Labor Day weekend 2025
There’s good news and bad news this weekend. The bad news is that we’re still going to be a little behind last year’s corresponding weekend. The good news is that last year (on Labor Day) we really didn’t have much going on at all as far as new movies (Reagan, Afraid), so we’ll only be behind last year by about 10%. And considering the total 3 day box office this weekend will only be about $70 million, it’s only a $7 million haircut on the year’s cume.
It’s still a mystery to me why we don’t have bigger movies on this weekend, it’s prime real estate with a Holiday Sunday/Monday, no NFL games and for the most part kids are back in school. The response I keep getting is ‘but everyone is traveling’; huh? Everyone? So more people travel this holiday weekend than Memorial Day, President’s Day and MLK weekend? We seem to do just fine with big movies on those weekends where ‘everyone’ is traveling.
As I expected, the silence was deafening from Netflix on the wildly successful K Pop Demon Hunters ’sing along’ last weekend. Most of the press releases I saw pointed to the wildly successful platform viewing, but they want absolutely nothing to do with the theatrical sector (except during awards season driven by their acute case of imposter syndrome). But here’s where I’m struggling with that policy, between K Pop and Happy Gilmore, how much revenue are they leaving on the table lately by bypassing the higher per eyeball revenue of Theatrical, and why doesn’t Wall Street give a shit? It might be $100 million or more in revenue, and I know that’s a very small % of what Netflix brings in each year (and $100 million is clearly nothing to them because they’ll spend 3x of that on something like Electric State), but it’s still squandered revenue and Wall Street generally has an issue with that. Usually there’s some activist investor that stirs up a pot like this, but maybe the analysts who steer those opinions are just asleep at the switch.
We’ve got something going on this weekend that might be the beginning of a nice trend, Auteur film makers making commercial movies. Darren Aronofsky, Paul Thomas Anderson, Bennie Safdie, Josh Safdie; all have films opening this year that are a little broader in skew than what they normally make. What great about that is that…well….it’s the movies, stupid. Having some of our great filmmakers make movies that appeal to other consumers than the guy behind Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall talking about the latest Fellini film saying ’it’s not one of his best….’ is good for the sector. A couple of these movies (including this weekend) have a shot at opening to #1, and hopefully they hang in there and pull a nice multiple, but if it works out and it’s a good experience, it would be nice to have a couple of more Tarantino’s building up the sector. Plus they are all original IPs.
Anyway, based on something I heard during an argument about who is busier today, the operators at 1 800 Vaccine near me or the Dallas Cowboy Fans Suicide hotline*, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
Caught Stealing - It’s really interesting to watch an up and coming actor like
Austin Butler, clearly he’s got the makings of an actor who is going to be
around a while, but with all the upside of his nomination for Elvis there was a
pretty depressing downside; negative awards campaigning. As the awards season
got into the stretch a couple of years ago, he was a frontrunner for the Best
Actor Oscar (he won the Golden Globe and the BAFTA), but then the folks running
competitive campaigns started a narrative of ‘he thinks he’s still Elvis, just
look at the way he’s talking’. And jeez did that take off in not only the
entertainment press but the consumer press; and although it had nothing to do
with the quality of the performance, it seemed to make a difference to the
voters and Brendan Fraser took home the Oscar. So just like what we see in our
political spectrum these days, the move isn’t ‘our candidate is best’, it’s
’they suck’. But then as he did other projects like Masters of the Air, the
issue kept coming up in the entertainment press. Unfortunately, that
affects his Theatrical IP, because it pigeonholes him as Elvis, instead of one
of our brightest young actors. Doing Dune 2 was the movie that seemed to wash
all that away, but as good as the box-office was on that movie, it was the Dune
IP that was creating it. For an actor, it’s similar to doing a Marvel movie,
the film’s huge success doesn’t seem to help your ability to put butts in the
seats on your own. So he’s essentially rebuilding his Theatrical IP from
scratch and the next project, The Bikeriders, opened to a solid $10 million;
which isn’t bad considering it was a dark period piece against June tentpoles.
Now we have another period piece that’s not quite as dark and the critics seem
to think that (along with Aronofsky’s craftsmanship) he’s the reason the film
works, which is a good step forward. Bottom line is that this looks like it’s
going to do about the same $10 million in 3 (about $12 million in 4) as The
Bikeriders, so that’s where his Theatrical IP is living right now.
The Roses - Looks a little behind where Caught Stealing is running, but the exits are a little lower and they have 800 fewer runs, so this looks in the 7 or 8 range for 3, mid 8’s to mid 9’s for 4.
Jaws - They re-released this wide with an emphasis on striking digital prints for IMAX, and those are the theaters that are driving this today. The IMAX classic theaters like Lincoln Square and Universal City are really cranking out some nice numbers. It looks like this is all pre-sales because the numbers aren’t growing at all as the day goes on, and it’s possible it could be a one day wonder; but this looks like a really nice 3 day of about $6 million, and a 4 day of about $7 million.
The Toxic Avenger Unrated - Raise your hand if you thought this film would get a Rotten Tomatoes score in the 80’s. Yeah, sure. This remake of the Troma classic was actually made by the folks at Legendary, who have a tendency to make really good movies (and have been a big force lately at the box-office), but as much as critics and the target audience seem to really like this movie, it’s still pretty edgy and Troma IP tends to be on the campy side. So this film ended up at Cineverse, who had a really nice success recently with Terrifier 3. What’s good about this marriage is that Cineverse has the Bloody Disgusting site, which can be leveraged into box-office purchases without a lot of effort (or spend). This is very similar to what Angel does or what Mubi is cooking up with their future release schedule. But there’s a big difference between Terrifier and Toxic Avenger, one is a horror movie and the other is a comedy, and the horror genre fits better with what Bloody Disgusting is all about. So as much as there is commonality of audience skew between a really violent comedy and a really violent horror movie, it’s still all about the core genre, and campy comedy doesn’t spill outside of the core as easily as horror. So even though this film isn’t going to gross a lot this weekend, they didn’t spend a lot either. Looks like a 3 day of about $2 million and a 4 day in the mid 2’s.
Prince Sign O’ the Times - This re-release of the 1987 concert film went in a little less than 400 theaters, with the bulk of them large format screens. It’s pretty good in the better big city theaters and it’s pretty good in Canada but the grosses fall off pretty quick as you get to smaller situations. Might be a one day wonder but if it isn’t it should get close to $1 million for the 3 day and a low 1’s for the 4.
- They are actually pretty good at high volume periods, they just usually don’t staff up for it until early January.