Thanksgiving 2023

It’s going to be a fairly normal Thanksgiving weekend, maybe a little low, but a nice variety of films should keep the total at a number ahead of last year. The main component of Thanksgiving weekend is generally what Disney is up to, and because the world seems to be playing a big game of ‘gotcha’ with them (more on that below), they’re not going to be able to contribute the gross they have in the past. We should be a decent amount ahead of 2022 (Strange World and Devotion, but also had Black Panther 2 still doing $50 million in 3), but we’ll be behind 2019 (Knives Out and Queen & Slim, but also Frozen 2 in it’s 2nd weekend doing $86 million in 3). However, we have an unusual amount of wide movies next weekend (it’s usually a weekend that no one releases anything of note), so December should start a lot higher than it traditionally goes.

Just like everything else this weekend, the ‘money day’ is Black Friday, and in this sector that’s usually when the playability of each title kicks in. Considering both Napoleon and Wish weren’t loved by the critics, the word of mouth generated by these next two days could recalibrate what moviegoers think, and once we get to Friday, we’ll be able to see the results. Just looking at the current audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, it looks like the public disagrees on Wish, and is about the same on Napoleon. Obviously the same idea applies to the titles from last weekend. So for today, it’s probably not a good idea to guess what the 5 day grosses are going to be, I’ll just address in detail the 3 films going wide and only take a stab at today’s gross. If there’s anything interesting to report, I’ll write something on Friday.

Anyway, based on the same accuracy associated with the bet I put on the ‘under’ for FYC emails today (the over/under number was 30 but I’m already at 27, so this is a loser), here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Wish - You would think building a Disney animation film around the idea of 100 years of Animation heritage would land with the critics; but if you go and read the reviews they seem to appreciate what Disney is doing, but there’s a subtext to the reviews that echoes ‘but we’re not supposed to be on Disney’s side right now’. And as usual, the big problem with an aggregator like Rotten Tomatoes is that 2 1/2 star reviews can get a score in the 80’s or a score in the 30’s, and this film had a lot of 2 1/2 star reviews. It all depends on what the critic decides to mark it as; and that’s where that ‘Disney….ewww’ aspect shows up. We actually saw the flip side of this when Disney was white hot and a couple of those Star Wars films got rave reviews, but later the fans weighed in with a significantly different tone. Since the audience score (so far) seems to think it’s considerably better than the critics, we’ll see how that manifests itself once we get to Black Friday. As of now, it’s running about 10% ahead of Encanto, which would put the day at about $8.5 or so.

Napoleon - This epic from Apple and Sony got off to a great start last night, and since they have a lot of Large Format theaters that tend to be hotter with the pre-sales, the numbers at this point in the day are very good. However, the audience score on RT is good not great, and I’m a little concerned that the bounce on Black Friday might be a little less than the other films. It’s also clearly a big city film, and the film is really coastal. The key number to watch here is how much today’s gross is up from yesterday’s preview numbers, that might be an indicator of how this is going to do for the rest of the weekend. Today’s gross looks like it’s in the low 4’s which should put the combined day in the low 7’s.

Saltburn - Based on the very successful exclusive runs last weekend, they widened this out to 1600 runs for the holiday. As you would guess, it’s a big city/upscale film and the grosses reflect the consumer behavior associated with that type of film (most of the top grosses are Alamo Draft Houses), but the grosses go just a little farther out of the big city theaters than I expected. So maybe the Jacob Elordi thing is a real thing, or at least the beginning of a real thing. This looks like $600k to $700k for today.

As far as the other films, generally today is pretty good for kids films so Trolls Band Together looks good. However, both Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and Thanksgiving are also having a good day.

Everyone have a great Thanksgiving.