Third weekend of October 2025
This weekend is going to play out pretty much where I expected it to be, we only had one new wide film last year (Smile 2), and we have 4 this year; and there’s a chance we could be a couple of bucks better than 2024, but it should be very close. Next week we have 4 wide films that should keep us even as well, even though we had Venom 3’s $51 million opening last year. But there’s a weekly theme here that I find encouraging.
Week after week we’ve got more titles this year than last year, and that variety at the box-office could help us build back what we’re still missing, the habitual moviegoer. It’s always nice to have a big title come into the marketplace like Venom, but it goes at a very specific audience, so it’s possible we are better off having 3 or 4 titles bringing in about the same gross, we could be activating other genre/demo fanship that might help us grow back to pre- shutdown levels. However, as always, it’s the movies stupid; and the more we can offer both variety and quality to the consumer on a regular basis, the better off this sector is going to be.
Anyway, based on something I heard at Katie Porter’s seminar ‘attracting flies with Honey’, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
The Black Phone 2 - I’m not sure why they ditched the preposition for the sequel (but it feels like since they did, they should have added an exclamation point at the end), but this is holding it’s own against the June ’22 release date of The Black Phone. Although the critics and the exits are a little below where The Black Phone was, this looks like it’s going to end up with about the same gross. The best grosses are coming from theaters that lean heavily Hispanic and the LA theaters are a big force as well, right now 12 of the top 25 theaters are in LA. They might hit some headwinds tonight with the Dodgers playing, especially since the grosses are so LA centric, but right now it looks like a weekend in the low 20’s.
Tron: Ares - They lost a few PLF’s this week, but even the non PLF are taking a decent hit this week; but the fact that this film had a fan base with iffy depth, that’s just consistent with what we saw last weekend (and the last Tron film). Looks down 65% for a weekend around 11 or 12.
Good Fortune - It’s great to see comedies in the marketplace, as many of you know I’m a big booster of this genre and think it’s something we’ve got to develop if we want the sector to get back to full health; and the exits so far here look like this is a comedy that’s going to leave the consumer satisfied. But we’ve still got some work to do with this genre because this film is going to be consistent with the other comedies we’ve seen in the marketplace. Roofman, The Roses, and now Good Fortune all seem to go to the same place gross wise on their first weekend. But there’s a very good reason for that, and it’s the same reason we’ve seen a lot of Actor IP go from dependable box-office to not so good. They took the bag from the streamers and they became TV stars during the shutdown, and now they have to slog their way back to an IP that you have to pay for in a theater. Just look at some of the actors who had box-office IP parity with Tom Cruise pre-shutdown, but now Tom Cruise is still Tom Cruise at the box-office and the rest…are not. And that’s what happened with Comedy.
But this is our own fault, and there’s a reason we ceded Comedy to the streamers, we kind of just messed it up. We used to have a decent amount of Comedies with every studio slate and there was a nice blend of PG13 films with R films. But then films like The Hangover and the Jump Street movies broke out, and all of a sudden we were only making R Comedies. The big problem is that R rated comedies aren’t any easier than PG13 comedies, but all of a sudden we saw PG13 projects that were stuck on the shelf add a shitload of fucks to the script and they found a path to green light. The script was still not great, but it had a lot of fucks in it. The consumer didn’t think a mediocre script with a lot of fucks in it was something they would pay for, and because they stopped coming, we stopped doing it. But since the streamers were in a war for dominance, anything with printed words on a page got a green light after meeting one, so Comedies got made, they just ended up on a platform.
As I’ve said here before, calling something ‘a streamer’ isn’t a good thing, but we have to do enough of these satisfying Comedies in the theatrical sector before the consumer thinks that Comedy (and it’s probably going to have to be a star driven Comedy), is theatrical and not a streamer. In this case it doesn’t help that one of the key drivers of this film, Aziz Ansari, has IP based in TV. But all these single digit openings hopefully will lead to a Xmas or June comedy that will perform at the level we used to see. This looks like it will end up in that same $7 million weekend range that we’ve seen lately.
Truth & Treason - This Angel Film went the usual Angel 2000 runs and the grosses look very……Angel. Overall the grosses look very similar to Sight or The Senior, and as usual with Angel the best grosses are mostly in the Salt Lake market. Figure it’s somewhere just short of $3 million.
After the Hunt - The expanded the release to 1200 runs this weekend, and the results are consistent with the exclusives last weekend. It’s best in the upscale art theaters, but the grosses fall off very quickly, and the exits are on the low side of soft. Looks like a weekend around $1.5 million.
Pets on a Train - Went 1300 runs and there’s not much going on here at all, maybe $1 million for the weekend.
The Mastermind - Went Exclusive NY/LA with 4 runs, and NY is pretty good but LA is a little soft. Looks like a psa in the 20’s.
Blue Moon - Went 5 runs Exclusive in NY/LA and the Lincoln Sq and Angelika in NY are decent, but the other 3 runs (Cinema 1 in NY, Century City and Burbank) are pretty soft.