Third weekend of December 2025

 As expected, the roster of films opening this weekend should put us way ahead of
last year’s weekend before Christmas films (Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Mufasa: The
Lion King, Homestead), probably by about 30%.  The 3 films going wide on
Christmas Day should be about the same or slightly better than the 4 films the
opened on Christmas Day last year (Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, Babygirl, The
Fire Inside), so we’ll finish the year on a high note.  January looks a little
light (again), but last year was so craptacular that no film grossed more than
$15 million opening weekend until we barely got a decent gross in January on the
31st with Dogman’s $36 million, so even though we’re a little light again we
should be competitive with last year’s January.
With all my blabbering over the last couple of weeks about the Big Beautiful
Buyout tm, I neglected to talk to you about one of the key reasons this time of
year is so unique and challenging.  In addition to the social clutter that makes
it hard to get high enough on a consumer’s ’to do’ list to generate a ticket
purchase, there’s an odd competitive landscape to this time of year.  Over the
next 6 days, there will be 7 wide releases all dropped on top of each other, and
that doesn’t happen any other time of the year. They drop on top of each other
to take advantage of the ‘golden 8’ days of the holidays where every day is
Saturday night (and the way the calendar sets up this year, it’s more like a
golden 11, because you get that extra holiday adjacent weekend on the 2nd, 3rd
and 4th before everyone goes back to school/work).
But there’s a key data point that shows we are evolving as a sector.  In the
years before Covid, you would normally see between 7 and 11 films in this period
with a combined production budget of around $1 billion.  If the information I’ve
researched is correct, the 7 films this year total around $700 million; but
that’s kind of deceptively high because Avatar is over half of the total.  4 of
the 7 films are at or below $50 million and two of them are around $25 million.
So outside of Avatar (and as much as they’ll get beat up this weekend for
opening lower, more on that below, there’s no issue with ROI on that
production cost), we’re being more level headed on how much these movies cost to
make.
What’s kind of funny is that in a world that feels like it’s upside down, the
2nd highest budget is from A24 and the 3rd highest budget is from Angel; and the
best Rotten Tomatoes score is SpongeBob.  So, our sector this Christmas is just
as weird as the rest of the world.  But the upside is that all 7 films seem to
have strong playability, and they have a pretty diverse audience skew, so having
a varied menu of films that satisfy in the market should be good for the sector
long term.
One more point I kept meaning to bring up regarding the Big Beautiful Buyout tm,
what’s Apple going to do?  Now that the other two streamers have bought a robust
and functioning theatrical machine (assuming Netflix can close the deal….and is
telling the truth about keeping everything functioning the same), will Apple
continue to just play ‘rent a studio’ for anything they feel like going
theatrical with?  With data that shows that Movies going straight to a platform
have much less long term library value than movies that have a theatrical run,
doing what they’ve been doing lately (with pretty substantial budgets) is pretty
close to just being a patron of the arts and borders on philanthropy.  Of
course, it’s Apple and even if something like F1 went straight to the platform,
would they even care?  Whatever they’re spending on movies is just couch cushion
money to them (and it might even be less significant than that), but it will be
interesting to see if they pivot to a model that gives some sort of ROI on
their bigger budget films.
Anyway, with the same expected accuracy of all the men who swore ‘they weren’t
that close to Jeffery Epstien’, here are some thoughts on the weekend
box-office.
Avatar: Fire and Ash - This weekend is going to be fun (but not really) to watch
the clueless industry press tsk tsk this opening saying ‘but it’s less than
Avatar: The Way of Water, so the business is broken’.  The Crap already had an
article this week titled James Cameron and the Art of the Diminishing Box-Office
returns….  But as usual, they don’t know shit.   3 years ago, Avatar: The Way of
Water opened to $134 million, and because tracking thought it would open to $180
million - $200 million it was panic time then too (but it eventually went to
$688 million domestic and $2.2 Billion world wide); but there’s a massive
difference between this weekend in 2022 and this weekend, Avatar: The Way of
Water opened against……nothing.  The 2nd best gross that weekend was $5.3 million
and the total gross for that weekend outside of the gross Avatar: The Way of
Water generated was a paltry $19 million.  The three films opening against it
this year all could gross more individually than the whole business did outside
of Avatar: The Way of Water 3 years ago; plus you still have Zootopia 2 chugging
along with a gross in the teens.  So in the mind of the idiots who report on our
sector, Avatar should do the same business as it did 3 years ago with $70
million or $80 million of additional competition against it?  Morons. And oddly
enough once you get past the 4 new openings and Zootopia, the rest of the
business looks like a very similar $17 million.  This looks like it’s going to
end up around $100 million for the weekend, which considering how much more
competition there is this time than there was 3 years ago, just getting it there
is proof of solid work on the part of Disney Marketing.
David - The folks at Angel have had some decent success in their theatrical
slate, and two films are head and shoulders ahead of the rest of them.
Obviously, the film that launched a thousand (MAGA based*) tweets, Sound of
Freedom, got the Angel brand rolling.  But this last spring they had King of
Kings, a family friendly animated film timed for Easter Week and it opened to
$19 million.  Now we have the Christmas Themed Animated Musical, David.  And
looking at the grosses the first question is ‘why aren’t they doing only movies
like this?’.  The rest of the slate feels like they’re doing a faith based
version of Participant, with similar box-office results.  But this film has
really good numbers, and as you can guess it best in the red states and the
Bible Belt. It’s not growing very fast, but Angel films are generally very
pre-sales heavy so that’s not a surprise, but unless it doesn’t grow as much as
a family film should grow this time of year, it should end up in the mid 20’s.
The Housemaid - There’s a Christmas miracle going on with this film.  As I’ve
spoken of often here, one of the tricky aspects of Christmas isn’t getting a
consumer interested in seeing a movie, it’s getting them to see it before
Christmas.  There’s so much chaos before Christmas it’s really hard to get them
to go (after Christmas, they’ve got tons of time), and the toughest consumer to
get this time of year is Older Females.  I’ve seen movie after movie aimed at
older moviegoers get eaten alive in the weekend before Christmas, and then the
exhibitors move them to the 40 seat house once the next crop of releases come in
on Christmas Day, so it’s really tough to come back.  But Lion’s Gate really did
a nice job here** getting the target older females to see this right away.  It’s
really good today and looking at where it’s doing business, it tells me two
things about who they activated here. The best theaters on the sheet right now
are the Dine in theaters (which serve alcohol) so this screams ‘girls night
out’.  But it’s also very suburban and not that coastal, so it looks like they
did a really nice job of activating the fans of the book this is based on.  So
just getting to where they are already is, well, a Christmas Miracle, because
this doesn’t usually happen.  But it will be interesting to see how this plays
out over the weekend. The grosses today tell me this is very pre-sales based,
it’s not growing any faster than David is (and Angel films are all pre-sales),
and the exits are pretty good but not sensational.  So we’ll have to see how
this plays out over the weekend.  For now let’s call this 20ish, but because
this could be a deeper audience than it seems like now, it could go well into
the 20’s, or it could be front loaded and end up in the mid/high teens.  But
even on the low end of this, it’s an outlier and it’s very very good.
The SpongeBob Movie: The Search for Squarepants - Looks really good considering
there are very few (8%) of kids out of school today. There’s a certain audience
component to this film outside of the family audience (it wouldn’t be out of
line for this film to have a dispensary tie in promotion), but we’ll have to see
if they show up tonight.  This looks like it’s going to get to about $20
million, but that’s based on a film like this having a pretty substantial bounce
tomorrow.
Marty Supreme - Opened Exclusive NY and LA in 6 theaters, with 4 of them having
70mm prints.  The grosses are sensational and the grosses this weekend will
pretty much be dictated by capacity, and how the exhibitors adjust to the demand
as the weekend unfolds.  The psa is going to be really sexy, probably north of
$100k per screen.  Assuming the film plays as strong as it’s been playing during
the 37 premiers (or it seemed like it) and events they’ve had ramping up to this
opening, it should help the wide break next Thursday.

back when MAGA cared about child trafficking (before the Epstien files)

** sorry to all of you Lion’s Gate haters out there who beat me up everytime I
say something nice about them.

Thread continued
Reply 1, the reader · 2025-12-20
There’s nothing better than your emails.
Btw, it’s Lionsgate, all one word. Not Lion’s Gate.  (Or at least it was
when I was there… six years ago)