Fourth weekend of March 2024
This weekend’s box-office should be steady with last week’s, but as I pointed out last week last year John Wick Chapter 4 crushed the weekend at $74 million, and we won’t have anything similar this year. So we’ll be 20% behind last year and we’re going deeper into the hole. Next week won’t be much behind (if at all) last year (Dungeons and Dragons), so we won’t bleed much next week.
I don’t really have much to say today, and the usual ’this business is hard’ aspects are probably better addressed film by film. Plus I’m driving a lot today for some life stuff.
Anyway, with the same expected accuracy and thoroughness of a Shohei Ohtani background check, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire - Sequels are so tricky. In order to have a successful sequel you need to have that delicate balance of fan service and new ideas to satisfy both the fans and the tagalongs, and the slightest favoritism towards fan ship can blow up on you. A great illustration of this was during the test screenings on Hangover 2. The movie played through the roof during the tests, and the audience loved it because ‘it was just like the first one’. When the movie got to the critics, they said ‘wtf?, this is the same movie as the first one’, and as soon as that idea got into the consumer’s heads, the movie was done. So now we have a sequel where the current audience score on RT is really good (so the fans have no issue with the movie), but the critics beat it up pretty good saying it was all ‘fan service’ and ‘nothing new’. Now a lot of you might say ‘yeah, the critics don’t matter as much anymore’; maybe, but when you have a RT score in the 40’s and the encapsulations say it’s not good because ‘you’ve seen it before’, that can have a profound effect on the tagalongs, and tagalongs are important, so that can end up being a big problem. it’s a little behind where Afterlife was at this point, and it probably should be ahead, since there are some kids out of school today and there were 0 out when Afterlife opened. I’m a little concerned those reviews will make this a little flat for the rest of the weekend and say it’s around $40 million. But since the audiences don’t have the same issue with the film, it could fight through those reviews and do a little better.
Immaculate - Neon picked up this Religious Horror film from Black Bear, starring current ‘it’ girl Sydney Sweeney and it’s pretty good, but maybe there was a missed opportunity here. We’re seeing how the other companies like A24 and Bleecker Street that play in the same sandbox as Neon have evolved, and as they grow up they are dabbling with big studio marketing levers like TV. As I’ve pointed out before, the problem with the laser targeted online marketing tools is that they are really good at activating the fans, but they are not so good at building awareness with the tagalongs. So by only targeting the fans online, it’s really hard to get a film higher than mid single digits, because you get the tag alongs muttering those two terrifying words….’what’s that?’ when a fan invites them. Now if you’ve got a long term plan for a film with a roll out release, the word of mouth will help with those tagalongs (and you can get through it), which is the bulk of the boutique studio releases. But for a film that cries out for more of a ’smash and grab’ wide release like this film, you gotta get those tagalongs on board from the beginning. Considering how hot Sydney Sweeney is, and the idea behind this film seemed pretty sticky, you kind of wonder what this could have got to had Neon spent some money on TV. As of this writing it looks like $5 million to $6 million.
Late Night with the Devil - Went 1000 theaters and bolstered by the very strong reviews, it’s pretty good considering they didn’t spend much money on marketing. There are some really good numbers in the upscale/art theaters (a lot of Alamo Drafthouse Theaters), and this could get close to $2.5 million or so for the weekend.
Carol Doda Topless at the Condor - Went exclusive in 3 runs, Angelika NY, Nuart in LA and the Roxy in SF, and the grosses are really good across the board. Unless this is a one day wonder of some sort, should end up with a psa in the $30k range.
As far as the other films, Dune Part Two doesn’t look quite as solid as last week (they lost a decent amount of the Large Format theaters to Ghostbusters), so figure it’s down 40% or so for a weekend in the mid teens. There aren’t as many kids out of school today as last week so Kung Fu Panda 4 is down a little more than last week, but figure it’s down 45% or so for a weekend in the low mid teens.