Fourth weekend of July 2024

As promised, we’re going back to the pre-pandemic days and Disney/Marvel has given the box-office the shot we needed, just like they used to. We should easily beat last year’s total (Haunted Mansion, Talk to Me), but last year also had $140 million in 2nd week gross from BarbenHeimer, and I’d love to say we’ll continue to be ahead for the next couple of weeks. But it’s going to be the same situation we’ve been seeing this year, and it will be up and down from week to week. Unless Deadpool has an outlier hold next week, the new films next weekend probably won’t come close to the $58 million generated by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Meg 2 last year. However, the week after next we’ve got some titles coming in that might make us competitive with last year. There’s strong titles this fall, but we’ll really start kicking into gear with some consistency of titles (with a release date aberration on the first weekend of November, because Halloween is on Thursday night) towards the end of October. And once we hit Thanksgiving, we should be full go for a while.

There’s a trend developing lately as brands move studios, and M & A’s happen (so the IP shifts from one place to another), so we can look at how certain IP’s and genres are better suited to some studios than others as those IP’s move. Back in 2016, Fox set a new R rated 3 day record with Deadpool (with a slight assist from Valentine’s Day and President’s Day), which has stood ever since. Now the Deadpool IP has moved under Disney’s umbrella, that record is going to be smashed by 50% or so this weekend. Because Disney has honed their Marvel machine ever since they bought Marvel 15 years ago, are they better at opening this Genre than Fox was? We saw something similar a couple of months ago when Kung Fu Panda 4 opened under Universal’s watch, after the first 3 films had been marketed by Paramount, and results at Universal were considerably better than what happened when Dreamworks Animation was at Paramount. Of course, there are the ones that go the other way. As exceptional as the result will be this weekend on Deadpool, Disney has struggled with the rest of the 20th lineup; and even though the results of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was a giant step forward, they’ve still got to get some consistency on films with original IP.

So why do certain IP’s or genres do better at some studios? It might be a simple as the number of reps that studio has had with that genre (or similar IP), so they know all the nuances that activate every corner of the interested consumers (and, of course, their tag alongs). Disney for example started a massive project 15 years ago to understand the hispanic consumer (and spent a ton of money doing it). That research shows up big time in the massive success of the Family and SuperHero films, and I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be experiencing what we’re seeing today without the findings from that project. Universal has both Illumination and DWA, so they get a ton of reps activating family audiences, and get better with each film based on what they learn. A24 has been building an amazing company by knowing how to activate audiences on the coasts, and that showed up opening weekend on Civil War, when the coasts were great but the Red States seemed to be the opportunity that they didn’t quite figure out.

So what is the point? The world has changed over the past 20 years, and it seems like we think marketing departments have the same challenges they had 20 years ago. But 20 years ago they marketed towards ‘moviegoers’, and because of the broad reach of media back then, that included tagalongs. But in the last 20 years, we went from Broadcasting to Narrowcasting to Microcasting. And now a marketing department doesn’t stop at creating great materials to sell a movie, they now have to find who to show them to and where they are, and that might be the biggest challenge of all.

Just like everything else in this sector, this business is hard and there’s a lot of trial and error that can lead to success, so that’s why we might be seeing more success in certain genres or IP’s at certain studios, because they’ve had some ‘ah-ha’ moments finding where the consumers they need consume their media. But I do find it interesting that no one is good at everything these days, and experience is shockingly connected to success. But it also shows you how fragmented our consumers are, and you can’t just go at ‘moviegoers’ anymore, it’s way more compartmentalized. So marketers have to reach into those compartments, which takes some learning to do; and sometimes that learning takes as long as 15 years.

Anyway, with the accuracy normally associated with a French train schedule, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Deadpool & Wolverine - As you’ve probably heard, this is a monster today and it’s going to blow away the previous R rated weekend by a lot: but how they got here was Disney/Marvel 101. Once Disney got control of the bulk of the Marvel Characters, they started combining them into Variety packs, and since each character has some unique fans, by combining them they bring additional fan bases into the theater. That crescendoed to the insane (and still record holding) $357 million 3 day of *Avengers: Endgame *with the whole gang dumped into one movie. So once Disney got control of the Deadpool IP, they added another character that came with the Fox purchase, Wolverine into this movie. And it’s hard to say what the Venn Diagram looks like for this film, but I doubt when you diagram tickets purchased because of character fanship, it doesn’t just look like one circle. There’s a ton of commonality, but there is probably a lot of value added here by including Wolverine, and since Wolverine had already gone ‘R’ in Logan, it was a natural fit. Right now it looks like around $185 million for the weekend, and although some of the talk around town has it getting to $200 million, it’s fucking R rated so I’m not sure we’ll see the usual Marvel bounce tomorrow. Not saying it won’t happen, we’ve seen some amazing walk up ticket based surges all Summer, but at $185 million it’s an amazing achievement for a R rated movie.

Twisters - Considering how big Deadpool is, this isn’t holding up too bad. Figure down 55% for a weekend of about $35 million.

Despicable Me 4/Inside Out 2 - As a sign of a very healthy business, both of these aren’t down much today, even in the face of Deadpool. If Deadpool was PG 13, I’m not sure that would be true. Despicable looks down 35% for a weekend in the mid teens, Inside Out 2 looks down 25% for a weekend around 10.

The Fabulous Four - Bleecker went 1000 runs and it’s just okay, figure a weekend around $1 million.