not that great, and that’s where this gets complicated. Because they allowed fans to watch the movie essentially for free at home, they sacrificed a decent amount of box-office revenue that would have happened if the ‘at home’ option wasn’t there. And that’s fine if this was Firestarter, but because this was so big, it’s a lot of revenue and this was probably a very expensive action. Along with cutting into the opening box-office, the day and date severely affects the holdover weeks, and the effect is inversely proportional to the quality of the movie. So the better the movie plays, the more the day and date cuts into those lucrative holdover weeks (because if the movie is trash, it would have plummeted anyway), and this movie played really strong. So if this had not gone day and date (even though it was pretty fan centric), it still probably would have eked out a 2 or a 2.2 multiple off the opening weekend. Looking at today, this might not even get to 1.5 off the opening weekend. That’s $30 million or so in film rental; and if that’s the case, hopefully they got $30 million in acquisitions, otherwise this wasn’t a good idea. They still made a lot of money here, but $30 million is $30 million, which would have helped cushion the blow of the next disappointing *Exorcist *film. This is dropping so hard you don’t want to stand underneath it, it’s down more than 90% from last week (it’s what Day and Date films do) and that doesn’t even account for the $10 million they did on the Thursday previews that won’t happen this weekend. Figure it’s down 90% for a weekend of about $10 million.

Killers of the Flower Moon - Beginning to stabilize a little, looks down 40% for a weekend in the mid 5’s.

Priscilla - Went 1400 runs this week, and hearing about the exit data you wonder ‘what was the point of the exclusive run last week?’ The exits are supposedly good, but not great, so why platform? What’s also interesting is how wide they went, because it’s playing like a big city film, it doesn’t look like it’s connecting with the red state moviegoer at this point and they might have gone too deep. Looks like mid 3’s for the weekend.

Radical - This Sundance Audience Award Winner went 400 runs, and is doing really nice business in the Hispanic skewing theaters. Looks like a pretty successful weekend around $1.5 to $2 million.

What Happens Later - Bleecker Street went 1400 runs and it’s nothing special so far. looks like a weekend of about $1 million.

*The Holdovers *- Expanded to 64 theaters this weekend, and there are some mixed signals coming in this afternoon. On the positive side, a couple of theaters from last week that didn’t have Q and A’s (like Lincoln Sq) are holding very nicely. There are some great upscale theaters that are new this week that are showing promise as well. However, part of the mission of expanding a film like this is doing ‘toe dips’ into some of the suburbs in NY and LA to see how it does, and those theaters are pretty soft today. Since this film has very strong exit polls, it’s got the word of mouth, there just needs to be more of those mouths. Looks like a weekend of about $400k.

• just when we were getting somewhere, someone brought up the Patriots and we were back to square one.