Fourth weekend of March 2025

The Legendary free March nightmare continues this week. Although we’ve got 4 new titles going wide, they’re only going to add up to less than half of what Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire opened to last year. So once again we’ll gross less than half of what we did on the same weekend last year. Things get better once we turn the calendar page to April, and although it’s not going to be a big difference (to make up what we lost in March), it should be a net positive. May should be better on an overall basis than last year too, so once we start hitting the summer movies we should be back in the plus column compared to last year.

Each week when I write this, there’s occasionally a moment right after I hit ’send’ where I say to myself ‘well that was just okay’, and then I open some wine and forget about it. That’s the way I felt last week (except for the wine part), but then I got a couple responses from you saying you really liked it, which I really appreciate. But then a couple responses came in that took everything in a completely different direction, and as the old saying goes ‘hilarity ensued’.

After I pointed out how aspects of Snow White got beat up because the film as a whole didn’t succeed and wasn’t successful at the box-office; aspects like a non White actress in a lead role or the way they were portraying the Dwarfs (or at least the original iteration of the Dwarfs). But a film like Wicked had similar aspects and got a pass because it was wildly successful, and I only thought of the casting of Elphaba as an example. Oh, but no no no, I apparently didn’t go nearly dark enough in my thinking, because a couple of you felt compelled to point out that there was something else in Wicked that got a pass. The girl in the Wheelchair. The online mob might have put this out there already, but it was new to me so I’ll share what came at me last Friday night……

• ‘So they have a school where literally everyone there can do magic, but they can’t perform some magic on the girl in the wheelchair so she doesn’t need a wheelchair?’
• ‘Wicked has a school where magic makes animals talk (and teach) but they still can’t get a girl out of a wheelchair?’
• ‘Wicked won an Oscar for Production Design but the girl in the wheelchair has a wheelchair that’s off the shelf at CVS. If the film hadn’t been so successful they wouldn’t have won the Oscar’.
• ‘Galinda uses her magic to create a bubble to fly around in and Elphaba uses her magic so she can travel on a household cleaning tool, but they won’t share either trick with the girl in the wheelchair to get her out of her CVS Wheelchair? So Mean Girls.’

But when you fly at the altitude that a lot of you who get this attain, details like this are really important and there’s such a thin margin between something wildly creative and something that will come off as ‘checking a box’. Both Hamilton and Bridgerton had an element that made the other unconventional angles work, in those cases the music seemed to be the glue. On the flip side there’s Mary Queen of Scots a couple of years ago that used Hamilton rules and came off as a mess. Even something like Anyone But You dodged the mob by being successful, but when you do Much Ado About Nothing and shove in a Lesbian couple as the pair getting married without any other LGBT characters at their wedding, you checked a box and you’re begging the mob to come get you.

There’s nothing wrong with having a character in a wheelchair, but do you want to make it make sense in the world you’ve built or are you checking a box?

Anyway, based on something I learned from a Signal group chat, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Disney’s Snow White - Continuing on the thread here of how success changes everything, this film got beat up with sentiments such as ‘how could they remake that movie, the original was nearly perfect, it’s another corporate money grab’. But Disney actually already remade Snow White, but it was actually more of a prequel/origin story and it was called Inside Out, and the Dwarfs (which were essentially Snow White’s emotions, including Sneezy because Cocaine was legal back then) just became emotions inside Snow White’s head. But Inside Out was wildly successful, but if it wasn’t, the reviews of ’smart and original’ would have been closer to ‘another corporate money grab based on IP that shouldn’t have been touched’. Back to today, the beatings this film has been taking are showing up in the grosses today. The big question here is what it does tomorrow? Last weekend it was notoriously flat Friday to Saturday, and if it does the same thing this weekend, we could have a race for #1. However, I’ll say it has a normal family Saturday bounce and it looks down 55% for a weekend in the high teens.

A Working Man - It’s interesting how some stars have IP that puts it in a particular place box office wise, and unless they mess it up, it stays there. Jason Statham elevated his box-office IP last year with The Beekeeper, which took his box-office from a place that usually landed in the high single digits to the mid teens. Even though this film didn’t quite get the critical love or strong exits that Beekeeper got, it’s looking very similar right now, and that’s probably a testament to Statham’s current star power and MGM doing a nice job of leveraging it (again). Looks like a weekend of about $14 million or so.

The Chosen: Last Supper - These theatrical debuts of the popular The Chosen TV series can go all over the place, but this one looks on the high end of them. The best gross came from Season 3, Episode 1 and 2, which grossed just short of $9 million and this looks a little less than that. Looks like a weekend of about $7 million.

The Woman in the Yard - The Blumhouse malaise continues, and this is looking like high single digits, maybe 7 or 8 million. However, the exits here are pretty bad, so we could see this gross leak as we get through the weekend.

Death of a Unicorn - This A24 comedy thriller had a ton of heat until it Premiered at SXSW, and the heat seemed to vanish once the critics weighed in. It’s just okay today, and only looking a little better than another edgy A24 film like X. Exits seem to align with the 2 1/2 star reviews and are just okay, but this looks like a weekend of about $5 million.

The Penguin Lessons - Went 1000 theaters and these penguins are pretty dead. Maybe $700k or so for the weekend.

The Friend - Went exclusive in 2 NY runs (the Angelika and the Lincoln Sq) and it’s really good. Figure a psa of about $45k.