First weekend of September 2024
It’s going to be a great weekend at the box-office; Disney is passing the ‘we’re here to save the day’ baton to WB for a couple of months, and it looks like the rest of the year should get us closer to last year’s overall grosses. As I mentioned last week, this was never a traditionally good weekend in the past and we used to refer to this weekend and next as weekend #51 and weekend #52, but we’ve seen some really big grosses (mostly from WB) in this period. Last year was pretty good for this time of year (The Nun II, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, plus weekend #2 for The Equalizer 3), but as good as it was, we’re gonna scream by that number this weekend, maybe by as much as 50%. The next couple of weeks look like they’ll be way ahead of last year as well, so it’s still looking up, and we might have seen the worst of all the product flow related issues we had earlier in the year.
There is one little thing that’s going to affect the grosses all fall, and it started happening last night; the NFL is back and that’s good news and bad news. The good news is that because it’s such a juggernaut on TV, we have the last great ratings generator that no one fast forwards (or completely ducks) the ads for films. The bad news is that it’s such a juggernaut, the grosses take a little bigger hit on Sunday than they do the rest of the year. What will be interesting tonight is that there’s a Friday night game with two massive NFL brands (Packers and Eagles), and we’ll have to see how the grosses perform as we get to the evening shows. Yeah, I know, it’s only on Peacock, but the NFL is so huge that when they put a playoff game on Peacock last winter, the ratings didn’t take a major haircut. Of course, the main reason the NFL keeps growing and growing is because of the recent changes in gaming laws, but that’s another issue. But even if the (one off) game tonight cuts into grosses a little, it’s still going to be a great weekend.
Anyway, based on something I heard at a Parenting seminar titled ’giving your 14 year old a semi automatic rifle as a gift, what could possibly go wrong?’, here are some thoughts (and prayers) on the weekend box-office.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice - WB has clearly laid claim to this part of the release schedule, and at the end of the weekend they are going to have the #1, #2 and #3 openings of all time in September, however this time it’s without using a pronoun in the title. As you’ve probably heard, WB crushed this from all angles, this is a smash hit and they’ll roar past the $75 million domestic cume of the first film sometime Sunday morning. In fact, to show you how massive this is for this time period, the average total gross for the first weekend in September is $76 million.
There are some nice bonuses for the industry as well here; once again we’ve got another example of ’this is how you do IP effectively’, and even though there was a veteran cast of notable stars from the first film to lean on, Jenna Ortega was way out front in this campaign. Developing a young actor as a movie star in big grossing movies only helps her IP, which hopefully will lead to that IP being leveraged by other films, and lead to box-office success in the future. They had a really nice night last night, even though the NFL was flexing their considerable muscle on TV, and it’s really good today. Right now it looks like low 90’s with a possible upside to 100 if the game being on Peacock doesn’t hurt tonight too much, or they get a better than average bounce tomorrow. There were some really gaudy tracking forecasts running around town this week, and although WB seemed to be the voice of reason with a gross closer to what were seeing (reminding people ‘you do know the NFL is starting this weekend’), it seemed to fall on deaf ears.
The rest of the holdovers look pretty normal today, and we’ll see a decay from last week in the normal 40% to 45% range. There are two films that look just a little better than the rest. Two films from last week are holding pretty good, Reagan looks down only 35% or so, and The Forge looks pretty similar. So the Red State films are holding in better.
The Greatest of All Time - This Bollywood film opened Wednesday and has about $1 million in the till already. It looks like it might have had it’s best day (on Wednesday) already and looks like a 3 day of about $2 million and a 5 day of about $3 million.
The Front Room - Went 2000 theaters, and it’s a little better in NY and LA than the rest of the country, but even NY and LA aren’t that great. Figure a 3 day of 1. 3 or so.