Third weekend of June 2025

Because the new films last year were soft (Bikeriders, The Exorcism, Thelma) I thought this weekend had a shot at coming close to last year’s total, but it looks like we’re going to be about $20 million shy of last year. Because Inside Out 2 had an outlier hold (-34%, but actually an amazing -28% if you don’t pretend count the Thursday opening day as part of Friday), that $101 million it grossed was just a little too high of a hill to climb. So we’ll give a little more of the surplus we collected in April and May back, and we’ll probably see about the same thing next week. But the next couple of weeks (if the blue chip IP tentpoles deliver) should put us back in the black for a couple of weeks.

Yesterday was an interesting day at the box-office, a lot of folks were off work (including a lot of the studios and agencies) and it was a pretty good day at the box-office. As we see the holiday evolve (a lot of people, including me, didn’t realize a lot of businesses were closed until yesterday), this could be a nice destination point for releases. However, since it’s attached to a specific date like Christmas and Veteran’s Day instead of a day in the week like Memorial Day or President’s Day, we’ll see different levels of marketplace lift depending on what day it falls on each year. Once we get through this weekend and take a look at what % of the reported 3 day the Thursday gross is (vs a norm of about 10% for an adult film like 28 Years Later and high single digits for a Disney June title), we’ll have a better idea what kind of a lift it’s giving us.

Anyway, I had the most beautiful funny line for this space, and I’ll tell you in two weeks (maybe), but here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

How to Train Your Dragon - Looks good but not great today, the drop is about 20 points behind where Inside Out 2 was at on it’s 2nd Friday, but there’s no doubt this should win the weekend. Figure it’s down 55% or so for a weekend around 40.

28 Years Later - When the trailer dropped for this film last Christmas, it got a lot of attention from both the consumer and the industry. Industry wise, it was one of those trailers where folks who make trailers said ’that’s impressive’, and it went on to win some awards as well. There was a 2nd part though, and once industry people started seeing the film the reaction was ‘if you think the campaign is good now, wait till you see the movie, then you’ll see they did something really spectacular because the movie they’re selling ain’t close to the movie it is.’ And looking at the exit polls and the audience reactions, you can now see what they are talking about, the audience reactions are pretty soft. And once again we have a situation where the critics see a film one way and yells Bravo! but the audience sees it another way and says whaaa?, but it’s especially prevalent in Horror.

But here’s where there can be an issue to get to where this movie got, Marketing departments have a duty to find a way into a movie that gets as many people in to see it as possible, and doing a ‘cheat’ can be part of the process. A lot of you have been in a conference room during the ‘dog and pony’ that lays out the campaign, and the reaction from filmmakers can go towards ‘but that’s not what the movie is’. Unfortunately, too often what the movie ‘is’ gets it to a fraction of the opening that the marketing can get it to based on a cheat; but it’s difficult for a filmmaker to understand that in order to get a substantial audience, you can’t say what the movie is. We saw a similar situation last week with Materialists, and it leaned heavily on the standard Rom Dram/Com first half of the film, instead of the critic friendly but audience averse 2nd half.

So it will be interesting to see where this goes this weekend, and how the ‘cheat’ here wanders into the playability. It’s possible the campaign was so good that it fights through the word of mouth, or it could see some decay as the weekend unfolds. But apparently it’s not a terribly expensive movie (it was shot on iPhones, seriously, yes, it was 100% shot on iPhones), and the marketing spend looked lower to me than what we would normally see this time of year. Depending on how it plays out, it should end up anywhere from the high 20’s to the low 30’s.

Elio - This movie is probably the last of the ‘experimental’ period for Pixar/Disney Animation, and they probably learned a lot about their core fan base in the process. One of the great things about Disney’s rich history is their lead characters are someone you would aspire to, especially if you’re a kid. Their Female skewing films all go to a variation on ‘Princess’ and the Male ones go towards hero. But looking at the lead in this film feels like someone had a special needs kid in their personal universe, and wanted to show other kids their world; and that goes to a creators core, write what you know. And having a kid with an eyepatch seems mild, but unless that other eye shoots laser beams, it’s not terribly aspirational. So you end up with a film that just doesn’t activate the Disney fan base for a very human reason, no one wants to be that kid. And when a studio that makes massive hits about death…for kids (Coco), but can’t make it work, no one can. There are signs all over the grosses today that this was rejected by the core Disney audience. There’s a theater in South Salt Lake City that is almost always in the top 5 Disney grosses (or any family title) that’s buried deep in the gross sheet, and is actually being outgrossed by the R rated British Zombie Movie shot on an iPhone. The exits are good here, so this should play pretty normally, but for now this looks like a weekend of around $20 million.

Materialists - Normally I wouldn’t cite a film of this size in its 2nd week, but there’s something kind of weird going on here. The exits here were not great, and after seeing the film last Friday and Saturday*, I totally understood the exit polls. The film makes some really interesting choices in the 2nd half, and doesn’t follow the rom/com/dram template. But maybe there’s some resonance to those choices because I thought this would be down about 20 more points today than it is. At this point it only looks down in the 40’s for a weekend in the high 6’s.

Bride Hard - From the director of Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up video, this went 1000 theaters and there’s not much going on here, maybe a little more than $1 million for the weekend.

• This is the downside of digital projection systems, the theater I was at (Cinema West Beach Cities) has a centralized projection system and about 50 mins into the movie it went down, all 13 screens. They had to issue everyone refunds and I had to come back the next night to finish the movie.