Third weekend of May 2025

The box-office looks pretty good this weekend, and the same as we’ve seen lately, WB’s volcanic hot streak continues* and we should be a little better than the same weekend last year (If, The Strangers: Chapter 1, Back to Black, The Blue Angels). The next couple of weeks should be a blowout compared to last year with double and maybe even tripling the same weekend of 2024, and since we’re already about 15% ahead of last year, we should extend that lead significantly over the next couple of weeks.

There’s a really good reason WB has been hot lately, all three of their breakout hits have a core element to the marketing sell; you’re going to have a good time. And from the first trailer on Final Destination, they took the IP and walked it right up to the edge of the cliff where it could have become ‘campy’, but didn’t fall off the cliff. And that’s a super tricky balancing act to pull off.

Considering Horror can go a couple of different directions, and lately there have been quite a few films in this genre (mostly from the indie studios) that have taken it towards a darker ‘artier’ tone, having an IP like this where the idea is super clean and combining it with a promise of LOL’s leads to an exponential increase in box-office over the auteur Horror films. We saw this effect just recently during the Sinners campaign (without the LOL component), and by pivoting to a more genre based sell (Vampires are fun) instead of a darker tone that relied too much on the immense star power of the above the line elements, it grew from a $25 million opening to a $48 million opening.

But there’s a ‘part II and part III’ to every campaign when it comes to tone and positioning of the campaign, ‘will the movie deliver on that promise?’, and that comes into play once the film is about to open.

Part II is when the critics weigh in, and it always helps (even if the reviews are so so) when the critics echo what you’ve been saying in the campaign. When you’ve put a ton of stuff in your spots with claims of ‘it’s the funniest film of the year’ or something like that and the critical capsules on the front page of RT say it’s not funny, the air comes out of the balloon really fast. And then Part III is what the audience sees once the activated consumers buy a ticket and go; but both of these aspects are crucial. Often you’ll get pushback from film makers because they always think they know the best way to position the film, and the battle cry usually wanders one of two ways; ‘but that’s not what the movie is’ and ‘let’s surprise them’, and most of the time neither of those is the correct answer. And those conversations aren’t unusual on any given movie. How unusual? Somewhere between dropping an EarPod and it landing where you can reach it and overhearing a conversation in English at Costco on Sunday morning. In the case of Sinners, it’s interesting that the pivot into a more genre based sell actually meshed better with the audience reaction (and the critical reaction) to the movie, and we’ve seen that pivot pay off week after week in the holdover grosses.

So it’s great to have a ‘message’ movie, but if you want to get consumers to your movie in big numbers promise and deliver a good time for their money.

Anyway, with the same expected accuracy as pushing dos para Espanol on an Avelo airlines reservation line looking for an upgrade, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Final Destination: Bloodlines - Coming off a great opening day yesterday they’re having a terrific day today, and this will end up towards the high end of what we see with this genre. But looking at the history of this IP, there’s something interesting about certain IP’s, they seem to always work or they always don’t. This is the 6th Final Destination film and they’ve all worked at the box-office, but on the flip side another horror genre IP like The Thing dies every time. Going outside the genre, every version of A Star is Born has worked at the box-office. So when we look at rebooting/remaking IP’s that died the first (or 2nd or 3rd) time at the box-office, maybe it’s not the execution that’s the problem, maybe it’s the IP. The grosses here are very promising so far and where it’s doing business might be very good for it later in the evening. It’s not only playing strong in the usual A+ theaters, but there’s a strong AA and Hispanic component to the way it’s playing, so that usually means it’s going to keep growing late into the evening. It’s a little behind Sinners right now but that film had such a big PLF aspect, so it had better presales (normal for that format) but it tapped out with capacity later in the day. So this should blow by it tonight. Playability is very strong, so we shouldn’t see a horror falloff tomorrow. Figure it’s a spectacular result that should have a 5 in front of it.

Thunderbolts/Sinners - This looks like it could go either way this weekend, mostly because at this point it looks like the hispanic and AA audiences that are part of Marvel’s core are moving on to Final Destination, Sinners looks rock solid again. But there is a component this weekend with Sinners that I’ll call your attention to (again). They got their 70mm prints back and those theaters are crushing, not the 4DX runs or the smell-o-vision runs or whatever ‘of the moment’ format they’re in, it’s the 70mm runs that might make the difference between 2nd and 3rd place. There’s something here and we need more of it. Both look like $15 million or so.

Hurry Up Tomorrow - This musical featuring Abel Tesfaye, who used to be The Weekend but apparently no longer wants to be The Weekend, went in 2000 theaters and considering the critics beat it up pretty good, it’s not terrible today. The exits so far seem to agree with the critics so it could run out of gas pretty quickly, but for now it looks like mid 3’s.

Friendship - Expanded off the terrific NY/LA exclusive into about 20 more markets and added 55 theaters. The grosses are really good and go pretty deep, so as good as this is, it’s kind of a head scratcher why they didn’t go wide right away, nothing I’m seeing says this film cried out for a slow roll. This looks good enough to crack $1 million for the weekend, and on 60 runs, that’s pretty amazing.

• However, their next movie is a service deal with Apple and they seem to be going in the other direction, so if anyone can cool off WB, they might be able to.