First weekend of August 2025
Even though last year’s first weekend in August only had about $21 million in new title gross (Trap, Harold and the Purple Crayon) and we’re going to double that with this year’s new titles, the box-office shadow that Deadpool & Wolverine cast will give us another deficit of about 20% from last year’s weekend total. We should get much closer next weekend, but there’s a chance we’ll still keep giving a little of that surplus back. But at this point, it looks like September and October are going to be a wipeout compared to next year. We’ve got no answer for monsters like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and we might end up in a situation where we’d give a kidney for a Joker 2 gross. However, November and December should put us back in the black and we should be competitive or better than last year every weekend.
Anyway, with the same expected accuracy as the upcoming August Federal jobs report, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
Fantastic Four: First Steps - This movie had a really unusual weekend last weekend. It played like a $130 million opening on Thursday and Friday, and then it played like a $100 million opening on Saturday and Sunday. Normally we would see that kind of performance on a film that didn’t have great playability, but the exits were pretty good here. Today, it’s still acting like the playability is an issue, and the drop so far looks on the low side of what we see in 2nd weekends from Disney/Marvel. Since this IP has a sketchy history of quality, it’s possible the drops we’ve been seeing since last Saturday speak to the history of the IP, and one quality movie can only accomplish so much. The next dip into this IP is the next Avengers movie, so if that follows the same quality pattern as the most recent versions, the next time Disney does a standalone film with this IP we could see a significantly better decay off opening day. Right now the drop from last Friday looks like Thor: Love and Thunder, which also had an outsized Thursday gross (20% of the Opening weekend vs 22% on Fan Four, and they are usually in the mid teens), and that dropped 68% in weekend 2. Because this film plays better, let’s figure a drop of 65% or so for a weekend in the mid 30’s.
The Bad Guys 2 - It’s really interesting to see how the family films perform, and what’s interesting to watch is how different the various brands perform, probably based on their history and brand trust by Parents. Clearly the Disney castle rules and where Dreamworks was (at one time) the 2nd best family brand (and was very close to Disney), they’ve been passed by their Universal room mate Illumination. Because Universal gets a lot of reps in this genre, they’ve developed some consistency with Dreamworks, but outside of the IP’s that they inherited they still don’t have a big breakout with the originals they’re making. They’re doing solid work production wise between (Oscar Nominee) The Bad Robot, The Bad Guys and Dog Man but they’re still stuck in that middle tier gross range. Looking at the theaters doing business right now, it looks like they have some work to do in Conservative Red State America (like Salt Lake City) and with Hispanics. Those are two groups of consumers we generally see much better results with on Disney and Illumination films, but Parents trust brands so that makes sense. Looks a little better right now than The Bad Guys, but that opened in April so we won’t see the same bounce tomorrow. Figure it’s good enough today to make up for the smaller bounce tomorrow and it ends up a wash in the same low 20’s.
The Naked Gun - ‘Who are you and how did you get in here? I’m a locksmith and……I’m a locksmith’. Back in 1981, on the heels of the runaway success of Airplane!, the same trio took on Quinn Martin* with Police Squad. It debuted on ABC with some really brilliant writing and performances [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8PZFQz-qmo]; but America shrugged and it was immediately cancelled (they shot 6 episodes and only aired 4). But with VHS developing, a fanship followed and in 1988 the Police Squad Crew took a shot at Theatrical with Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad and it opened to #1, and then legged out to a 9 multiple of the opening weekend. Because of that success, the sequel Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear was given the prestigious ’June Tentpole Comedy’ slot and also debuted to #1 at an impressive (for the time) $20 million. But that’s when a problem arose that we’ve seen over and over again on Comedy sequels. The audience score for the Naked Gun sequel was okay at best, and then on Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult it got worse. If you look at the audience scores for the Austin Powers sequels, it’s the same thing, and the same for Anchorman 2. And if you talk to anyone who has fanship for those sequels, they’ll tell you they are the most hilarious movies of all time. But how can that be if they are so good and the theatrical exits are so low?
That’s the dirty little secret of this particular sub genre of Comedy, it’s generally of a lot of sketches put together to make a movie and the parts are better than the whole. For the first dip into the IP, that’s not a problem but because the comedy delivered and they don’t notice the cohesive and consistency issues, but the expectations go sky high for the sequel (because you remember the original being better than it was). But then it migrates to home viewing and by lowering the quality bar that comes with TV content, those parts were funny enough that it changes the fondness for the film. So it will be interesting to see how this film plays out and if the fanship sees it as a sequel (and judges it as such), or cuts it some slack and it’s closer to an original. As you can tell by my knowledge of the IP history, I’m a fan and plan to go see the film over the weekend; but what surprised me was the reviews and how funny they said the movie was. The materials I kept seeing were……not (at least to me), so I’m super curious to see the movie.
They had a decent opening day yesterday, and today’s grosses are falling in line with yesterday’s gross. It’s super LA heavy and as expected it’s apparently playing older, male and white (which meshes with the fanship). Normally because it’s so fan driven, we could see a big drop-off tomorrow, but older males (like me) tend to go on Saturday so that should mitigate the super fan surge on opening day. Looks like a weekend in the mid/high teens, which is pretty good. Even though LIam Neeson is a dead bulls eye as a choice to take over for Leslie Neilson, he’s been slowly chasing away his audience by doing the same movie over and over again, so this is a really nice comeback gross for him.
Together - As many of you know, what Garfield is to Mondays, I am to Wednesday openings…..I hate them. Especially during the summer when the weeknights are better and more often than not you’re just diluting the 4 3 day gross into a 6 5 day gross. As I’ve said here (a lot), core fans want to go as soon as possible, but the tagalongs really don’t want to go out on a Tuesday night, so you lose them. Plus your second weekend decays off the first weekend and your Monday gross decays off the Sunday gross, so there’s a waterfall effect that says you need that Friday Saturday Sunday gross as high as possible. There is one exception to that thinking, if you have a movie that plays spectacularly well; something like a Crazy Rich Asians where it wildly over delivers and the non-Friday opening won’t hurt you (but i still think you’re better off on Friday). But this is a movie that got a C+ Cinemascore, so it’s just head scratching that Neon thought opening a C+ Cinemascore movie (and doing previews last week adding to the stupidity) on a Tuesday with discounted tickets Wednesday was a good idea. Unfortunately things like this are usually the result of distribution over thinking a situation, and they rationalize it as ‘we can get more of those good summer days’, but they missed the whole ‘but the movie doesn’t play’ idea. What’s especially sad here is that the campaign was really good, and they got exceptional reviews (which is weirdly common in this genre, the critics and the audience don’t agree on how good the movie is), so the table was set for a really nice opening weekend until Distribution punted the salad. Right now it looks like a weekend of about 6 or 7 so the total should be around 10 or 11. And that 10 or 11 is probably what it would have done had they opened Thursday today. Then they would be decaying next week off a 10 or 11 three day instead of 6 or 7 three day.
- He was essentially the 70’s version of Dick Wolf.