Christmas Day 2024
I hope everyone is having a great Christmas today, the box-office is having a pretty good day. Today and the next couple of days are really good days, but today and then the days after are really different. I mean really different. Like Venus and Mars different, Cats and Dogs different, being from Philly and being quiet and shy different. They’re really different. And there’s a big reason for the difference, today is driven by a unique type of moviegoer; it’s driven by non-Christians, cast off older males and the big cities during the day, and then tonight is propped up by the folks who get sick of their families and need to get out of the house. Think of the later as the midnight entry invitation to the Vanity Fair party, they show up to keep the party going on but the overall effect is pretty slight.
Tomorrow goes back to the normal ‘compromise’ of holiday audiences, and because of the way the holidays are set up this year, all the days are pretty good until Sunday the 5th. But today (and to a certain extent tomorrow) is where the films that opened last Friday can show us that they’re tipping once moviegoers aren’t so busy. 7 years ago, Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle opened to a number very similar to what Mufasa opened to this year, and received the same ’shouldn’t this be better?’ treatment from the press. But on Christmas Day it sprung to life and ended up as a big hit at the end of the day. As I’ve said over the last couple of weeks, you play long this time of year, and today is the day where films show what they really are.
The flip side of today vs the rest of the holiday period; because today is so unique in audience skew, tomorrow’s numbers can come crashing down. Just look at last year; WB did an amazing job of getting The Color Purple open to a head spinning $18.1 million on Christmas Day. But there was no depth to the audience and that Christmas Day gross ended up being 30% of the total gross once it played out. So today is great, but when you don’t have any depth to the skew of the film (or iffy playability), today’s gross isn’t predictive of long term success. Christmas is just weird.
All 4 of the films going wide today are going to be interesting to see as they play tomorrow and throughout the holiday period. Sometimes you don’t know what the audience is until you look at where tomorrow is in relation to today. Because it’s so iffy, I’m only going to talk about todays’ grosses, and I’m not going to take a shot at what the rest of the next 4 days is going to look like. I’m not planning on writing you again until January 10 (there are no wide films this Friday or next Friday), but if there’s something interesting going on this Friday, I’ll write something.
Anyway, with the same expected accuracy of any data where you can’t really do a deep dive because people keep coming over (and that’s the case today), but here’s some half assed opinions on today’s box-office.e
Mufasa: The Lion King - And……..cue the ‘Jumanji’ bounce. Even though the press was dying to label this a ‘bomb’ last Friday, cooler heads prevailed (for the most part) and it’s having a great day today. It’s up a very similar % that Jumanji was up from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day, and it looks like a really positive day of $13 million or so.
Nosferatu - I was really wary of this film on Christmas Day, because we’ve never had a successful Vampire movie on Christmas Day, but since this is less of a Vampire Movie than Robert Eggers film turned up to Eggers 💯, the cineste’s are out in force today and this is pulling really big numbers; and that’s the interesting aspect to what’s going on here. Being the cineste’s they are, they want to see this in IMAX and that sell figured prominently in the campaign. Only one small issue, Mufasa has the bulk of the IMAX showtimes and (for the most part) they’ve only got the 10pm show in each complex. So those shows are sold out and those big city theaters aren’t really growing today. Where they don’t have IMAX, they’re growing pretty normally but this film (today) shows how we really need more Large Format infrastructure in this sector, you could only imagine what this film would be doing today with more Large Format capacity. This looks like 9 or 10 today, but they did some shows last night that might push that higher.
Sonic 3 - The younger the film, the less it does today and this film is only up a little from yesterday; looks like about $9 million today.
A Complete Unknown - They had a decent opening day yesterday, considering they opened a film on a shitty day like Christmas Eve. But day two is much better, I always thought this film was pretty well positioned for today; it’s older, male and of the 4 films opening yesterday and today, it always felt like a decent compromise film. We’ll have to see how this holds up over the next couple of weeks and how deep the audience goes, the campaign always felt a little ’secret handshakey’, so I’m not sure where this goes once they run through the Dylan fans. But today it looks like a nice $6 million to $7 million.
Babygirl - There are two films I’m the most interested in when we get to tomorrow, Nosferatu and this film. The audience here is clearly females and they don’t generally go on their own on Christmas Day, where older males are a dead bullseye today (and that’s why Nosferatu is soaring today). This isn’t very good today, but I’m not sure today is predictive of the rest of the run. This looks like $1.3 million or so today.
The Fire Inside - Looking way better in the AA theaters today, but it’s not adding up to much today. Looks like a little over a million today, plus whatever they did yesterday.
Everyone have a great holiday, I’ll speak to you again on the 10th.