Second weekend of July 2024
It’s another really interesting week at the box-office, I’m not sure we’ll get to the same total as the same weekend last year, but we might get close. Even though the new films this weekend won’t equal the $54.7 million Mission: Impossible did last year, as usual, it’s the holdovers that will be the difference between getting even and coming in a little behind. Just like we saw in spring 2023 where Super Mario Brothers kept the box-office high week after week; the one two punch of Despicable Me and Inside Out 2 are still making significant weekly contributions. But even though most of the holdovers last year weren’t anything special, this was the weekend that consumers who hadn’t seen the inside of a movie theater in years (or maybe decades) showed up for the 2nd Weeknd of Sound of Freedom, proclaiming ‘we’re here, we believe everything we see on Fox News, get used to it’. Sound of Freedom was up a stunning 40% from opening weekend, grossing $27.3 million, and without that outlier we would be ahead this year. But next week is when BarbenHeimer hits, so we’ll start digging the year to year hole again.
Because we’ve had a good run the last couple of weeks, the press needs to weigh in and tell us why that’s happening. And as usual, they’re wrong. The angle they seem to be taking is that ‘Animation is the answer’ to our Theatrical woes. But wait, weren’t you just saying that streaming killed the Theatrical Family market, especially for Disney? Of course, what they’re missing is that it’s nothing to do with genre or demo skew, (say it with me) ‘it’s the movies, stupid’. All these movies that have jolted the box-office back to life are good movies (and in some cases, exceptional), with solid IP and a high entertainment value. None of these movies wag their fingers at you, and are worth leaving the house for. Considering the big story this weekend will be in a genre that’s the polar opposite of a Family film (more on that below), I guess the ‘we should only make animated films’ theory is out the window.
Anyway, with the same expected accuracy of a New Mexico Ballistics Analysis, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
Despicable Me 4 - Looks pretty good so far, since they went on Wednesday last week they won’t have the ‘give back’ from missing the Thursday preview gross in the 2nd weekend, the drop will be better than usual. Right now it looks down 45% or so for a weekend in the low 40’s.
Longlegs - Outlier Alert! Looks like Neon is going to join the ‘lightening in a bottle club’ and they are going to have a weekend that everyone there will remember for a long long time. But how they got here is a little more interesting, and they are going to get something done that’s very hard to do, they are getting a film open to a record (for them) opening weekend without any TV spots. It’s something that pretty much the whole sector is working towards; but going only digital is tricky. The upside of digital only marketing is that it’s so targeted and there’s much less waste, but the downside of digital only marketing is that it is so targeted, and tag-alongs become an issue because they don’t necessarily indicate any fan-ship that allows you to target them efficiently. But Neon took a very interesting and calculated approach here and dropped 4 non-narrative teasers in the 4 months before they dropped their first Narrative trailer, which is an unusual cadence for materials. All those little actions eventually added up, and this film really popped at the end of the campaign. It’s really good today, and I don’t see a path where it’s less than $20 million and could easily get to the mid 20’s. The only question here is if Neon thinks this is their new norm, which is a pretty standard thought process in this sector. But since this is pretty much the 1 year anniversary of Sound of Freedom, and the next 4 films Angel released have a total gross that’s less than the first 5 days of Sound of Freedom, just enjoy this and soak it all in, you might never get to experience this again.
Inside Out 2 - Still hanging in there nicely, looks only down 35% or so for a really strong high teens.
Fly Me to the Moon - This light rom-com from Apple (through Sony) is fine for what it is, but it’s doing what we’ve seen these slightly upscale adult films do lately. It’s really good in the West, it will probably have a really nice bounce tomorrow (the exits are good), and it will probably leg out over the next couple of weeks. If there’s something we’re still working on post pandemic, it’s urgency for Adult films like this, and sometimes in a slightly cluttered marketplace they start a little slow. But the 10 or 11 they’ll start with this weekend should get them going.