Third weekend of September 2025
It looks like we’ve got enough gross coming in from the new titles this weekend to stay ahead of last year’s total (Transformers One, Never Let Go, The Substance), but padding our lead or giving a little back could come down to a couple of factors.
Last weekend, Demon Slayer broke out of the well defined audience niche of Anime and played much broader, almost like a Marvel film; it got walk up business and it looks like the tag alongs gave the genre a shot. So this weekend we’ll have to see if it’s back to the Anime mold and it drops the 80% in week 2, or if the crossover aspect we saw last weekend continues. So far it looks closer to the Anime model, but we’ll see how the rest of the weekend develops.
But the 2nd factor this weekend falls into the category of ‘it’s the Movies, stupid’. We’ve got a couple of new films this weekend that didn’t turn out, and the exits are telling us that we might see a falloff as the weekend unfolds. Next weekend looks like we should at least tie last year, but it could go either way. However, we thought the 1st weekend of October was going to be a bit behind last year, but all of a sudden we hear the cavalry bugle from over the hill…and TAYLOR SWIFT is here to rescue us. It’s only a FSS event but it should be enough to put us ahead of last year that weekend.
Demon Slayer Kimetsu No Yaiba Infinity Castle - As I said above, it’s closer to an Anime film in relation to last Friday than a broader mainstream film; but it did have pretty good exits last week, and with the new films falling short in their exits this weekend, this could get a little bit more walk up business over the weekend and finish better than the norm -80%. I’ll say it does just a little better and drops about 70% for a weekend in the low 20’s.
Him - I was super interested to see where this film went once it got to the marketplace, as I kept seeing the trailer in theaters and always wondered who it was for (as well as WTF is going on in this movie?). So far it looks like the materials landed with the Jordan Peele crowd and it’s playing pretty coastal and upscale, there’s an AA component to the way it’s playing but it’s not terrible dominant. They had a decent opening day yesterday (for a Thursday, the worst box-office day of the week), and the numbers were pretty solid this morning, so the campaign clearly activated some pre-sales. It’s been flattening out all day though, and I’m wondering if this is going to have a downward trajectory all weekend. So once again here, by opening a film (that doesn’t play) on the worst day of the week, they left some money on the table. Right now it looks mid teens.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey - Sometimes the stars align for your film and sometimes they don’t, like last week where Demon Slayer had all the stars aligned to generate something special, but on the flip side gave the new films a little bit of a haircut, and in the case of this film, they didn’t align. This was a blacklist script from 2020 that picked up inertia once Margo Robbie and Colin Farrell attached, and then got picked up by Sony; but that’s where the good news stopped. Months after filming wrapped, along comes polarizing legislation in Washington that just happens to have a similar name, and you’re now digging out of a massive hole with your marketing material and nothing seems to stick. But there are other reasons this film isn’t working besides a unfortunate title coincidence.
I speak here all the time about how IP fanship drives consumers to theaters, and with original IP you need good ol’ fashioned Movie Star IP to do the work. Unfortunately, you have two Actors in this film who don’t have any history of driving consumers to theaters without additional IP, they’re part of an equation that can be successful when you have other IP, but they’ve never done it on their own; and an opening like this exposes their lack of unique drawing power. Of course, if this film would have turned out better this might have been a nice building block to get them to a place where they matter, but it didn’t get there.
Lastly, this film was a blacklist script, and don’t films end up there because they are really good scripts and everyone has passed on them? No one argues they are good, but they pass for a reason. It seems like we learned a lot during the streaming content wars, and all those pet projects (and often they were blacklist-ish scripts that were good, but had issues becoming viable commercial movies) that had been sitting around for years (and sometimes decades) got made and almost all of them sucked. But when you take a chance on a blacklist script that’s there because you’ve got a pretty good sample of experienced people who couldn’t see a path to saying yes, by saying yes it’s like splitting 3’s in Blackjack; yes you might win but it’s going to take some stars aligning to make the hand a winner.
This looks like $3 million for the weekend, a bust.
The Senior - The folks at Angel have been pretty consistent in leveraging their ‘investors’ each time they release a film, but this acquisition may not be the best fit for their faith based walled garden. This looks like the low side of what we’ve seen from them and it looks like $2.5 million or so for the weekend.
The holdovers are all just okay this weekend. Conjuring and Downton Abbey both look just a little worse than normal, but The Long Walk is about 10 points better than a 2nd Friday norm, so it looks like it might have some legs (rimshot).