Third weekend of November 2025

As expected, it’s going to be a good weekend; but because we’re missing a key component from last year (the $55 million Gladiator II brought in), we’re still going to be about 10% behind the same weekend last year. The same thing goes for next weekend; as good as Zootopia 2 is going to be, Moana 2 was an outlier (it’s been the biggest IP in the Disney quiver ever since the platform launched), so even though there’s going to be nothing wrong with the total gross next weekend, we’re still missing a substantial title and I wouldn’t be surprised if the difference between the total for next FSS and the total from last year is close to the $31 million that Gladiator II generated last year. However, we’ll get some relief the week after Thanksgiving, and even though that weekend is usually a place to put films that ‘just need a theatrical release’, we’ve got the most substantial title I’ve seen on that date for a long long time in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. And the surplus should continue for the rest of the year, it looks like we have a good roster of titles to finish out the year.

We’ve got a (very) rare situation this weekend that gives us a look into release date strategy, and it’s probably the closest we can get in this sector to A/B testing the difference in competitive landscapes and learn a few things.

A couple of years ago, we had Barbenheimer, and the industry debate was ‘did they hurt each other by going on the same date or did they give each other a lift by going on the same date?’. Then last year on this weekend, we had Glicked, and the same debate hijinks ensued. The battle cry for both weekends was, it’s great because consumers will see both! And to a certain extent that happened but only slightly, mostly with the frequent movie goers and as a hipshot I’d say it’s no more than 20% or so. As much as the two films in each situation skewed very differently, all 4 movies were good movies (34 Oscar Noms, 3 Best Picture Noms and a Best Picture win) and were built to compete. And there were some parts of the audience skew that had some odd commonality; on Glicked both the Grove in LA and the Metreon in SF were in the top 10 grosses nationally on Gladiator II and Wicked, so there was a subset of a subset that might have been into both Gladiators and Showtunes.

So this weekend we have icked without the Gl with Wicked For Good, and since a lot of you get tracking (hilarious thought, all of you get tracking, it’s practically open source these days), you’ve probably noticed that it looks almost identical to Wicked; and the only tracking source that was considerably better than Wicked was pre-sales. Which brings up a question, why were all the tracking sources pretty similar to Wicked, but it’s going to do considerably better this weekend?

The answer of course is in the competitive landscape, and the absence of Gladiator II this time is showing up in two ways, and both are showing us what a difference getting a clear landscape can be. There was a time where you dated a movie based on what else was opening around it, and the commonality of the audience determined the choice in dates. But there’s another factor now that’s way more important.

The biggest difference this time is that Wicked For Good has pretty much all of the PLF’s. As the consumer has told us over and over again, they prefer the Large Formats like IMAX, Dolby, 70mm, Prime and whatever Regal calls theirs (isn’t it Kirkland?); and on the titles that had most or all of the PLF’s the last couple of weeks (Predator, Tron), PLF’s accounted for around 60% of the weekend gross. On Wicked, they had about 50% the available PLF footprint (but Gladiator II had pretty much all the IMAX’s), so there’s a massive difference in PLF seating inventory this weekend; and I’d be curious to look at this weekend’s gross come Monday and see if the difference in what Wicked grossed and what this does is all in the increased PLF revenue.

Second, and it’s a distant second, is having way more tagalongs to yourself. Clearly not everyone who tagged along to Gladiator II would have considered joining the Wicked group, and it’s actually possible that more Wicked tagalongs would have said yes to Gladiator, since Musicals are right up there with Westerns and Horror when it comes to a binary response from consumers. But the tagalong issue is something that’s closer to the original ‘what’s the commonality of audience’ that we’ve been choosing dates around for a long time.

But as we look for more ways to offer the consumer as much PLF inventory as possible (especially more 70mm, please), there’s one format that’s being completely ignored, 3D. One of the ‘pro-tip’ aspects to a big weekend like this is going to the 3D screen, no one goes and you can pretty much have any seat you want when everything else is full. But there’s a reason for that, and it’s one more reason that the Theater Circuits are dumb*.

3D was part of the big surge in grosses around 2009 (when we really needed it during the Recession), but it kinda sucked. And the biggest problem was the picture was pretty dark, which lessened the experience considerably. Because it wasn’t great it became a passing fad, but if you haven’t been to a 3D presentation lately, it’s a different experience now. Because of the brightness you can get out of a Laser Projector it’s pretty good now and I don’t have the same problem with it I used to have with it 15 years ago.

But have the exhibitors made any attempt to communicate that with their audience? Of course not. Instead AMC is wasting their time branding some of their screens ‘XL’***, which makes no sense at all, especially with their choice of screens. For example, at the Burbank 16 they branded the medium size 220 seat screens #7 and #8 ‘XL’ but they didn’t designate the 500 seat screen #15 ‘XL’. Wtf? So add the lack of 3D positioning to the weird ‘XL’ positioning to Regal refusing to put ’Theaters’ or ‘Cinemas’ on the signage outside the building as reasons that exhibiors might get what they deserve.

I’d really like to see how much of the difference in gross on Wicked For Good vs Wicked came in via the PLF screens, but it would also be interesting to see how many more tickets were sold. If the increase in gross is all just the higher ticket price of PLF’s that’s one thing, but if most of the increase came in via the PLF’s and they sold more tickets, that might mean we lost sales opening weekend last year because they couldn’t find a PLF seat they wanted to sit in (or was unavailable). And that would be an interesting piece of data we don’t normally get to see.

Anyway, with the same expected accuracy of the (cancelled) 10 reasons to hate NYC White House Press release, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Wicked For Good - We’re actually in day 4 of this release, and it’s been pretty good so far. They opened the film on Monday to about $6 million, did about the same on Wednesday and then yesterday’s ‘opening day’ was in the high teens. But it’s still weird to me why you want all those fans going on weeknights, when you tell tagalongs (that would rather go on weekends) to go f themselves? But why do we keep doing this? Clearly this isn’t a Universal issue, it’s everyone. It’s the exhibitors that push this nonsense, because it’s way more efficient for them infrastructure wise to spread the same $65 million or so over 4 days instead of just Friday. And I still wonder what we’re giving up by bending the knee to a bunch of people that aren’t very good at positioning their own business. This is clearly way better than Wicked was on Friday, possibly because of the easier competitive landscape and the larger inventory of PLF seats, but it’s still great at $145 million or so.

Rental Family - This TIFF favorite went out on 2000 screens and has some decent numbers in NY, LA and SF; and in those markets it’s not just the super Arty theaters, it’s decent in the more upscale burbs as well. The exits are very good so far so this could build some momentum over the weekend, but for now it looks low/mid 3’s.

Sisu: Road to Revenge - This followup to the culty Sisu is just okay, but it’s on a bad date. The first Sisu went out on 1000 screens via Lions Gate and there’s one massive difference between that release and this one. Sisu went on a date where they could get a lot of PLF theaters, and those theaters were the majority of the gross. This time they went on a date that they had no shot at PLF’s and the grosses show it, it’s not good. Looks like about $2 million for the weekend on 2000 theaters.

and remember I used to be an Exhibitor, so I know what dumb feels like.*

** okay, so in the part of the business I’m in now, I’m wrong a lot and I still feel dumb all the time.

*** It’s the exhibitor’s version of replacing the hand towel hanging from the handle of the refrigerator and calling it a remodel.