First weekend of June 2024

Thank you for all the responses to last week’s email. I felt like the entertainment industry version of George Bailey and you made me feel like one of the richest people here. Thank you very much.

This weekend looks like it’s going to play out pretty much as expected, the new titles should be in the same ballpark as last year’s new film (Transformers: Rise of the Beasts), but same as the last couple of weeks, it’s what the other holdover films are doing that will keep us running behind last year. And since the 2nd and 3rd place films last year (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Little Mermaid) grossed $78 million between them, that is something we don’t have this year. Things finally turn around next weekend with Inside Out 2 over Father’s Day, but even some old school Disney Magic should only get us even (or maybe just close) for the same weekend last year when we had The Flash, *Elemental *and The Blackening bringing in $91 million. Hang in there, this will get better eventually; but as always, it’s the movies, not the marketplace.

Speaking of the movies, the sequel game is just as complicated as everything else in this sector, and the spacing between sequels has become an issue we need to pay attention to. As studios lean towards known IP vs original IP, sequels keep getting more and more development attention, and there are weekends at the box-office where there are so many numbers at the end of titles that the Marquee at the theater looks more like a scoreboard than a list of films. But as Disney learned recently when they listened to their rabid fan bases who kept screaming ‘more!’, ‘more!’, and then they gave them more, but the rabid fans had trouble bringing their friends who said ‘didn’t we just see that?’. Even though the grosses were still at a level the rest of the industry would kill for, because of the gross decay from film to film, they started to rethink the cadence. As always, it’s all about the tagalongs.

This weekend is being driven by the 4th installment of the Bad Boys franchise, and although the very lazy entertainment press will tsk tsk anything less than the $63 million Bad Boys for Life did (and we’ll have more ’the sky is falling’ in their narrative); there’s a consistency to a decline from one sequel to the next when there’s not a big space of time between editions. We’ve seen this over and over again. When the Jurassic Park franchise took a 14 year break, absence made the fans’ hearts grow fonder, and it came storming back to a $210 million opening weekend. But the subsequent films in the series since then have still produced great openings, but they’ve slowly declined in opening gross. Same with other franchisees like Star Wars, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, the list goes on and on. So if we learn from history, there really wasn’t a chance that this Bad Boys would even come close to what Bad Boys for Life opened to.

As a very smart person once said ’that’s what these movies do’, and a decline in gross (because it’s only been 4 years since the last version) is what this movie should be doing.

Anyway, with the same accuracy and efficacy of the Supreme Court’s ethics handbook, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Bad Boys Ride or Die - Had a great start last night (especially against the NBA finals), and the grosses so far today are very good. One fun fact here, did you know that Bad Boys for Life was the biggest weekend opening in 2020? Maybe there’s an asterisk there (kinda like the Dodgers and Lakers Championships that year), but it shows you the power of this franchise, and we also had a pandemic that year… What’s also very good here is how the combined efforts of Sony, Bruckheimer Films and Will Smith have softened any long term effects of Will Smith’s Oscar incident. If you just consider the decay from one sequel to the next based on it only being 4 years since Bad Boys for Life, I can’t find any downstream effect in the numbers today. As with the other Bad Boys films, the grosses are skewing heavily AA, so the North and South East are dominating the top grosses. The playability here seems to be very good, and at this point it looks like a weekend in at least in the high 40’s. But with the strong playability, I wouldn’t rule out getting to 50 or even a little higher. And either number in relation to what it’s predecessor did is consistent for a sequel made 4 years after its predecessor.

The Watchers - As much as the ’nepo baby’ thing is getting some pushback from social media, I’ve never had a problem with parents who want to give some of what they’ve got to their kids, but only if they can deliver. Sometimes the kids are super talented and probably would have done great anyway, and sometimes it’s clear that they wouldn’t have made it on their own. Obviously, that’s the difference between giving the job to someone who can do it dependably and someone who can’t. But aside from the capability factor, a key issue here is what the parent’s IP is worth, because there’s a downstream effect on the nepo’s value; and waterskiing behind a parents IP can add value when it comes time to sell a movie. Since this film is directed by M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter Ishana, it would help if M. Night’s IP was worth what it was back in 2019, but as they say ‘yesterday’s hits don’t win today’s ball games’. Because he’s had a couple of so so openings, his IP doesn’t help his daughter that much. And that’s showing up big time here, and reading the tepid reviews, it doesn’t look like the film can stand on its own. Clearly a very capable group like WB did everything they could to get a toehold here, but it’s all just all adding up to a big nothing and this looks like it’s headed to $6 million or so.

For the holdover films: Since the new movies are both adult skewing it’s a good day (with kids getting out of school) for a family film. Both Garfield (which should give Sony a nice 1 - 2 finish this weekend) and IF have very small drops from last week, but the competition is showing up in Furiosa, and it’s way down today.