Third weekend of September 2024

The box-office has been pretty hot for a couple of months now, but eventually we have a weekend where it cools off a little, and this seems to be that weekend. Hard to say why, and it might be because we have a couple of pairs of films going at the same audience, but it looks a little flat right now. However, because we still have a nice sized IP opening today, plus a decent quiver of films holding over, plus this weekend last year was really dismal (Expend4bles, It Lives Inside), we’re still going come close to doubling last years total weekend. As we’ve talked about here, the box-office is better when we have a consistent flow of product, and looking at the rest of the year, we’re pretty much back to that. The big films still need to be a little bigger and we need a few more of them, but we seem to be past the worst of it.

As long as we’re in an off weekend where the box-office isn’t over performing, I’ll bring up a subject again that no one wants to hear. For those of you who don’t follow the box-office as closely as I do, here’s the ranking order of box-office days from best to worst. Saturday is obviously #1, and depending on the time of year Friday and Sunday are #2 and #3. Because of discounted tickets, Tuesday is the best weekday and comes in at #4 overall, followed by Monday at #5, Wednesday at #6 and Thursday as the worst day of the week.

But as much as we seem to bury our heads in the sand about it, we open films on Thursday, the worst box-office day of the week. The ad materials say Thursday, the ads running on Thursday say ‘opening today’; we open films on Thursday, the worst box-office day of the week. The only place it says Friday is on the release schedule. And in addition, we now have more previews labeled as ‘fan shows’ on Wednesday, the second worst day of the week. But because of Distribution math, we add that gross that didn’t happen on Friday….into Friday. You’re probably saying to yourself ‘who cares, if the number is bigger, it’s better, right?’. I’m not sure the math would agree, and even though I’ve gone on this rant before here, there’s some new data lately that makes me bring it up again.

It’s the ‘fan shows’ that got my attention, which started as a one off, and now pretty much every film does it. And the question I can’t get out of my head is ‘where is that money coming from?’, is it just moving money from the Thursday shows, or opening weekend? It can’t be created revenue because it’s skewed towards consumers who were locked in. But the most troubling aspect of it is the same issue I have with everything box-office related, how does it affect the tag-alongs? If we keep putting the first availability of a movie on the worst and 2nd worst days of the week, are we only getting the ‘fans’ and are we losing tag-along revenue that would have gone with the fan on a more convenient day?

Here’s where the math part of this comes into play. I took a look at the rise/drop of each film’s gross from Friday to Saturday over time (and by Friday, I mean only Friday, I took out the gross from the non-Friday showtimes), and went all the way back to when films actually opened on Friday. And you know what? The change in gross from the (pure) Friday to Saturday hasn’t really changed (once you separate films out by genre and demo skew). It didn’t change when we started moving the Thursday shows from 10pm to 9pm to where we are now (about 2pm). It didn’t really change once we started adding more previews before the Thursday opening. So that means ‘we’re good, right? It doesn’t affect anything’. I don’t think so, I’m looking at it as a problem, because what it tells me is that Saturday is going to be a set % of Friday, and Sunday is going to be a set % of Saturday; so you need to make the Friday gross as big as possible. Friday sets the level for the rest of the weekend.

Here’s an example. Let’s say we have Movie A that grosses $10 million on Friday and has $3.5 million or so in preview gross for a ‘reported’ Friday gross of $13.5. It’s up a normal 20% on Saturday and down a normal 30% on Sunday; that would bring the 3 day reported gross to $33.5. What if it opened on Friday without previews, what would the Friday gross be? Let’s say it doesn’t get all of that $3.5 preview gross, it only gets 2/3 of it and it grosses $12 million Friday. Using the same % change for Saturday and Sunday, the Saturday gross would be $14.4 and the Sunday gross is $10.1; that puts the 3 day gross at $36.5. So it’s a 10% bump by passing on the previews, which (and this is just a guess) would account for additional tag-alongs. In addition, Monday’s gross is a pretty set % of Sunday and Tuesday’s gross follows Monday’s gross; so we’re decaying from a higher number and the revenue continues to increase.

But let’s be real here, no one is going to do this. As long as we keep bundling non-Friday box-office with the actual Friday box-office, it looks better because you have more money on Friday. But in a business where we need tag alongs and we’re struggling for younger moviegoers (that we might be excluding), it might be a very short sighted view.

Anyway, with the same accuracy normally associated with Sean Combs’ Bumble profile, here are some thoughts about the weekend box-office.

Transformers One - We’ve seen what’s going on here before, as we continue to figure out ways to mine IP from different angles, the latest trend is to take something live action and redo it with Animation (the flip side of what Disney’s been doing for a while). And what’s interesting is how that can pay off handsomely, but not right away. 5 years ago, Sony/Marvel went that route with Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and it opened……okay. But because it was a movie people loved and played and played (and won the Best Animated Film Oscar), it laid the groundwork for the next chapter. And the next chapter, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse opened a little better than okay at $123 million. So this film has a lot of the same characteristics; it’s an animated version of an IP that’s been beaten to death with sequels, but it’s apparently a very good movie. Both the critics and the audience have given it high marks, and the grosses today look a lot like the opening day of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. So even though this isn’t setting the world on fire (compared to where the first couple of Transformers opened to), it might be setting the table for something special the next time around. Right now this looks in the high 20’s, but getting into the 30’s is not out of the question with a decent family bump tomorrow.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice - Sometimes when a movie opens you can see the commonality it has with the audience of something already on screen, and it looks like the Transformers audience is very similar in skew to this; it’s way down today. Of course they also lost most of the large format theaters to Transformers, so that figures in as well. Looks down 55% or so today, for a weekend in the low 20’s.

Never Let Go - Another example of where we are in this sector. A thriller with a decent star IP, but the critics didn’t offer much support and unless I missed it, neither did the star on the publicity trail. In times past we would try to bludgeon the audience into coming with spend, but that was something we just talked ourselves into (and it seldom worked) and we’re smarter now. I wish some of these older stars would take the example of our up and coming talent, and realize that support for your film only helps your IP. The grosses aren’t too bad in the theaters that have a skew towards Halle Berry’s IP, the more upscale and the better AA theaters. But for a thriller like this the hispanic theaters are a little light. Right now it looks like a weekend of mid 3’s to 4. This feels like it has a decent amount of common audience with The Substance, since they’re both Females Over going crazy, so both of these films might have been better if the other wasn’t there.

The Substance - We have a new player in the wide release game, Mubi, who has brought us a couple of limited release films such as the Oscar Nominated Decision to Leave, is taking this film wide. This Cannes award winner for Best Screenplay is opening in 2000 theaters and as you would expect, the upscale theaters that click when you mention the word ‘Cannes’ are leading the pack. But a body horror film like this can only soar if it connects with the more downscale blood thirsty consumer, and it doesn’t look like that happened here. Right now it looks around $3 million for the weekend.