First weekend of January 2024

This is generally a pretty quiet weekend at the box-office, we usually have a Horror film this weekend that can soar if the IP connects; but since this is the weekend before MLK weekend, if you’ve got anything substantial, you wait a week. But usually it’s a weekend where the Christmas films play out a little more (and they begin to really separate due to playability), and some of the Awards Bait films expand. Comping back to last year, we’ll maybe fall a little behind, but as we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks having a diverse balanced slate vs a massive film adds up to a similar total gross. Last year was the beginning of the M3GAN phenomenon, plus we still had Avatar The Way Of Water starting it’s long long run and A Man Called Otto was just beginning to remind us that Red State moviegoers want to go to the movies too. But we shouldn’t be more than 10% behind last year.

Anyway, with the expected accuracy and efficacy of Peloton’s new competitor to Rotten Tomatoes (although Peloton instructors probably aren’t any more qualified to review films than the actual critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but are considerably hotter…maybe they are on to something here), here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Wonka - Should have no problem keeping the top spot this weekend, and this weekend will probably be a good indicator of where this film will net out at the end of the day. The big question this weekend for Wonka is tomorrow, it’s been a little all over the place on Saturday’s so far, but lately it’s been behaving closer to a family film than a general audience film. So we should see a big family bounce (since most of the kids are back in school today) tomorrow. Assuming that happens, this should end up down about 30% for a weekend in the mid teens.

Migration - Looking pretty normal for a kids movie and looks similar to Puss in Boots The Last Wish looked like this weekend last year. That was only down 19% but the Saturday before was NYE (not a great kids day), so this probably won’t hold as well. Figure it’s off 25% for a weekend in the very low teens.

Anyone But You - Okay, cue the Greatest Showman comparisons. Back in 2017/2018, The Greatest Showman opened to $8.9 million the weekend before Christmas. It started showing it was up to something in the week after Christmas, and then the first weekend of January it said ‘I’m here’, and then finished at a staggering $174 million domestic. This looks very similar here today, although I’m not sure I’d say Sydney Sweeney Zendaya. However, maybe if Zac Efron and Hugh Jackman had a baby maybe that = Glen Powell? Especially since apparently Glen has Broadway showtunes in his future and seems to bulk up at the drop of a (top) hat. But aside from that nonsense, there are some similarities to both films.

As I pointed out at the beginning of the holiday period, walking out of a movie this time of year with a smile on your face gives you a better chance at success, and both films do that exceptionally well. But there’s another reason these two films are linked, music. The Greatest Showman had a couple of hit songs that were charting and drove consumers to the theaters. In Anyone But You, during the credit sequence there’s B roll of everyone in the cast singing the anthem of girls who ‘just want you to hold them’, Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield; and as much as something like that causes a grizzled vet like me to eye roll*, it might be the differentiator here. If you hit IG or Tik Tok and look at Sydney Sweeney’s feed, you’ll see a lot of girls leaving the theater spin dancing and singing the song, while they tell you it’s the best rom com in years. So that might be the equivalent of a couple of hit songs here and there’s no telling how far this will go. It’s got to get by Mean Girls next week, but once something like this gets rolling, it might be a bigger problem for Mean Girls than the other way around. Right now this looks like a weekend of about $10 million, up 15% from last weekend, and this is something to keep an eye on because that just doesn’t happen.

Night Swim - As I said above, this is a tried and true weekend to launch a horror film. It’s a good box office weekend because we’re still at the tail end of holiday behavior (without a lot of the social clutter), there’s no more College Football, and a lot of the NFL games this weekend are meaningless. The financial model for Horror films doesn’t really fit into the Christmas period (when media costs are really high), so this is the next available slot and you can open a horror film with only a week’s media. This film had a pretty good night last night, especially considering the critics beat it up pretty bad, so it’s an accomplishment for Universal and Blumhouse to get those early attenders to stay onboard. But apparently the exits not only agree with the critics, they might be a little…..worse? So even though this looks like it’s going to end up around 10 or 11 for the weekend (at this writing), that might not hold up once we get to tomorrow, considering the exits are saying ‘we could swallow a DCP and puke a better movie’.

All the rest of the films look pretty normal, and expect drops in the 35% to 40% range from last weekend. Three films that are looking a little more resilient right now, Iron Claw, American Fiction and Poor Things might have drops in the 20% range.

• when it comes to filmmaking gadgets that artificially put your thumb on the exit poll scale (similar to the equally annoying ‘out takes’ reel), this is at the top of the list.