Second weekend of October 2025

We should have enough gross coming from the new movies this weekend to have a little surplus over last year (Terrifier 3, Piece by Piece, My Hero Academia: You’re Next, The Apprentice), but it won’t be by much. The next two weeks should be more of the same, but at the end of the month we’ve got a calendar aberration this year with a Friday Halloween (and it’s traditionally a really bad movie day), so that weekend is pretty much a 2 1/4 day weekend instead of a 3 day weekend. But come November we should be humming along, even against the massive weekends we had last year at the end of the month.

We’re going to have another weekend where our Entertainment Press will get it all wrong, and even though you’ll hear the word ‘underperform’ a lot, I’m saying bullshit in complete disagreement (as usual).

Over the last month or so, folks kept asking me about Tron, and when I told them what I thought I got the same response over and over again ’but tracking says’. Okay, great, and the first thing that popped into my head was ‘is tracking the least confidential document on the face of the earth?*’. People in our industry who get coffee for the people who get coffee get tracking, but just because you get it doesn’t mean you know what it means. Just like everything data wise in our sector, data is one part, but context is the bigger part. And looking at a data set like tracking without proper context from experience (which often is the case with the companies that publish tracking), can lead to large error rates. As I’ve harped on over and over again, our sector is completely unique because of the tagalongs. And unless you have an understanding on how the tagalongs are going to attend (the toughest part of the equation), you’re going to have a faulty opinion.

So let’s look at the Tron IP. As someone who is ‘of a certain age’, I was around when the first Tron opened, and….it dropped dead. Although it opened to #2 behind the ET juggernaut, it barely outgrossed the 7th weekend of Rocky III, the 4th week of Firefox and the 6th weekend of Poltergeist. So it wasn’t great, and didn’t hold that great either. However, it developed a fan ship as the VHS/DVD boom happened, and in 2010 Disney took a chance on a young Director named Joe Kosinski, and thanks to some brilliant marketing, got it open to #1 with a gross of $44 million. But after opening weekend it dropped dead and didn’t hold up.

Clearly the history of this IP says there’s a core fan base for it, but in both earlier editions, it didn’t really grow. So now we have a 3rd shot at the IP with a faithful fan base but a history of tag along issues. And that’s where understanding the context of tracking comes in. As someone who used to be the face of tracking, I got burned a lot by films like Tron; those Sci-fi fans (who are usually older males) don’t have a lot of friends, and they waaaay over sample on tracking. Even hearing a sci-fi title like Tron combined with bringing up tracking makes my face twitch a little**.

But the big problem with tracking is that there’s not much data science to it. It’s a bunch of polling numbers you look at, and then you take a guess at what the opening gross is; that’s how you get to situations like this weekend where Disney (and A24 last week) gets hung out to dry because people look at tracking and say ‘big numbers equal big gross’, so you end up with guesses of $50 million in the trades. And with an IP like Tron, those people being polled are those Sci-fi fans that struggle to get their tagalong friends to go with them, but no one seems to know that (including the tracking companies).

So how do we fix this? I’m not sure we can and the degree of difficulty is similar to convincing Jordan Ruimy to initiate a policy at his World of Reel where every first draft of an article was published, so the world could judge him on unfinished work the way he posts test screening reactions to our sector’s works in progress. So when you hear the word ‘underperform’ this weekend, you should hear ‘uninformed’ instead, because the unrealistic expectations on a film like Tron were never rooted in a tried and true phrase from people that have seen this before; ‘that’s what these films do’.

Anyway, with a similar accuracy as an article written by Hillary Lewis [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/zaslav-meeting-de-luca-abdy-wb-replacements-report-1236175869/] or Thomas Buckley [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-30/warner-bros-ceo-meets-with-candidates-to-replace-studio-chiefs], here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Tron: Ares - They had a decent opening day yesterday, but today (and for the rest of the weekend) it’s showing the lack of depth in this fan base, and the challenge those fans had in attracting tagalongs. Disney wrung every last dollar out of this film with an all-in marketing campaign, but because the film didn’t register with critics (and a similar reaction from early exit polls) they struggled to close the deal. You know you’re in trouble when the best thing out of the early reactions are ‘but the soundtrack is amazing!’. The PLF’s are clearly leading the way today, and that was a big part of the sell; but this is such an older male skewing film I don’t see a big surge later today or much of a bump tomorrow. At this point this looks like a weekend in the mid 30’s; but for a sequel where the last film wasn’t that good (51% RT score) and this film did about the same, I’m not sure what more you would expect.

Roofman - Channing Tatum is one of those stars that seems like they can deliver box-office, but unless you combine him with a Dog and attract Dog lovers, he’s kind of just a different flavor of Austin Butler. And similar to the recent Austin Butler vehicle Caught Stealing, the sell on this movie looked kind of fun, but didn’t have an angle where you wanted to see what was going to happen next. Oddly enough, the grosses look almost exactly like Caught Stealing and this looks headed to about $7 million for the weekend.

One Battle After Another - WB has done everything they could here with a substantial chase campaign, but the decay looks pretty normal and it looks down 40% for a weekend in the mid 6’s.

Soul on Fire - Sony’s faith based division Affirm is back with a 1700 run break. It’s running about half of their last release, The Forge, so figure a weekend of about $3.5 million.

Kiss of the Spider Woman - Went 1300 runs and isn’t too bad in the art theaters in NY and LA, but falls off really quickly after that. Looks like about $1 million.

After the Hunt - Went exclusive in the classic 6 (Lincoln Sq, Alamo Brooklyn, Angelika, Grove, Century City, Burbank), and NY is considerably better than the LA theaters. Should be good enough for a PSA in the high 20’s.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You - Went exclusive in the smaller classic 4 (Lincoln Sq, Angelika, Century City and The Grove), again NY is better than LA and this should end up with a screen average of about $20k.

• only slightly behind a Pete Hegseth Signal Group Chat

** just hearing the title Riddick makes me get dizzy from stress and I pass out.