Memorial Day weekend 2025
As you probably have heard, this should be a monster weekend at the box-office, although I’m not sure if we’ll break the record set back in 2013 when Fast and Furious 6 and Hangover 3 led the pack. But just like that year, the box-office is healthiest when we’ve got a deep supporting cast, especially the holdover films. Back in 2013, in addition to the 2 headliners we had Epic from Fox/Blue Sky, which generated $33 million; plus we had a Star Trek movie (Into Darkness), Ironman 3 and Great Gatsby still pulling in decent gross. This year we’ve got 3 strong contributors in Final Destination, Sinners and Thunderbolts, plus an Angel Studios film; so we’re having a nice weekend because of contributions from a lot of different angles. We should easily double last year’s Memorial Day weekend (Garfield, Furiosa and Sight) and because the new films the week after Memorial Day were pretty much MIA last year, we should triple 2024’s total next weekend. So by the time we get past next weekend we’ll be at least 20% ahead of 2024.
I speak often here about how IP casts a shadow over all of our existences these days, and how different forms of IP value need to be considered, such as a movie star having Theatrical IP value vs Television IP value. But we’ve got a movie this weekend where the IP is so unique that it’s something I’ve never considered, at least in as pure a form as it’s coming through today. When Lilo & Stitch opened back in June 2002, it was a middling Disney Animation release and kinda came and went, opening to $35 million, about the same thing a middling Fox Animation film like Epic opened to 11 years later. But in the 23 years since, one part of this IP seems to have blossomed into something spectacular that’s driving the top tier box-office this weekend. I’ve heard a lot of talk around town that this is what it is because of Disney +, and it’s a similar situation as we had last Thanksgiving with Moana 2. That might be the usual industry laziness, because Moana 2 was an outlier on the platform and I hear the original Lilo & Stitch was good, but nothing that would predict this type of outcome. In fact, when the teaser for this dropped last Thanksgiving, would you have any idea that this formerly ‘middling’ Disney IP would cast an IP shadow bigger than Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Coco, Snow Wh…anyway, it’s an outlier and it’s IP reach is now closer to Lion King, Toy Story or Incredibles.
But apparently this is a one hander, and the lynchpin of this success is all tied to the character of Stitch, who apparently is to young girls what Loki is to boys and Roger Stone is to older MAGA males. And the accelerant of this character’s popularity seems to be coming from the consumer products part of the Disney empire, in addition to whatever the historical creative contributed. As we figure out new ways to get consumers into theaters, and the traditional means of activating fanbases keep getting muddier (such as linear TV), Disney seems to have found an anchor point in those consumer products that carried much more weight than what we would normally see. And that could explain an IP punching way above its box-office weight based on the history of the IP. Of course, some of you are saying ‘what about Barbie?’; this seems a little different and like I said above ‘it’s a little more pure’ from the consumer product source. Barbie was broader and one of the whole points of the Barbie IP (and the story of the movie) was her cut and paste ability to be anything. This character is so specific, and based on all the sources of consumer activation for a movie we would normally see (such as fan ship for the original movie) this shouldn’t be happening at this level. Or at least we haven’t seen it carry this much of the weight, and what’s happening here is something new.
But all this wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t for good research to identify this point of attachment, and although a lot of you who get this find that part of our industry ‘challenging’, solid long range positioning research probably unearthed the character stickiness that Disney is running with today. And of all the parts of the industry that get no love, they are some of the most unloved. We all know how the post mortem blame game goes after a rough opening; Production blames Marketing, Marketing blames Research (or Distribution), the next time you see your research people, give them a fist bump (you can’t hug anymore, right?), they get no love. But they probably had a decent part of this success.
One last thing on this movie, because this movie is really living off of one character, would this movie even ever get made if it was 100% live action instead of the animation/live action hybrid? Just having Stitch’s agent saying ‘Lilo who?’ during the deal process probably would have derailed the whole thing unless they changed the title to Stitch!.
Anyway, based on something I learned from Bill Belichik’s Raya profile, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
One of the things that makes our business soar is when we have films going at different sections of the moviegoing consumer, and these two films seem to be going at a completely different consumer. Stitch! is really good in the red states and the suburbs and MI is good on the coasts and in the cities. In the theaters that are almost always on the top of the gross sheet in the big cities, Mission: Impossible is #1 and in the better red state theaters in Florida, Utah and Texas, Stitch! is #1. So we’ve got a nice 1 2 punch this weekend.
Stitch! Lilo & Stitch - Clearly they had a great opening day yesterday, and they’ve had a great day today. As I just said it’s best in the red states and (obviously) the Disney strongholds, but the key thing here will be tonight. It will be interesting to see how late it plays, because we’ve seen female skewing films of this size like Barbie hit a wall at night. But we’ve also seen films like Minecraft keep going during the evening (at this point on opening day we thought it was a little over 100 for the weekend, instead of the 163 it ended up at). At this point it looks like it’s at least $130 in 3 days and $160 in 4, which is just crazy considering the history of this IP.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning - What’s interesting about this franchise is the stability, and what’s somewhat frustrating about this franchise is the stability. Even since this franchise was revived with Ghost Protocol in 2011 with a creative IMAX only release the week before Christmas, they’ve been opening in the same 50/60 million range. Meanwhile Tom Cruise + the Top Gun IP opens to double that, so it’s probably the IP. And that might be because they seem to be making the same movie over and over again from that IP. Of course, the movie they keep making over and over again is a really good movie, so if they hadn’t kept the quality as high as they have, they would have seen a lot of decay off that opening gross. The grosses today are better than any of the MI films, and they have a marketplace leg up on Stitch!, because MI has all the IMAX theaters and a good share of the non IMAX Large Format theaters, but they also have a movie that’s almost 3 hours long and a core audience that could best be described as Males Waaaay over. So they’ll hit a wall at 8pm (and maybe 7pm) tonight. Still should be good enough for the best opening weekend of the series with a 3 day in the mid 60’s and a shot at 80 in 4.
The Last Rodeo - As I’ve pointed out before, Angel seems to operate in a walled garden, and with few exceptions all their films gross about the same, probably because the sales are driven by in house memberships. This is no exception, and it’s almost dollar for dollar identical to the last film they dropped into a marketplace buzzsaw (Bonhoeffer against Wicked and Gladiator II), so figure it’s the same $5 million in 3, and $6 million in 4.
Friendship - They expanded to 1000 runs (where they should have started 2 weeks ago) and once again it’s really good. Looks like a 3 day of about $4 million and a 4 day just under $5 million.
Jane Austin Wrecked My Life - Went 60 runs and there’s not much going on. Even the A+ upscale theaters like Lincoln Sq and The Grove aren’t anything.