Final weekend of May 2024

This E-Mail and its contents is a private communication for the addressee As we expected, this is going to be a down weekend, there’s no wide films being released. And we had the spectacular opening of Spider-Man on this weekend last year, so yeah….waaaay down. Next weekend will be more of a fair fight with new films when we have Bad Boys Ride or Die vs Transformers Rise of the Beasts, and then Disney comes to our rescue over Father’s Day weekend with Inside Out 2. As I’ve said, this is what it’s going to be for a while, so buckle up and we’ll get through it.

I’ve been seeing mostly predictable press coverage of last weekend, but there actually have been a couple of outlets that get it. The LA Times had a piece about expectations being the issue instead of performance, which is about as good as you can do these days from the Entertainment press. But hopefully (but doubtful) they’ll catch on to the fact that the ‘underperformance’ of certain films is a product of the way they were built, instead of a bigger issue with the industry. Prequels generally do not perform as well as Sequels, big tent poles with emerging stars and iffy IP value aren’t automatically ‘huge’ because of what the studio spent on the movie. There are reasons films do what they do (and it’s not always ‘the marketing’), and we’ll have to take a step back and understand how to build films better if we want this sector to survive. Remember, there are no bad films, only bad budgets.

As some of you know, I separated from my day job at EDO at the end of November last year, and I’ve been working as a consultant there while I worked on a deal to purchase the systems that I had a hand in building. Well, that purchase was finally completed a couple of days ago and starting tomorrow June 1, I own both businesses with the teams coming with me, and the new company will be called Insight Theatrical LLC. I’m so excited to take this next journey, I’ve never owned a business before and I’ve always been a ‘worker bee’, so I’m both terrified and excited.

But I couldn’t have gotten to this point without many of you, and going forward I really need your help. One of the reasons I started this adventure with EDO almost 10 years ago was because in my days as President of Nielsen/NRG, I found a lot of the tools pretty mediocre. Tracking was fine, but it was built for campaign effectiveness, not economic outcome. The Test Screening process hadn’t really changed in 90 years and we were still asking audiences to communicate with the filmmakers using stone tablets and chisels. So I got the incredible opportunity to work with the brightest minds I’ve ever been around, and helped create a screening system that moved the process forward and a box-office forecasting system that was specifically built for economic outcomes. Both of these systems have found their footing, but there’s something that’s troubling to me.

Although I doubt any of the other screening vendors would have moved off stone tablets and chisels had I not come along with a better way, but because we came up with something spectacular they had to try to keep up. But what they came up with after I shook things up was….kind of mediocre. It’s kind of like comparing a new 2024 Tesla S Plaid to a 2015 Nissan Leaf. Yeah, they’re kind of the same, but they really aren’t. But what troubles me is that a lot of you out there seem to be okay with mediocre. You still seem to be just fine with stone tablets and chisels and even though the entire world communicates on electronic devices, if you’re doing a screening where there are electronic devices to communicate with you and the other stakeholders in the film, why aren’t you demanding the Tesla instead of the Leaf? You demand the best from every other stage of the film, why are you okay with mediocre once you get to the test screening process?

Unfortunately, the standard answer I get is ’this is the way we always do it’ or ‘we’re comfortable with it this way’. And that response is just one of the reasons we struggle as an industry, we get locked into our ’same same’ routine without looking for the best way to do things.

So here’s where I need your help, don’t settle for mediocre, if you have a film that needs to test, ask for me (and you might have to demand it, because you’ll probably get an answer from the studio that says ‘but we always do it this way’). I promise you that you won’t regret it, and you’ll see what I’m writing about here. If you talk to people who use us, you’ll hear the audiences are better (I’m a fanatic about the test scores being very close to the exit polls once the film opens), the data is richer (we can do a lot with our questionnaires that the others can’t), our system saves you hours of time and makes it very easy to understand where the issues are with your film. And we like to let the data speak to you; we’re great at putting that data into actionable context and I don’t make the process all about me. So don’t settle for mediocre, use us.

For those of you who have been on this email for a while or know me very well, there are two things going on here that are different. I don’t like to talk about myself, and I do this email every week to try to make the industry a better place and move it forward with different angles on things. And I do it just to do it, because it needs to get done, and that’s my goal in screenings and forecasting. But this is the rare case of me asking something from you, and I’m just one guy (backed up by an amazing team) trying to change things for the better, instead of walking the same (mediocre) beaten path everyone else is comfortable with.

I already have ideas to make things even better, especially in the test screening process. We can be better and faster, because many of you know who have gone through the grind of post production, a couple of hours when you’re up against deadlines can be a difference maker. My team is going to take this even farther than it already is, and we should be better off as an industry because of it. You read me here every week, you know that’s my jam.

Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated, and the road to get to this place right now has been rocky to say the least. But there’s one thing I’ve learned along the way that I should have realized a long time ago; I seem to make mediocre people really jumpy.

Anyway, with the expected accuracy of a Singapore Airlines seat belt light, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

The Garfield Movie - This is going to be interesting this weekend. Garfield will probably win today (they won last night) and they should win the weekend. Although family films like Garfield usually have a great bounce on Saturday once you get past the first weekend, that bounce goes down as schools get out, and as of today about half the K-12 are out. On the other hand, adult skewing films have developed a really nice bounce on Saturday over the last couple of years, and that’s not affected by school holidays. So we could have a situation where Furiosa has a bounce tomorrow that makes this interesting. However, Garfield’s drop from Saturday to Sunday shouldn’t be that different from last week and Furiosa’s drop should be bigger (because of the Monday holiday last week). Looks like a 3 day in the very low teens.

Furiosa - Looking about the way you would expect it to look, figure a weekend of around 11 or 12.

Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle - Yep, a film with not only two !’s (!), but also has dumpster in the title. Sony/Crunchyroll has really done a nice job developing a fanship here, but they did something really interesting distribution wise here. The last couple of S/C Anime films have gone 2000 runs, but once you get out of the big cities and the more sophisticated areas (or have a good asian population to draw from) the grosses fall to nothing very quickly. So they didn’t take those runs here and only went 1100 runs, and the weekend gross will probably end up pretty close to the last Anime they took 2000 runs on, Spy x Family Code: White. So figure low 4’s.

In a Violent Nature - IFC went 1500 theaters and there are some decent grosses in the upscale theaters, but it falls off pretty quickly. Figure a weekend around $1.8 or so.

Ezra - Bleecker Street went 1300 runs and there’s not much going on here, but should be enough to get them around $1.2 or so for the weekend.

Summer Camp - Went 1800 runs and looks like they can get to $1 million or maybe just a little less.

The Dead Don’t Hurt - Went 700 runs and this looks like it’s headed to about $500k for the weekend.