First weekend of June 2025

On this weekend last year, Bad Boys: Ride or Die jump started the box-office that (up til that weekend) was in a slump. But even though we’ve got nothing new this year close to that $56.5 million weekend, the deep roster of holdovers should give us another win over last year. Next weekend I don’t see a path to a win over last year because Inside Out 2 was such a monster at $154 million, but we’ve got a couple of films next week that might break out and slow the bleeding a little. The last two weeks of June could go either way, but should be close. But at this point we’ve got a 25% cushion over last year so if we have a week here and there where we give some back, it’s not terrible.

In today’s edition of ‘this business is hard’, female lead action movies. As a sector, theatrical has always pushed boundaries and told stories that moved the social needle. But sometimes physics gets in the way, and as much as we’ve run with the ‘women/girls can do anything men/boys can do’, there’s only so far we can take the movie magic before physics gets in the way. Action movies with female badasses have struggled, but before we start looking at gender, I’m wondering if it’s not that simple. Could it be just a matter of size?*

Looking at Action movies with female leads, there seems to be a difference between a female lead that could plausibly kick ass, and a waif. Charlize Theron (Fury Road and Atomic Blonde), Angelina Jolie (Mr. and Mrs. Smith** and Wanted) and Gal Godot (Wonder Woman) come to mind as actors who have a sturdier look to them (and in Gal’s case, military credibility), and have done a little better at the box-office than the waifs, so when you apply a little movie magic the audience buys it. But let’s take gender out of this and look at the guys too.

It’s no coincidence that every action movie with a male badass, be it a SuperHero film or a standard action film, has Doctors nutritionists on call to beef up the guys. And beefy they do get, look at the difference between Alexander Skarsgard in The Northman vs pretty much everything else he’s done, being bigger reads better in the film for that story. So we condition the audience that ‘mass kicks ass’, and if we throw a waify male out there in an action movie, such as Rami Malek in The Amateur, there’s a ceiling to the success.

There are some exceptions though, and if you’ve got IP that comes from another medium a smaller thinner actor seems to work. Timothee Chalamet comes to mind in Dune, he’s not really a big dude but since the character existed on the page before as someone who might not have been physically threatening, it worked. Brie Larson as Captain Marvel seemed to work but she’s probably closer to average size than waif size, but in the minds of the fans of the character, she seemed to fit. Maybe that’s the Mendoza line for this type of role, average is cool (such as Keanu Reeves), but when you can touch your thumb to your middle finger around their thigh, it’s ‘oh, come on’.

And here’s why this is important. The audience for action movies is Male, and mostly males over, and we’re not a very free thinking group. For the most part, there’s not a big enough difference in the gender split when you have a female lead in an action movie (Wonder Woman was the outlier, but that came from the IP source), so until the girls start showing up in big numbers, you’re going to have to cater to the core fans. So optical physics matters and you need to get rid of the ‘oh, come on’.

I’m only bringing this up because there will be inevitable comparisons in the press this weekend between Furiosa and Ballerina, and that’s probably a little lazy. First of all, one of them was made for about 1/3 of what the other was, but this isn’t a gender issue, it’s a physicality issue. Would The Amatuer have been better at the box-office with an actor who made a little more sense as an action hero? Maybe, but the same probably goes for Ke Huy Quan in Love Hurts, so as much as we like to bring the movie magic, you maybe have to start with an actor who doesn’t skip legs day (or the rest of the body part days).

The fact that female led action movies are doing as well as they are doing, means there’s something there; but if you want to shoot for the stars box-office wise, optics are clearly important. Both Anya Taylor-Joy and Ana de Armas are two of our finest young actors today (same for Oscar winners Rami Malek and Ke Huy Quan), but American theatrical consumers are struggling with the illusion of badassery when they are so slight in physical stature. It’s not like this is the only type of film where you need a certain trait with good box-office IP, and there just aren’t many candidates. Just ask any casting director for a Polynesian actor with IP and you get ‘well there’s The Rock….and……’.

Anyway, with the same expected accuracy as a Government employee’s key card getting a green light on a Friday when they get to work, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Lilo & Stitch - Looks pretty good today, should be down about 40% for a weekend in the mid/high 30’s.

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina - Lion’s Gate did everything they could to make this a John Wick movie, it’s in the title, he’s in the movie and he was in the materials. But as hard as they tried to reposition this as a John Wick film, the consumer saw it as a spin off, and this character doesn’t quite have the fanship that John Wick has. It’s still at the high end of what we see from female led action films and looks like a weekend in the high 20’s with a shot at 30.

Mission Impossible: The Last Reckoning - Good but not great today, figure it’s off 45% for a weekend in the mid teens.

The Phoenician Scheme - When I called last week’s limited release ‘stupid’ I wasn’t referring to Focus or even the previous custodian of Wes Anderson films, (Fox) Searchlight. This was more a filmmaker thing of ‘we always do it this way’, and each distributor of his films has agreed to the limited engagement as part of the deal. And it’s been a pretty successful strategy, but I’m always wondering if they can do better (and trust me, I’ve tried to change this but I’ve given up). Since Wes Anderson is as big a director IP as there is, there’s just no need to go limited to get the word out; like you needed to do early in his career with Bottle Rocket or Rushmore. Focus came up with a campaign that made this look as broad as a Wes Anderson film has looked in a while, plus they have ridiculous casts now, so just the star power alone cries out for an immediate wide release. But here’s the problem, Wes Anderson is to moviegoing consumers like anchovies are to Caesar salads. If you love it you can’t get enough of it, and if you don’t it’s repulsive. So when you have as good a campaign as Focus generated here to make this broader, the last thing you need is for the word of mouth from the limited run saying ‘no, it’s the same Wes Anderson experience, if you don’t dig it stay away’; that’s why I think they should have just gone wide on tier 1. The grosses today are similar to what we saw last week in the limited runs, it’s about 70% of what Asteroid City did and looks like about $6 million right now with an upside.

Dangerous Animals - Went 1000 runs and doesn’t look like much, maybe $1 million for the weekend.

The Life of Chuck - Went 16 runs in 8 markets and it’s just okay. Los Angeles and Austin are a little better than the rest, but lower Manhattan, Chicago and Boston are pretty soft. Figure a psa in the low teens.

*that’s what she said….rimshot

** who was a last minute replacement for Nicole Kidman, could you imagine the difference in that movie with waify Nicole Kidman? Yikes.