Fourth weekend of October 2024
The last weekend in October has been hit and miss over the years; there have been successes here and there, but because Halloween is a major issue it needs to fall on a midweek day so it’s not a factor, otherwise you avoid it. This year should be pretty good and we might even do a little better than the same weekend last year, which is an accomplishment considering the Monstrous Five Nights at Freddy’s opened last year on this weekend. We should get a little ahead of last year next week too, but then we’ll take a step back for a couple of weeks before Glicked weekend gets here.
A quick note of appreciation here about Lynda Obst. I met Lynda in the mid 80’s when I was a nobody film buyer and always really enjoyed her point of view, and we had a lot of deep conversations, she always treated me like anything but a nobody. Quite a few of you who are on this distribution list have been privy to her intelligence, vision and recognition of talent. I have fond memories of being invited to her sets, as well as sitting on the deck at Helena’s in Silver Lake several times, talking about either story structure or where the business was going. On opening night of The Fisher King, I remember going to a restaurant where they had to run a phone line to the table so I could plug in my dial up modem and access the grosses. Once I started this email 19 years ago (!) Lynda was one of the original recipients. Over the years she was one of the most active parts of this community, and she would regularly go back to her editor roots, responding once she got the email with encouraging words or calling me on my bullshit (and she was always right on the bullshit part). Over the last year or so, the responses got fewer and fewer, so the sad news of her passing confirmed what I feared. I’m not sure this email would be what it is without her editorial guidance, and although you might not hear it, her voice is present here. It always has been and it will continue.
Some of you may have seen the LA Times <https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2024-10-24/ucla-report-teenagers-teens-entertainment-habit-movies> piece about how teens rank going to the movies as their #1 ‘go to’ entertainment choice. Sure, as long as you ignore a couple of key facts from the same report, that’s great. But as much as the content issues the piece raised will probably be the most discussed aspect this coming Monday in your Senior Staff Meetings, there’s a couple of other issues that need to be discussed with the same urgency.
First, there’s the teeny tiny little caveat to the ‘movies are the go to entertainment’ is that teens said that they’d go on the condition ‘there was no price barrier’; or (more than likely), they’ll go if it’s free. But as daunting as that sounds, that seems like something we can work with. If it’s true that they really want to go, could we address this with some variations in the current exhibitor subscription models? Maybe a lower monthly price for anyone under 18, or introduce a family based tier to the pricing? This particular age demo is already keenly aware of the subscription model, so how can we get them to opt in and use that model to make them regular customers again (which is the whole point of the subscription model), and we probably need to understand what price point this becomes adopted. Of course, we’re talking about exhibitors here, they’re not terribly evolved when it comes to forward thinking (that may be why I migrated out of the sector), so they’ll need some help from the studios to get them to move on this. They’ve already got Senior Citizen, Matinee and Tuesday variations (if you buy tickets on a one off basis), why can’t we apply that same logic to the subscription model? Especially when we see data that says, ‘we’ll go, but not at the current price structure’. Clearly free isn’t going to happen, but subscriptions feel like free sometimes (because you forget about that monthly charge), so maybe work in that direction.
The second aspect that got my attention was that they said they liked to go ‘opening weekend’. Uh-huh. They said ‘opening weekend’, not opening ‘weeknight’, which is where we open every single movie. And we open them on the worst weekday of the week, Thursday; which to use a phrase we’ve all used when we tell friends we can’t go somewhere on a Thursday…’sorry, it’s a school night….’. As I’ve raised here over and over again (and again, and again), most of us grew up going to the movies on Friday night with our friends, but because the exhibitors whined about needing some revenue on the worst night of the week, we’ve I indulged them by opening movies on the worst night of the week, and probably fragmented that audience (and hurt ourselves in the big picture). The answers are there in the data, we’ve got to listen to it.
Anyway, with the same expected accuracy of an Uber arrival time in DTLA or Inglewood tonight, here are some thoughts about the weekend box-office.
Venom: The Last Dance - The final segment in the Venom series opened yesterday to typical Venom like reactions; the critics don’t like it but the fans do. But this edition has some headwinds the last Venom (Let There Be Carnage) didn’t have. First, the last Venom had a wide open marketplace; the opening weekend grosses for the films opening the 3 weeks before Venom totaled a paltry $18 million, but the films that opened over the last 3 weeks this time opened to about $100 million. So there’s more clutter this time, but there’s another factor this weekend that’s just bad luck.
On Let There Be Carnage, Los Angeles (by far) out performed the rest of the country, and the Hispanic demo was a major part of that. But when this release date got set back in March, who knew that the Dodgers (kings of the first round playoff flameout) would end up in the World Series. And now Venom has some serious issues tonight and tomorrow with Game 1 and Game 2. On Let The Be Carnage, 5 of the top 10 theaters and 11 of the top 20 theaters were in Los Angeles. At the point of this writing, 2 of the top 10 and 5 of the top 20 are in Los Angeles; so clearly the World Series is causing a downdraft on this film. It’s weird to think Baseball these days has any effect on anything, but this may be a case where the star power on the field is having an effect on box-office, especially for this demo.
Even though this film is going to gross considerably less than Let There Be Carnage this weekend, it’s possible it’s so much less (not because they got unlucky this weekend), but they might have seen the other side on Carnage and gotten lucky with lightning in a bottle. They had so many elements going for them last time, wide open market, some fun elements (like Woody Harrelson) that might have seemed like more fun. So maybe this is an IP that’s a little fragile and the stars just need to align to get what they got last time? This looks like a weekend in the low 50’s, but if the 2nd film hadn’t over performed, this gross would be about right for the 3rd film in a series that started at 80.
Conclave - We’re getting into the meaty part of Awards season; so we’ll start seeing all the contenders roll out, but many of them usually open to very small numbers at the box-office, or maybe big numbers for the 6 run exclusive and then it drops off quickly on the wide release. Focus is going the other direction and started this film pretty wide, and they’re pulling some really good numbers today, but they aren’t just in the big coastal cities. They only went 1700 runs, and it looks like a really nice start to this run at $5.5 million.
We Live In Time - Expanded to 2900 runs and it looks like it’s going to be around for a while. The existing runs aren’t down that much, so this looks like another weekend in the mid 4’s.
Anora - Expanded to 34 theatres today, and the grosses are good, there’s some reach to this film. Of course the theaters from last week are way down (except the Grove, where they are doing Q & A’s), but the expansion looks promising here. Figure a psa in the mid 20’s or maybe a little better.