July 4th 2024, the holiday dispatch

Happy 4th everyone,

Despicable Me 4 - They had a great day yesterday, but today doesn’t look quite as good as I thought it would. Everything else is having a pretty good day, so it’s not like it’s a bad day overall, but this is down a decent amount from yesterday. That doesn’t really mean anything for the rest of the weekend; like I said yesterday, the 4th is an odd box-office day. Right now I’ll take a hipshot and say it does about $20 million, but I’m not sure it will get there.

The Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot - Angel Studios, who brought us The Sound of Freedom last year, seem to be stepping into the void we have with Participant stepping out of the business. They keep making ‘issue’ based films with a light religious touch, and this film addresses the issue of the foster care system. Having seen this film, it’s probably worth your time, there’s a raw aspect to the story telling (they aren’t afraid to show the messy side of kids that are hard to adopt) that I found pretty interesting. They decided to open today (with the usual previews last night), which I’m not sure is the correct way to launch a film, but since they had such a wild success with Sound of Freedom on the 4th last year today probably made sense to them. It’s probably headed to about $1.6 million or so today, plus whatever they did last night. But they probably would have been better off opening yesterday, since the playability is excellent.