Second weekend of December 2025
Last week I spoke about the challenges of getting anyone to a theater this time of year, and that’s manifesting itself today. The only shot you’ve got to open something last weekend or this weekend is to appeal to younger moviegoers, because anyone over 25 or 30 is slammed with holiday clutter; and getting a movie high enough on their ’to do’ list is incredibly daunting. We’re going to be short of last year’s gross this weekend, and most of that shortfall will be because of the difference between Wicked 1 and 2, Zootopia seems to be holding better than Moana so there’s not much difference in the week 3 grosses now. The new movies last year (Kraven the Hunter, Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim) didn’t really open, but they both had some young appeal so they’re way better than what we’ve got this weekend. For next weekend, If Avatar can deliver anything close to what it did in 2022, Avatar combined with a couple of movies that apparently really play, we should finish the year on a high note.
It’s been interesting to watch the situation develop since the Big Beautiful Buyout tm bombshell dropped last Friday morning. But it’s pretty clear to me that Netflix really punted the salad with the initial press release on Friday; and if they had only released the same positioning statement that they released on Monday (that they were buying the 3 business units to keep them intact and they were complementary to what they do now), all that blowback that kept circulating over the weekend would have been considerably muted. In fact if they had done this right, the sentiment might have gone the other way and it might have been seen as a good thing. Now all week they’ve been trying to disarm a bomb that already went off, but I still think the reason that didn’t happen till Monday was that they weren’t prepared to win the bidding. Now everything sounds like bullshit and no one is buying it, but there’s a logical reason that those units should be kept intact (regardless of if they are telling the truth about keeping them intact).
One of the biggest talking points that circulated last weekend was about eliminating competition, and as much as I get the market share of the streaming pie argument (although having two platforms seems like a good thing because it would generate two separate subscriptions, and Netflix is pretty Maxed (rimshot) out with subscribers. There is some commonality of the consumer base, but it’s kind of like Walmart buying Nordstrom), the theatrical side is something that’s more interesting. There are a couple of aspects that come to mind that go the opposite way of competition elimination, and it would be insane to do this to try and eliminate competition.
The first aspect is the people. The hot streak that WB has been on is pretty sensational, and that $1.8 billion domestic gross (while sitting out Q4) is a result of visionary people who know what they’re doing, and aren’t afraid to take a chance on something they believe in*. Since a lot of you (if not most of you who get this email) are at the top of your particular discipline in this business, you know people like you don’t grow on trees. And if this purchase was to eliminate those people from the marketplace was the goal, that just doesn’t make any sense. If the decision makers at WB ended up on the open market once this deal closes, they would last about as long as a handle of Dewars at the Kennedy compound. So if the WB personnel end up on the street, they’ll just end up at one of the competitors and you didn’t accomplish anything.
Second is the films, let’s take a look at the successful films from WB’s 2025 slate, and there were essentially 6 films that made their year; Sinners, Minecraft, Final Destination, Superman, F1, Weapons and One Battle After Another. What if Netflix had bought WB 4 years ago and shut the theatrical wing down, would Netflix have a shot at these? The first and most obvious one is F1, and since that’s Apple and they ‘rented’ WB’s Marketing and Distribution machine, Apple would have just used someone else. Next, both Sinners and Weapons were hot packages and were bid out, and if Netflix couldn’t win those auctions (especially with no legitimate theatrical component), they probably wouldn’t fare any better with one less theatrical bidder. Minecraft is Legendary, and they would have set it up somewhere else. There’s a reason there’s not much Horror gets made for streaming, it just doesn’t work as well as it does theatrically, and (because of the low production costs) the upside off theatrical makes it the better Premier Destination for Final Destination (another rimshot). As far as Superman, Disney can tell you a lot about how Superhero IP’s made for a platform waters down the value of the IP, but if you want to do it, go for it. Lastly, One Battle After Another; and because it had such a Large Format component, the only way Netflix would have had a shot at it was if every theatrical studio passed. But a Filmmaker like PTA needs to operate in a space where he has trust, and I would guess that this ended up at WB because he trusted the people there. So, if you took WB out of the equation, the only two films they would end up with are Superman and Final Destination; both of which need a theatrical component to maintain what you paid to acquire them, so what did you accomplish with the purchase if you shut down the theatrical business units?
Lastly, Shareholder value; and Library Value is the same as Shareholder Value. One of the things that Netflix has avoided is an activist shareholder who would question all the money they have spent on Movies made for only the platform, but because streaming has such a ‘smash and grab’ cultural component, those movies have very little library value now. Of course, they’ve been so successful in the TV that they do, it masks the not so successful aspect of the company, but you can’t count on that forever. I would love to see someone put a value on the Movies Netflix has made since they began the spending spree, and let’s say it was around 2015, which would give them 10 years of library titles. If you took that valuation and compared it to the same 10 years of WB theatrical titles (and just to be fair, throw in the titles that went straight to HBO Max +), what would that value look like? Probably a substantial multiple of what the Netflix library is worth. With the Billions and Billions Netflix has spent on films for their platform, can you name one title that has any cultural or IP (remake) value? The last 10 years should be considered an experiment, and because of the low Library value now created by that experiment, taking a shovel to the business unit that creates Shareholder Value seems (once again) like you accomplished nothing with this purchase.
So as much as the regulators will have a lot to say about this, the shareholders should have equal weight here because this is an awful lot of money to spend on something if it’s not creating long term value.
Anyway, based on something I learned at a University of Michigan extension course taught by Sherrone Moore titled ‘fine tuning your bull rush at home’, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
Zootopia 2 - Looks about 5 points better than the drop from week 2 on Moana 2, looks like a 45% drop for a weekend in the low/mid 20’s.
Five Nights at Freddy’s - We knew this was going to be front loaded, and because it’s not day and date with Peacock this is holding up a little better on weekend #2 than the first film, even with the holiday box-office headwinds this weekend has. Figure this is down % wise in the high 60’s (the first film dropped almost 80% in week 2) for a weekend just short of 20.
Wicked for Good - Still doing the same thing it’s been doing, dropping harder than the first film. Looks like a weekend around $9 million.
Ella McCay - As someone who has spent a decent amount of time in release date meetings, when you see a film’s release date, sometimes you look at the date and say ‘eewww, what’s up there?’. Putting an Adult skewing film on this weekend is a death sentence, and it never has much of a shot. But when a critical darling like James L Brooks delivers a film that generates a 18% Rotten Tomatoes score (with similar exit polls), you understand why they put it here. However, in Disney’s (20th) defense, they didn’t shy away from a full throated campaign here, including an Academy campaign and everything else here was very respectful to a filmmaker of this stature. But this is an adult skewing film on a weekend like this with a 18% RT score, and the $2 million (or maybe a little more) that this looks like makes total sense.
The Shining - Had a 45th Anniversary release this weekend in the IMAX theaters. The grosses are very good, and this looks like 400 theaters or so, but this looks like a weekend of about $2 million. But as much as this is only a couple of million dollars, there’s another factor here that’s problematic. This wasn’t on Comscore’s release schedule, and the same thing happened on Jaws over Labor Day. Since these re-issues are mostly hard core cinephiles, and by nature those are habitual moviegoers, they probably would have gone to something else this weekend. By not having it on the release schedule, distributors aren’t fully aware of the competitive landscape they are facing and that can lead to some issues. So Comscore needs to fix this.
Silent Night, Deadly Night - Cineverse has been releasing a couple of films to leverage their Bloody Disgusting fan ship and they’ve had varied levels of success, especially considering the low marketing costs associated with a built in audience. But it;s a very specific audience and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a lot of audience commonality between the Bloody Disgusting fans and The Shining. This film is a little tough to call because in quite a few theaters it’s only playing at night, but it went 1600 theaters and it looks like about $600k for the weekend.
*As opposed to other Execs that take chances on projects we all know are shit, and they fulfill that promise.