Third weekend of November 2024
As expected, the total box-office this weekend will end up way behind last year, mostly because we’re in a Thanksgiving ‘leap year’. Since Thanksgiving is the last weekend in November, during the November’s where we have 5 weekends it moves back a week (with a couple of rare exceptions). So last year this was the weekend before Thanksgiving, where the traditional big movies of Thanksgiving open; Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Trolls Band Together, Thanksgiving and Next Goal Wins opened. Just the total of Hunger Games and Trolls should beat the total box-office this weekend, but next weekend Glicked tm gets unleashed on the world and the Universal/Paramount tag team will lead us into a very nice end of the year.
We do have a little bit of marketplace clutter this weekend, there’s a decent sized fight tonight (Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson) that’s on free TV*, so we could see some issues with males. It’s a fairly early fight, 8pm in the east, so depending on how long it goes, it might not have much of an effect out west. This is one of those weird aspects you talk about when you choose a release date, especially in this case. This fight was rescheduled from July when Mike Tyson had an ulcer flare up on a plane at the end of May, so considering it got pushed once, it was unclear if this would even happen.
The 2nd and 3rd weekends of November are also the traditional window where Christmas themed movies open. Classics like* A Christmas Story*, Polar Express and Elf all opened here, and there’s a good reason this is where you launch; similar to the effect you get next month over the Christmas holidays, you play the long game instead of the opening weekend game. Christmas Story had a 7 multiple, Elf had a 7 multiple, Polar* Express* had an 8 multiple; you just need to get a film open enough to be in the mix with consumers looking for ‘out of home’ Holiday entertainment over the next 6 weeks. Elf opened to $32 million and then did $30 million over the 5 day Thanksgiving Holiday 2 weeks later. Polar Express opened to $23 million and then did $26 million over the 5 day holiday. If you’ve got the goods, it’s not all about weekend #1.
This is another genre based corner of the business where we seem to have ceded ground to the streamers, kind of like we’ve done with Comedy. The last year we had a substantial Christmas film in theaters was in 2018 with Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch, meanwhile every year a conga line of 47 original Christmas films have danced through the platforms. It’s nice to see these films back in theaters.
Some might say, yeah, but here comes *Glicked *tm plus Moana and the films opening before them are gonna get crushed. Maybe, but that weekend #3 of Polar Express over Thanksgiving was against National Treasure and The Incredibles; so if you’ve got the goods, the tide lifts all boats. Remember Theatrical is a social action, and with today’s hyper interactive social platforms, you might not be thinking of a movie but some friends are all about Wicked, Moana or Gladiator. You might jump on one of those trains and go, but once you have the idea of going to a movie, you might pivot to one of the other films instead. The current theatrical infrastructure might help make other boats rise with the tide.
Let’s say you have some friends going to *Wickoanatiator *tm, and in today’s market you’ll usually buy your tickets before you go to the theater online. If there’s any doubt about how this is true, have you noticed there’s not much of a box-office presence at theaters these days, just a couple of kiosks for walk up business because most people buy them before. When you go look for tickets for *Wickoanatiator *tm, you look at the online seating chart and you can’t find a seat you want to sit in (except for the theater that’s in 3D they keep trying to shove down the consumer’s throat, there’s always good seats there), but because you’ve already got the idea of going to a movie in your head, if there’s a quality option outside of *Wickoanatiator *tm you go there. But there has to be a quality option, and playability is crucial, so we won’t know the fate of the two holiday themed films until after Thanksgiving.
When it comes to the holiday themed films, the first weekend can be a starter instead of do or die.
Anyway, with the same expected accuracy of a Dwayne Johnson call time, here’s some thoughts about the weekend box-office.
Red One - There’s one aspect that’s key here, this was a film greenlit for the platform and got elevated to theatrical, so when that happens there’s only one goal. Use theatrical to elevate the performance on the platform and the only revenue goal theatrically is to make back the P & A. Unfortunately the idiot industry press will bring up the high cost of the film and how the box-office didn’t measure up. But unless they’re going to do the same thing and hold all the streamers accountable for their half hearted (and that’s being kind) theatrical releases, they need to STFU. Are they going to question Netflix about the box office numbers for The Electric State next March? Of course they won’t.
Back to the box-office, it’s fine, but at this point it doesn’t look like it will get to the numbers that have been thrown around in the trades. I’ve been hearing from a lot of you over the last couple of weeks (who get tracking, which is pretty much everyone), why are they saying 30’s for this film in the trades when it looks like 50 on tracking? So a lot of the performance expectations seem to stem from the hot tracking, and that seems to be happening a lot lately. And a lot of those expectations seem to come from the idea that because this is about Santa Claus, it’s automatically a 4 quad family movie. But is it? Is it a Family Christmas movie with some buddy action aspects or is it a Male skewing buddy action movie that happens to have a character named Santa Claus? There’s a key difference between the two, and it comes back to what I keep drilling into your collective heads, it’s all about the tagalongs. The 4 quad family movie gets groups twice the size of the male skewing buddy action comedy, it’s kind of the opposite of what happened in August with Alien: Romulus. The Alien franchise was living in the Sci-Fi drama world for a couple of films (that kept decaying in gross, because that genre lives with older males), but by leaning into the Horror genre, the groups broadened in scope and we saw the gross pop back up. What the movie ‘is’ has a profound effect on what it does over the weekend. And just because tracking was ‘hot’ (again), we shouldn’t hold it against a movie being what it is.
Of course, MGM Amazon still made an effort to reel in the family audience (and that’s more of a question for tomorrow), but there’s not anything today that points to the families coming in droves tomorrow; but it does look like the Red States bought into this more than the Blue states. Even if they don’t get a family bump tomorrow, these buddy action comedies skew toward older males and Saturday is a good day for that demo. For now this looks very similar to another Male skewing hybrid that had some family appeal, Transformers One (which had a nice Saturday), which would put Red One in the mid 20’s. Since this movie was elevated from streaming based on test screening scores, if the exits match those (apparently) high scores, this should have no problem hanging in there and getting its P & A back. And when you add in the fact that the highest opening film that was ‘elevated’ from streaming was Killers of the Flower Moon at $23 million; this is actually a new record if it stays in the mid 20’s.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever - Looking like they’re going to have a really strong hold this weekend, but the drop from last weekend won’t show that. Of their opening weekend, almost 25% of the reported gross didn’t happen on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, so they started the weekend down 25%. But the film is holding up really nicely, so even though the actual drop will show -60%, it’s really more like -35%.
A Real Pain - Expanded to 1200 theaters, and it’s showing some strength in the typical (upscale) theaters, however the exits are excellent, so this might be around for a while. Figure a weekend in the mid 2’s.
Hello, Love, Again - This sequel to 2019’s Hello, Love, Goodbye went 200 theaters and even though half the theaters are in the US, half are in Canada and it’s pumping out some really impressive grosses there. Depending how this plays out over the weekend, this could end up with a really sexy psa near $10k.
- well, it’s on Netflix, so same same.