Second weekend of December 2024

This weekend should deliver another nice surplus compared to last year ( Wonka), and should finish just above the 5 year norm for this weekend. The rest of the year should be comfortably ahead of last year as well. January looks really soft, but last year (actually since it’s 2024, it’s this year) was just okay, so the stronger holdovers might keep us pretty even all month.

Alright, here we are at the killing zone of the Christmas release schedule, and if you have the goods (Wonka, Jumanji) it’s a nice launching point for a Christmas movie. But that social clutter issue is key this weekend, so it takes a lot of work to go to a movie; since quite a large percentage of theaters are in shopping centers, just parking is a challenge (should you want to go to The Grove this weekend, their website suggests getting your personal affairs in order before leaving your house). And history tells us that you need to skew younger to get anyone to go this weekend, good movies with an Adult skew go here to die. West Side Story and Richard Jewell are a couple of examples, even Tyler Perry when he was generating hit after hit struggled on this weekend (and it was a Christmas themed movie). So even though this is a great time to play long if you have the goods, if you don’t your film has the life expectancy of a bottle of Dewars around Pete Hegseth.

But as I pointed out last Friday, this is the season where you ‘play long’; and if you’re going to go on any of the weekends before Christmas Day, you need to have a film that has the demographic skew to open and the quality to play a while, and if your film doesn’t check either of those boxes (and you really want to go Christmas), you need to wait until Christmas Day, where opening weekend lasts 8 days. It wasn’t always this way, but we’re in such a competitive market for consumers, the weekends before Christmas are really tough.

But there’s a genre that we probably need to think twice about putting here in the future; SuperHero movies, and there’s a fundamental reason why. Think about how SuperHero movies perform, they are so front loaded because their fan bases all need to be first (the Thursday grosses are the highest % of the weekend by far), and even the highest quality films drop so quick on the 2nd weekend you need to put yellow caution tape around the megaplex. So the performance curve is the antithesis of the ‘play long’ parameters of opening pre-Christmas.

Of course there are outliers, and back in 2018 Aquaman went the weekend before Christmas and was the top fish dog over the Christmas period, opening to $68 million. Obviously the first aspect of Aquaman was it had the goods and it played, plus the IP was towards the top of the DC IP food chain. But there’s another component that was key to it achieving the outlier status it got to over Christmas, Disney kind of sat out that Christmas (well, they had Mary Poppins, but same same), and there were a couple of IP rebuilds like Spider Verse and Bumblebee, so the competitive landscape around it wasn’t terribly challenging. But here’s where even Aquaman shows us clues about where SuperHero movies should go, it opened to $68 million, but the similar level DC IP Wonder Woman opened in June to $103 million. They both ended up with really good cume grosses, but we’re in the business of big openings (insert your own P Diddy joke here), and no matter how big the opening weekend is over Christmas, it probably would have opened to more when there isn’t such a challenge to get fans to the theater on opening weekend. I’m a big fan of exploring release date boundaries, but in this case we now know to understand specific genre performance characteristics when we try new things.

Anyway, with the same expected accuracy of a De’Vondre Campbell participation trophy, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Moana 2 - After opening weekend, the exits seemed to point towards some really strong holdover weeks, but the grosses aren’t quite matching up. The drop from last week is a decent amount worse than Frozen 2 was on the same weekend. Looks like it’s down another 50% for a weekend around $30 million.

Wicked - Still showing good legs this weekend (it’s a lower drop from last week than Frozen 2 had), and although it’s not going to beat Moana, it’s gonna close the gap. Looks down 35% for a weekend in the low/mid 20’s.

*Kraven the Hunter *- The lazy entertainment press will use this as another example of the downfall of the genre, but it’s a film with a RT score of 14% on a weekend that underperforms, so any genre issues are farther down the list. They had the usual Thursday opening day that should outperform the industry norm of about 10% of the opening weekend (normal for this genre), and they should end up with a weekend just short of the teens.

Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim - Although this Anime* LOTR* prequel with the secret handshake title (that acts like a tag along repellant) isn’t going to make much of a dent in the box-office, it does tell us a lot (again) about branding and IP. We’ve seen a lot of these Anime movies lately and sometimes the IP is substantial enough to generate a pretty decent opening weekend. But they always come at us from either Cruchyroll, Fun Films or GKids, and as I talked about a couple of weeks ago, when your brand only does one thing, consumers have a trust level towards that brand and quite often those studios have cultivated an internal fan club to activate each time they release a film.

So now we have a pretty good Anime take on the Lord of the Rings IP, but it’s a challenge to get the fanship of Anime and the LOTR fanship together so the whole equals more than the sum of the parts, and you’re trying to do it without a specific fan club to leverage. In the best case scenario, you want the first film to go at a style/IP marriage like this film did, and lay the groundwork for later films. Look at the difference between the results of Spider-Man into the Spider Verse and Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse. The first film needed to get the fan base comfortable with the animated (and somewhat Anime style animation) take on the IP, and once the audience realized it was nothing to be afraid of (and loved it), the 2nd film exploded. Two key data points that show how specific this film was; the presales today weren’t that far behind where Kraven started this morning, so there was some fanship. But they’ve been crazy flat all day, showing the consumer attraction here was very specific, and we’re not seeing any walk up or tag along business. Right now it looks like a weekend of about $5 million.

September 5 - Opened exclusive with 7 runs in NY, LA and Toronto, and it’s pretty good in the Upper West Side of New York and Century City, but it’s just okay in most of the other runs. Figure a psa in the mid teens.

Nickel Boys - Opened 2 runs exclusive in NY at the Lincoln Sq and the Angelika, and both runs are pretty good. Looks like a psa for the weekend of about $30k.