Second weekend of August 2025

It’s going to be a pretty good weekend, buoyed by a couple of solid new entries; but unfortunately last year we had films that were just a little better and were holding better than the holdover films we have this year. The one-two punch last year was Deadpool & Wolverine and It Ends With Us, and just the gross of those two films will probably be about the same as the top 4 this weekend. The difference between the two totals won’t be massive, probably a little less than 10%, but the bleed vs last year continues. But it’s going to get worse over the next couple of months. Because there’s very little substantial new title gross coming in for a while, I don’t see the total cracking $100 million until maybe the end of September, and since we had films like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doing $100 million on their own last year, there’s going to be a lot of giveback until we get to November this year. Just remember, there’s nothing wrong with the business, it’s just the movies stupid.

Here’s a thought that you might not have considered, this is the last weekend of Summer. You might say wait, what?, no Summer is over on Labor Day, right? Well, that used to be true and for some reason we think of it that way, but we probably think of it that way because School used to go back in session the Tuesday after Labor Day. But because schools decided the School year was more productive if they started this time of year, and then Finals happened mid December (instead of the end of January), starting after Labor Day didn’t work. So, as of mid next week, 50% of K-12 is back in session and it gets up to pretty much everyone the week after. But we haven’t seemed to come around to that idea with the way we’re dating movies.

Since the dawn of (box-office) time, even though there are only four 3 day holiday weekends a year and we run like mosquitos to a yellow porch light to 3 of them; but we seem to think that Labor Day weekend was a weekend to avoid with a tentpole, and usually the logic was ‘we don’t want to get caught up in all the back to school clutter’. But that doesn’t apply anymore, yet we haven’t seemed to evolve our thinking. Even though we’ve had substantial movies on that weekend like Shang-Chi at $75 million, Distribution seems to want to pass up 1 of only 4 Holiday weekends (with no NFL) for the weekend after with an abysmally terrible Sunday (because it’s the first Sunday of the NFL). It makes zero sense, but we’re creatures of habit.

What’s weird is that on the flip side of School year evolution, Schools get out earlier (in May instead of June), we’ve adapted and May is now the new June with a bunch of big movies in the middle of the month. So Labor Day should be the new mid September, but looking at the release schedule next year, no one seems to want to evolve.

We’ve got two films opening this weekend that (according to the folks who tabulate the chiseled stone tablets that are used in tracking) were going to be neck and neck. But there was never a doubt that Weapons was going to be considerably better because of a core marketing idea that one film had and the other did not. And since the Theatrical sector (especially WB and Disney) has gotten really good at activating core fanship, this weekend was a rare case where there was a commonality of appeal for the tagalongs. Looking at the grosses today, the best theaters for both of these movies are the same, so the tagalongs were a jump ball. The problem is that WB was 6” taller than Disney.

Let me explain. Both of these campaigns were very good, and both had great fundamentals as far as ‘what’s going on here and why should I care?’. But when you get to the 3rd act of your materials, you need to close the deal with a ‘lean in’ moment, and the best way to get there is ‘I want to see what’s going to happen next’. That creates a purchase, plus it’s an easy emotional metric that tagalongs can get sucked in by. And that’s where these two films went in different directions once the materials started dropping in the Spring, and it had nothing to do with the quality of the campaign, it was the core elements of each movie that are causing them to separate today.

The whole point of the brilliant Weapons trailers was ‘you have to see what happens next’, but the whole point of Freakier Friday was ‘you know the story, you love the story and you know what is going to happen next’ but there’s comfort in that appeal. But one of those feels more like a secret handshake (and in this case, pretty gender based) and one feels like a more broadly appealing adventure, so the difference between the two was in the tag alongs, especially Males. Those elements are just built in and you can only do what you can do with what the movie is.

I keep wondering what Freakier Friday would have done if it wasn’t against a movie like Weapons, and looking at the commonality of the theaters doing business, I think it would have been entirely possible it could have gotten to some of the numbers being thrown around this week had it gone on another weekend. But the trailer only dropped 3 months ago, and it’s really hard to move a date when you’re that close to release. Plus, the higher ups always seem to think that moving a movie off another movie is a retreat and is a sign of weakness, but maybe we need to evolve there too.

Anyway, based on something I heard from Kristi Noem’s glam squad, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Weapons - WB’s hot streak continues and yesterday’s opening day was on par with the high end of what we’ve seen from this Genre, and today’s grosses are consistent with yesterday’s opening. Because it’s from a filmmaker who is a critical darling, the grosses are leaning upscale and big city. Seems like the exits are solid so we should see a pretty normal box-office arc over the weekend and this should end up in the low/mid 40’s.

Freakier Friday - Looking at the grosses today, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is it looks a lot like Mean Girls, the bad news is it looks a lot like Mean Girls. The problem with Mean Girls is that it opened on January 12, and the daypart shows that time of year aren’t even close to what a film does this time of year on Friday Afternoon. So if this is going to get to the same $29 million Mean Girls got to, it should be way ahead of Mean Girls right now and it’s only a little ahead. But as I said above, the weird part here is that it’s good in the same theaters that Weapons is good in, so the theaters aren’t screaming ‘Disney’. If you only told me Disney distributed this and I didn’t know it was a Disney movie, I’d say it was a 20th or a Searchlight movie based on where it’s doing business. If this stays ahead of Mean Girls, it should get to 30, but because of the January/August issue I’m skeptical tonight will keep up and I think it will probably end up in the mid/high 20s.

Fantastic Four: First Steps - Hmmmm, this is one weird movie. For a film that had solid exits, it’s dropping hard again this week (and granted they lost the bulk of their PLF’s this week), and it’s still off a lot today. A couple of thoughts here. Maybe we need to go back and reassess how good a job Disney did getting this open to what they got it open to (and adjust up), or the fanship here was just thinner than we thought and they ran through all the fans faster than usual. Looks down 60% (or more) right now for a weekend in the mid teens.

The Naked Gun - I went to see this last weekend and just didn’t get it. They came at the idea with a different angle and I just sat there stone faced for 90 minutes. But the audience I saw it with howled with laughter and applauded vigorously at the end of the movie. Looking at the grosses today, there are more of them than there are of me, it’s holding really nicely today. Figure it’s down only about 45% for a weekend around 9.

Sketch - Oh Angel, what the hell? You burst on the scene a couple of years ago with Sound of Freedom, and even though you showed what amateurs you were by opening it on a Tuesday (because it was 4th of July, which would make sense to an amatuer), it fought through the bad distribution and because AMC has some bad A/C, it grossed a ton of money. You’ve had 11 films since then and had some other nice openings like Cabrini and King of Kings, but then you go back to amateur time and open this film on a Wednesday? As I talked about last week on Together, all that does is stretch a 3 day gross into a 5 day gross and now you’re decaying off a lower 3 day number next week. Anyway, the air is out of this balloon already and it looks like it’s going to gross about the same $2.5 million over the weekend as it did up through yesterday, which would bring the total to about $5 million. And isn’t a $5 million weekend better than a $2.5 million weekend?

Together - Speaking of Together, had it opened on Friday last weekend the drop this time of day would be in the low 70’s, and the drop today (even though they let the air out of the balloon by opening mid week) is in the low 70’s. So, this looks like it’s down 60% for a weekend in the high 2’s, as opposed to the 4 they would have done if they had opened on Friday. And that doesn’t take into account the lower weekdays they had because Monday is about half of Sunday this time of year, and so on for the rest of the week. So by having a lower Sunday, it cascades for the rest of the run and they give back whatever they made mid last week very quickly.