Final weekend of January 2025
This weekend should be more of the same box-office as we’ve seen this year; compared to what we used to do it’s not that great, but compared to last year (Argyle, The Chosen Season 4) we’re up. Next week should be a little better than Super Bowl Weekend last year (Lisa Frankenstein), but the big IP’s coming on this Valentine’s Day should put us way ahead of last year. However, once March hits, we don’t have anything close to Dune 2 this year, so we’ll start falling behind.
Quite a few of you ask me ‘what’s next, what should I be making?’, and as much as I’d love to have that answer, I don’t. However, there are aspects to the box-office that just won’t go away and they probably deserve a little more attention than they’re getting. There’s a movie this weekend that’s a bit of a footnote in the big scheme of things, but what that movie ‘is’ screams for more attention.
Even though One of Them Days is only going to do about $6 million this weekend and come in 3rd, it was only down 32% last weekend and it looks like it will only be down 25% this weekend. So here’s an IP free film that didn’t cost a lot to make, Sony didn’t spend a lot to market, but (if the tea leaves tell me correctly) might end up with a 5 multiple of its opening 3 day that almost won it’s opening weekend. Clearly the execution is key here, but the two genres that are like Jello (there’s always room) are Comedy and Family, and it’s still amazing to me how we still just don’t seem to support comedy in the theatrical sector. Funny is really hard, but it’s a genre that has similar economics and returns as Horror (and actually carries a lot of the same storytelling characteristics like timing and surprise), but when it comes to resources it sure seems easier to be in the Horror business these days than the Comedy business; at least theatrically.
Anyway, with the same expected accuracy as the annoying AI in Apple Mail that changes what you wrote to what it thinks you should say (last week I typed in Emilia Perez and it changed it to Amelia Perez, but maybe it thought the French spelling was what I meant, which might be a valid point), here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
Dog Man - Like I just said there are two genres that we always have room for, and Family is one of them. You might not have known this, but this film is part of the CUCU, the Captain Underpants Cinematic Universe and this is the 2nd film based on the IP. The first film, Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie opened to $24 million back in June 2017 (when DWA was at Fox), and this film looks considerably better this weekend, but we’ve seen this in the past where Universal has improved upon the box-office results for DWA IPs that were at other studios. This looks a lot like The Wild Robot right now, but the exits so far say it doesn’t nearly have the playability, so figure it ends up in the low 30’s for the weekend.
Companion - We’ve been seeing some really interesting ways that the majors approach the marketing budget for films like this, and a couple of years ago Disney took an approach to the way they marketed Barbarian that was a tip of the hat to the way A24 does things, and there was very little TV. Since we have the same film maker here, it seemed logical to take the same approach, especially in these days of ‘it’s not what you make, it’s what you keep’, and it looks to me as the spend on this film was very similar to the spend on Barbarian. The results today look very similar too, and this looks like it’s headed to a nice weekend of about $10 million, although the exits are very good so we could see an upside as the weekend happens. Although it’s nice to see a profitable model used, I can’t help but wonder how much better all these films could have grossed if they had taken a little bigger swing with the marketing spend. But success is success and this is pretty good for what they spent.
One of Them Days - Audiences really want to have a good time when they go to the movies, and clearly this movie has amazing word of mouth. What’s extra interesting here is that it really doesn’t look that ethnically different now than it did opening weekend, it’s still very AA. So it’s generating this level of business, without crossing over to a non AA audience. Looks great at -25% for a weekend of around $6 million.
Valiant One - Went 1200 runs and there’s not much going on here, maybe $400k for 3 days.
Love Me - Went 500 runs and it’s headed to about $150k for the weekend.