Second weekend of March 2024
This weekend sync’s up with the Los Angeles weather, some sunshine at the box office this weekend after a lot of rain; we’ll finally have a weekend where we’ll be significantly ahead of last year. Just the two top grossing films will come close to equaling last year’s total box-office, and as usual a wide variety of films will add up to a total number that’s at the high end of what the 2nd weekend of March usually does. And that’s saying something, because some really good titles have launched this week including Captain Marvel, Zootopia, Cinderella and Kong: Skull Island. We might be as high as 30% ahead of last year (Scream VI, 65 and Champions) and we have a good shot of getting a little more of this year’s accumulated deficit back next week as well. We’ll take a little hit at the box-office Sunday night because of the Oscars, but it will mostly be in the female skewing films.
Ever since Tyler Perry got a look at the OpenAI Text to Video demonstration and put some sound stage expansion on hold, there has been a lot of hand wringing in the industry. Some of you (that have had demos of this product as well) have told me how game changing the technology is, but as much as it looks like it’s going to change where money is spent (I wouldn’t want to be a FX vendor right now), but unless I have this wrong, this will save a lot of money and could lead to another big production surge; maybe as similar as surge as we saw during the streaming wars.
If there’s one big takeaway, I’m hearing from these demos (and that’s assuming this tech delivers in a real world scenario the same way it’s delivering in a demo world), is that 9 figure movies become 8 figure movies, $90 million movies become $60 million movies, etc. All of a sudden it’s as if the most lucrative government tax rebate scheme got applied to the whole industry. And isn’t that…..good? Now you can make 5 movies for the price of 3 without sacrificing quality, but when you look at the change in overall cost of making each movie, a bunch of options are now on the table.
As I’ve talked about before here, we’re entering an era where there are new options for a movie that can be decided after the movie is done. We’ve seen example after example of films being made for a streamer and have successfully chased the Theatrical pot of gold. Paramount seems to have led the way with films like Mean Girls, Smile, 80 for Brady, etc, all were built with an economic model based on a platform distribution, and then were upgraded to Theatrical. Of course, we’re seeing films go the opposite direction as well, but sometimes the movies are too expensive to even consider a straight to platform release. And that’s where I wonder if this tech is a game changer, because if a ‘visual AI’ tool like text to video can significantly bring down a production budget, the distribution options for a film that used to cost $100 million to $200+ million and now costs $60 million to $90 million could change a lot.
For example, take some of these Superhero movies that have run into a creative wall lately, and have struggled to satisfy audiences the way they used to. If visual AI would have allowed something like The Marvels to be made for a price that would have allowed Disney to have the option of pivoting to a straight to platform release, could they have? There are two key factors here; first is obviously the lower marketing spend for a platform drop vs a Theatrical release. But there’s another downstream effect, these Superhero films tend to set each other up, and the next film lives (or dies) off the previous film. Avengers: Endgame wouldn’t have done $357 million opening weekend if Marvel had stubbed their toe on some of the films that set it up, and instead it was their outlier ability to deliver consistent audience satisfaction that made that record breaking weekend possible. So if The Marvels had dropped on Disney + instead of going theatrical, would it make a difference for the next Marvel film that went Theatrical? This is where the nature of a platform release gets you through a mis-fire, they tend to fade pretty quickly and because (unfortunately) streaming has become the land of the mediocre movie, a misfire fits right in and the press doesn’t beat you up. Of course another key factor here is ‘can you make a $100 million film (assuming you could make a film like The Marvels for that little with the new tech) financially viable going straight to a platform?’, and only the platform owners can answer that question. But even if you could squint and say ‘we got out alive’, just the difference in downstream theatrical brand management could make any haircut worth it. So lower costs can mean a studio has options once they see how a film turns out, and could affect other films in their slate as well.
Anyway, with the same expected accuracy of a United Airlines maintenance quality check, here are some thoughts on the weekend box office.
Kung Fu Panda 4 - This looks really good today, but looking at the history of this IP, it looks like Universal is a little better at opening these movies than Paramount was. The first Kung Fu Panda film opened to a stunning $60 million in 2008, but even though the series kept pulling great reviews, the gross decayed from film to film. Panda 2 opened to $48 million and Panda 3 regressed a little more to $41 million. This film didn’t land nearly as strong with the critics, but the grosses are closer to the first Panda than the two sequels. The theaters that have a strong Asian skew are obviously doing great, but figure this ends up in the mid 50’s for the weekend.
Dune Part Two - This is showing us it’s gonna be around for a while, especially in the large format/premium theaters. One aspect to the large format theaters that might be worth a conversation (when planning a release for films like this in the future), the 70mm theaters are down almost nothing from last week. I guess everything that’s old is new again (like vinyl LP’s) and we might be back to the 80’s when consumers would drive right by a good theater to attend a better theater with a 70mm print. So if it’s what the customer wants, we should figure out a way to get it for them. Of course, there’s one pesky detail, no one manufactures 70mm projectors anymore, so just another aspect of things that can be attributed to ’supply chain issues’. This is going to be really good this weekend and might have a drop as low as 40%, and when you consider it started the weekend 18% in the hole (because of the $12 million preview gross from last week), that’s rock solid. Last Saturday over performed on this film, so we’ll see if an outsized Saturday is just the norm for this film, or last week was just an aberration. Figure a weekend in the mid/high 40’s.
Cabrini - Angel Studios is back with another faith based film from the same folks who made Sound of Freedom. Since a lot of the audience for this studios releases comes from their internal lists and members, it doesn’t tend to follow the same pattens as a mainstream film. For some reason Philly is much better than anywhere else, but in general the red states have the best grosses. Right now it looks like a weekend of about $10 million.
Imaginary - This Blumhouse release is at the lower end of what we normally see from Blumhouse, but there’s an interesting wrinkle here that’s worth paying attention to. This film got beat up pretty good by the critics, but so did Night Swim three months ago. The grosses today are about 20% behind where Night Swim was at the same point in the day. But Lion’s Gate spent about 10% of what Universal spent on TV, so to get a similar gross with an apparently much lower spend is interesting. This has a fairly young skew, so we might see a little better Saturday than a genre film like this would generate, but right now it looks like about $10 million.
Love Lies Bleeding - A24 went exclusive NY/LA in the standard 5 run break (Lincoln Sq, Union Sq, Century City, The Grove, Burbank) and what’s interesting here is that the Union Square is leading the pack, and that theater has consistently under performed since it reopened. Of course this is an LGBT skewing film and it might be just a lower Manhattan thing, but it’s nice to know we’re slowly getting back part of the Art/Upscale/Exclusive Film infrastructure, now we just need the Arclight Hollywood back..🙏 Figure the psa ends up in the high 20’s with a shot at 30.