First weekend of April 2025
As I’ve said here over and over again, one of the original Studio heads (I think it was Harry Cohn at Columbia) was asked by the press why the box-office was in such a slump in the mid-30’s, and his response was ’there is nothing wrong with the business that a couple of good films can’t fix’. So, yeah, it’s the movies, stupid. And there are a couple of ways the box-office gods show up and films go crazy at the box-office; the most common way they make everything do more business is to fire the head of the studio, then the slate they leave behind does a ton of business (i.e. Jim Gianopulos at Paramount). But it seems like our friends in the entertainment press have kicked the box-office gods into action, and by unfairly writing the obits for WB, WB now will have the biggest opening of 2025.
More on that below, but it looks like April will get us back to the plus column when compared to last year. We’ll pretty much double the total from this weekend last year (Monkey Man, The First Omen, Wicked Little Letters), and when you look at the main difference between this year and last year for March, it was the absence of Legendary. And the difference between this year and last year in April will be….Legendary. I wouldn’t say Legendary is the new Disney, but it’s a very similar effect. It doesn’t look like WB will relinquish the #1 spot for most of this month, so hopefully this will quiet the press down and let some folks at WB do their job without the unnecessary clutter of an unfair press. I’d love to see some of the entertainment writers try to do their jobs if they had front page articles about how they were about to be fired because no one is reading them.
For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been on Vacation all week, so I didn’t go to CinemaCon this week. But it was pretty amusing to me that quite a few folks texted me and pointed out that a lot of the keynote speeches (especially at the beginning of the week) ’sounded like I had my hand up the back of their shirt and it was me talking’, since it was the same ideas I’ve brought up here. And it’s really cool that theatrical is beginning to get its mojo back, and it’s even better that a lot of the stuff I write here is framed as ‘wouldn’t it be nice if……’, and then it’s being embraced by people in the business who actually have a shot at getting it done. Clearly we’ve got a lot of work to do, but the transition over the last 5 years from the bargain basement economics of streaming to the premium revenue economics of theatrical and various VOD tiers is stunning.
The one thing that cracked me up this week is when someone texted me about some of my points being used in a speech, and why I’m a little weird for not wanting credit. And I’m cool with that, I’ll get mad at folks for forwarding but I’m cool with you quoting me. So…you can quote me but don’t quote me.
Anyway, with the same accuracy as a White Lotus floating body prediction, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
A Minecraft Movie - There’s a couple of things here that should be pointed out.
First of all, remember back in September when the teaser for this film dropped and the mob decided this film was a bomb? How did that work out? Let’s make this clear, WB/Legendary crushed this from top to bottom and clearly activated the fanship of this massive video game IP, and it’s entirely possible that the first teaser spoke clearly to the fanbase, but not to the mob; so in this case the mob’s reaction was not predictive.
But there’s another trend here, ‘vintage’ video game IPs keep generating massive box office. Super Mario Brothers, Five Nights at Freddy’s and now Minecraft, all have been crafted into substantial box-office. In the past, making video game IP into a movie happened when the game was still in its heyday of usage, but the fans never showed up to the movie because they were busy playing the game. Seems like nostalgia video game movies are what works, and you don’t have the game play cluttering the attendance.
The one other aspect here that’s incredibly encouraging is that this film is playing broad. And by broad, I mean it’s good on the coasts, it’s good in the Red States, it’s good everywhere….it’s super broad. But let’s also not forget one really important aspect of why WB/Legendary crushed this campaign. It looks entertaining and funny, and on a day like today it’s a great way to shut everything down, go to a theater and laugh. So placing this on a date where it could soar is one more angle that made this opening what it is. Theaters got the country through the pain of the 30’s, we had a banner year in 2009 when the world seemed to be falling apart, but as I’ve said here before we’ve kind of ceded comedy to the streamers. We still need to get it back, and there’s a lot of box-office to be had when the audience is laughing. This looks like an easy $100 million this weekend, but with IP’s like this it could always be front loaded, and tomorrow could take it one way or another. The exits so far are pretty good, and actually very good for the family audience, so whatever it does tomorrow could push it a decent amount higher.
The Chosen Last Supper Episode 2 - Just like the last couple of these big screen showings of the TV show, they decay pretty quickly. This episode is about half of what episode 1 looked like, so figure it’s about $6 million or so.
The Friend - Bleecker expanded from their very successful NY exclusive last week and it’s now on 1200 screens. As you would guess it’s pretty coastal, but looks good enough for $1.5 million or so.
Hell of a Summer - Went 1200 runs and it’s got some decent numbers in NY and LA, but there’s not much going on elsewhere. Looks like about $1.5 million.