Second weekend of January 2025

Since way too many of you who get this have lost homes, it’s difficult to write this today. But every time I’ve been through terrible losses, somehow normal workflow gets me through it, so I decided to write today. But, as always if you need anything from me, don’t hesitate to ask.

Even though there’s a significant difference in the revenue of the new films this year compared to the same weekend last year (Mean Girls, The Beekeeper, The Book of Clarence), the high quality of holdovers this year should keep us pretty close in total gross. However, last year this was MLK weekend and if you normalize last weekend for this non MLK weekend, the total grosses would be very close. The bad news is that I don’t see a lot of big films for a while, so the first quarter this year won’t look much different than last year.

As I told you before we adjourned for the Holidays, this was going to be a wacky and unpredictable Christmas season (even by Christmas standards), but it really over delivered in wackiness and I’m still trying to figure out why things happened the way they happened. Even though the audience that shows up on Christmas day and the audience that shows up in the days after can be very different, usually the exit polls can give you a good indication of where things are heading. But this year it was the exact opposite of what those polls told us.

Based on what the exit polls told us, A Complete Unknown and The Fire Inside were going to hold extremely well, and both Nosferatu and Babygirl were going to struggle to hang on. But when you look at the ‘Golden 12’ days from Christmas Day to the 5th of January (when the calendar aligns this way,12 days is a more appropriate slice of time instead of the standard ‘Golden 8’), here’s what the 12 golden days look like as a multiple of Christmas Day:

• The Fire Inside - 4.2
• A Complete Unknown - 5.8
• Nosferatu - 6.0
• Babygirl - 10.4

So Babygirl polled the worst (by far), and held the best after Christmas Day (by far). Wacky*. So why did Babygirl out perform it’s exit polls by so much? There could be a couple of reasons.

First, it could be that the audience that shows up on Christmas Day isn’t the same as the audience that showed up the next couple of days, and the Christmas Day audience wasn’t predictive; but the polling numbers didn’t seem to change as more sample came in during the next couple of days. It could be that the methodology the exit poll companies use is faulty and sloppy, which if you’ve seen it in person, is entirely possible. But let’s put that all aside and say it’s something that’s inherent with polling methodology; polling bias. When you poll consumers they can give you faulty data, and they’re not lying to you or trying to deceive the pollster, they just want to give the ‘right’ answer. Just look at election polling lately, and even though a lot of attention has been paid to the error rate in the results, the error was actually in who said they were definitely going to show up to vote, but didn’t. It’s something we face on a weekly basis here, so welcome to box-office forecasting…..

So how did that bias show up in the Babygirl exit polls? Similar to the way Romy has spent a long marriage not sharing what she wants with her husband in the movie, did moviegoers have an issue sharing the idea that they liked the behavior in the movie with pollsters? There are a lot of very personal and private ideas in that movie, and since the whole point of the movie is sharing your private thoughts and wants, maybe that’s the same disconnect in the polling data. This happens quite a bit during test screenings with movies that have sexual or personal aspects, and sometimes you can find clues in the data that tell us the difference in what the audience is saying and what they really mean, but sometimes you can’t. Especially when you’re trying to compare the audience at screening #1 to the audience at screening #2. Just one more reason that says ’this business is hard’.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera - Lion’s Gate has been beaten up lately about the marketing spend on their wide releases, and they’ve been through a rough patch. But too often I kept hearing the blowback (on their spending) and would think to myself ‘why would you chase that movie with a bigger spend?’, so it all made sense to me. Like I’ve said here several times, it’s not what you gross, it’s what you keep. So now we have this film; and with that same level of spend we’ve seen lately, it’s going to open to about the same number as Den of Thieves, which opened in 2018 with a lot more spent on TV. The one thing that’s completely different about the audience on this film compared to Den of Thieves is that Den of Thieves was driven by the AA audience, but the sequel today is really hot with the Hispanic audience and Los Angeles is dominating the top grosses. The AA audience is there, but this is a very hispanic skew this time. This looks like a weekend of 14 or 15.

Gamechanger - This big budget Bollywood film is just okay. Went on 800 screens and looks a little better than $1.5 million for the weekend.

The Last Showgirl - Went 900 theaters and it’s nothing special overall, but it does have some pretty good grosses in the art skewing theaters in NY and LA. Looks like $1.3 million or so.

Better Man - Went 1200 runs and there’s not much going on here at all. Maybe $1 million for the weekend.

The Fountainhead with Heroin Brutalist - They expanded to 66 runs and added 15 markets, and the grosses are for the most part very good, the grosses go pretty deep and this is clearly getting some benefit from the wins at the globes. What’s extra impressive about these grosses is that this film is long, and they can only have 2 shows a day, plus they need more time between shows because it takes a while to go around waking the audience up. Looks like an impressive psa for the weekend in the high teens.

Hard Truths - Went 22 runs in 9 markets and they have a pretty massive gross in Lincoln Square (probably with Q and A’s), and some really nice grosses in the better NY and LA theaters. Depending on what that Lincoln Sq gross looks like the rest of the weekend, figure a nice psa of $10k or so.

The rest of the Holdovers - Since we were still in a Holiday period last Friday, everything is way down today. But it’s still a pretty good weekend and the leaders from last week (Mufasa, Sonic) will be down about 50% this weekend. But consistent with what we’ve been seeing since Christmas, the film with the smallest drop today is Babygirl, followed by A Complete Unknown (which had good exits) and Nosferatu. Those films have a shot at being down around 40% this weekend.

• yes, that was a smutty single entendre