Second weekend of August 2024

As you may have heard, there’s something beautiful going on today at the box-office. We’ve got a really big movie opening today (and that’s not that unusual for this time of year), but how it got here and what consumers it’s attracting is way more interesting, and I’ll break that down the best I can in just a second. But the total this weekend should blow away last year’s weekend (The Last Voyage of the Demeter) by a good amount. And with the exception of Labor Day weekend, where last year we had The Equalizer 3, we have a shot of beating every weekend from last year till the end of September. So we might be a little better off than we thought once we get back into a real box-office rhythm in November.

There’s been a lot of chatter the last couple of years about serving under-represented parts of the country, and the term DEI has been pounded into every aspect of business; but as we consciously try to get more faces and situations in front of consumers that ‘look or behave like them’, there’s one significant consumer we consistently ignore in this sector, Middle America. As Michale Jordan famously said when he was asked about his lack of activism ‘Republicans buy sneakers too’, and we might need to start thinking more like Mike.

Week after week as I pour through data to put on this little burlesque of words for you, there’s always the same theaters at the top of the list; the Upper West Side and Times Square in NY, Century City and Burbank in LA; week in and week out it’s the same theaters that lead the pack. Why is that? Because they serve the audiences y’all know and understand. But for the 2nd time in a couple of weeks, the theaters not in 212 and 310 are flexing their wallets in a big way, and maybe we need to rethink our inclusiveness in Psychographic terms instead of just Demographic terms.

As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, Disney started a concerted effort to understand the Hispanic moviegoer 15 years ago, and that work has paid off over and over again. Two years ago, Sony released Where the Crawdads Sing to a really nice opening weekend, mostly fueled by theaters in places where Crawdads sing, and those NY and LA theaters were nowhere to be found at the top of the gross sheet. A year and a half ago, Sony again went straight at middle America with A Man Called Otto and ended up with a really nice run, especially after a one week Academy run in NY and LA (where those usual theaters that lead the pack) just shrugged. Last Summer, Angel caught lightning in a bottle with Sound of Freedom, bringing people who hadn’t seen the inside of a movie theater in decades, and most of that business was in suburbs and fly over states. A couple of weeks ago, Twisters played like a $50 million movie in the normal blue chip coastal theaters, but played like a $100 million film where the Crawdads sing, driving the film to the $80 million it made opening weekend.

Now we’ve got a film this weekend that’s doing something similar (and again it’s Sony), the top grossing theaters are theaters you rarely see in the top 25, and most of the time they’re not even in the top 100 theaters. Lots of Suburbs and Fly over states, not a lot of big city theaters today. And because the consumer keeps voting with their wallets, maybe we should stop thinking about the (kinda lazy) idea that in order to make something theatrical we need IP for a ‘built in’ audience, and start thinking about audience’s interests and how to activate them based on those interests. The Sound of Freedom audience got activated because Fox News had been dining out on the Child Trafficking issue for years, so you just had to connect the movie to the issue (and Jim Caviezel did that effectively…..on Fox News). Twisters is about something people in the midwest fear every day. A Man Called Otto connected with older men who are lonely and a little angry. IP isn’t only limited to TV Shows and Comic Books, it can be a feeling or an event.

But the trick is how do you find them and activate them? More on that below.

But in the meantime, with the expected accuracy of a Boeing Starliner Departure Schedule, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Deadpool & Wolverine - Looks… very normal today. Should be off 45% for a weekend in the mid 50’s.

It Ends With Us - This is a really massive opening, and it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a young female skewing film based on a book rise to this level, maybe since The Fault in Our Stars. But what’s more interesting here is how the normal signals we count on in this sector all had this wrong. Tracking didn’t show it, the stuff I do in my day job only started showing it the last couple of days; the only measurement that showed this was presales.

There’s another piece of data that’s pretty interesting to me, what’s going on with the other movies in the marketplace. If a film like this comes along and surprises, we see the downside in the other films, and they’re usually off a little more than usual because this film took the normal moviegoers away. But all the other films are performing like they would if a big film like this didn’t come along. That tells me that the bulk of this audience aren’t habitual moviegoers, but got activated to purchase a ticket because of other factors. In order to qualify for the tracking panel you have to say you’re a heavy moviegoer, that’s why this probably didn’t show up on tracking. Apparently the exits show that the bulk of this audience is Females between 18 and 35, with most of them under 25, which is a demo that we haven’t really been chasing very much. So this is a group that goes every once in a while, but just once in a while.

So how did Sony activate them? Well, clearly the book helped, it sold a lot of copies that had a core in sync with the demo we’re seeing today. But so what? We see movies from best selling books (with so so Rotten Tomatoes scores) just do okay or drop dead more often than not. Why is this different? Blake Lively hasn’t exactly been box-office gold, she’s had some nice mid teens successes, but her last starring role opened to $2.7 million. However, she is best friends with Taylor Swift, and that might be the connective tissue that’s causing this to happen today. Since we’re witnessing history now with anything Taylor Swift being golden, it’s possible all that hang time with TS made Blake fans out of Swifties; especially since the Travis Kelce relationship pushed anything TS into the mainstream media newsfeed. If that’s true, you all should be rushing to sign Brittany Mahomes to a multi picture deal. But it’s possible we could be seeing something that’s unusual here and ‘adjacent fanship’ could have triggered a lot of these purchases.

But the last piece of data that might give a clue who’s coming this weekend is how this plays as the weekend develops. It’s not really growing from hour to hour, and if we see it fall off tomorrow, we might have seen that the reach of the film was mostly the book readers who needed to go right away. But if it plays more like we normally see, then it crossed over into the mainstream moviegoers. For now, I’ll say it’s mid 40’s, but I really don’t know. But this is an ignored audience that Sony’s been working towards for a couple of years now, and there’s definitely something to chase here. Way back, we used to think of comic books with contempt for the fans, and by treating the audience with respect it now dominates the box-office. Maybe we should think of middle America the same way.

Borderlands - The numbers are just a little behind a recent gamer IP, Gran Turismo right now (which opened to $17.4 million), however this does have a 7% Rotten Tomatoes score and exits on the low side of bad. Not sure how this will hold up the rest of the weekend with those metrics, but I’ll take a stab at something in the very low teens.

Twisters - Still looking rock solid, down 40% for a weekend in the very low teens.

Cuckoo - Went 1500 runs and has some really nice numbers in the upscale theaters. Figure a weekend of about $3 million.