Christmas corridor weekend 2025

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone, I hope the places most of you migrate to like Cabo, Aspen, Maui and Gstaad are treating you well this year. It looks like this is going to be a pretty good finish to the end of the year, all 3 wide releases look like they’re going to contribute today and we’ll probably be up a decent amount from Christmas Day and the weekend that followed last year. The way the calendar sets up this year with Christmas on Thursday, Friday gets a lift because most (if not all) people have it off, so it has a ‘Black Friday’ effect.

Speaking of this weekend, the last component of this time of year is the difference between the audience today and the audience for the rest of the holidays. Today’s audience tends to be more upscale, more big city and (obviously) leans towards non-Christians. But tomorrow everyone is in play and they have time to spare, so (depending on the lineup of films) we can get consumers to go to the movies 2 or 3 times before things go back to normal on the 5th. But because the audiences are different today, the films can perform differently once you get past today. We’ve seen movies have a really good day today, and then fall apart once you get to the normal holiday play period. We saw that a couple of years ago with The Color Purple, they had an insane Christmas Day at $18 million but it fell apart the next day and had a total domestic cume of $69 million. On the flip side you had Babygirl last year only doing $1.5 million today, but only dropped 13% the next day, and kept going and going, ending up at almost the same domestic cume as The Color Purple, finishing at $65 million. So today is very good, but tomorrow and the rest of this weekend are great too and it’s where we start seeing who’s going to be around for a while. This is also the two days (Christmas Day and the day after) where we see films come to life after a so-so start. Films like Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle, Anyone But You and The Greatest Showman started showing up on Christmas Day after disappointing starts .

The math is pretty simple when Christmas is on Thursday to calculate the rest of the weekend. If it follows the norm, the 3 day FSS gross should be about double the Christmas Day gross and the 4 day gross including Christmas Day is about 3 times the Christmas Day gross. But that’s the norm and we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see what’s what.

Anyway, based on something I read online that says that 31/Atlas is actually Santa Claus, here are some thoughts on the box-office today and the rest of the weekend.

Avatar: Fire and Ash - After a weekend last week that saw this film underperforming Avatar The Way of the Water by about 33% (possibly because this year’s Avatar had some legitimate competition), it’s Christmas Day gross is showing some life when you compare it to Avatar: The Way of Water’s Christmas Day. It’s only about 15% behind Way of Water’s Christmas Day gross so figure today in the low/mid 20’s a 3 day this weekend in the low 70’s and a 4 day in the 90-100 range.

Marty Supreme - Welcome to the Adult Table A24. For a while we’ve been waiting for this, and the way A24 approached this film is very similar to what we see from a Major. The Publicity was everywhere, they had a TV spend that was similar to what Searchlight spent last year for A Complete Unknown and the materials actually had Character, Story and Stakes (instead of the usual ‘hey, we’re A24 and weird, what else do you need to know?’). They had a great week of exclusive NY/LA runs last week and they expanded to 2700 theaters yesterday. What’s super encouraging here is that they’re not just doing business in the NY and LA theaters, this is pretty broad (in an upscale way, but still very good in the fly over states) and that’s something that’s been a blind spot for A24. Today looks like it can get to about $8 million, so when you add the $2 million or so they did last night, this looks like about $10 million for the combined day. Taking that $8 million today and doubling it, that would put the weekend around $16 million and the 4 day around $26 million. A24 has been stepping up the budgets on their films lately, and now we know they can support those higher budgets once they hit theaters, so it’s a good thing to have them at the Adults table, they’ve earned it.

Anaconda - Sony has had a pretty tough year, the biggest weekend the mother studio produced was $30 million on 28 Years Later (although CrunchyRoll had a $70 million weekend on Demon Slayer) and their biggest opportunity for a monster hit got sold to Netflix. They had thoughts of finishing the year on a high note with this film, and had dreams of this gross starting with a Jumanji like 3 or 4; but they got stuck with weird tracking where the public may have had some brand confusion and thought this was a reboot of the horror film (and the hispanic skew of the way this is playing today makes me believe they still think that), and not the ‘meta/we love making movies about our own industry’ film that it is. It didn’t help that the critics didn’t love the film, but they ‘reported’ a decent gross of $2 million last night*, which is a pretty good start. Today isn’t as good as the ‘reported’ gross last night, it’s running about 2/3 of where Marty Supreme is running and Anaconda has 900 more runs. The way this is playing is super weird as well, it’s really good in the fly over states with an odd hotspot in Salt Lake City, and the better theaters in LA are leaning towards a hispanic skew. The exits so far are just okay, so if there’s a film that I’m wondering where it goes tomorrow, this is it. But today looks like they get to about $6 million, so if you take the norm that puts the 3 day FSS at $12 million and once everything gets added in from today and last night they have a shot at getting a 2 in front of this for the 4 day. This isn’t a super expensive movie, so they’ll still be fine here, but it’s not the gold rush they hoped for.

Song Sung Blue - For those of you out there who appreciate a good marketing campaign, you should see this movie. Focus positioned this as a fun story about a Neil Diamond cover band and it leaned heavily on tone and fun, and then counted on the publicity campaign based on the goodwill that Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman bring with their respective IPs (as well as the jukebox aspect of the music). But there was very little effort to lean towards the usual movie marketing angle of ‘wait till you see what happens next’, because there’s a rug pull to this story (that should work in their favor from a Word of Mouth point of view), but you can’t go anywhere near the idea in the marketing campaign because it’s way too dark and would make the movie sound depressing (which it isn’t). But all you need this time of year is a campaign that can get it to a place where the Word of Mouth can take over (you need enough mouths), and so far it looks like they’re going to get it there. Today looks like it’s headed towards $4 million or so, which (using the norm) should get them about $8 million for the FSS 3 day and about $12 million for the 4 days including Christmas. That’s about the same place The Greatest Showman and Anyone But You started at, so it’s at a good enough level that can stage it for a long run, and since this has the best exits of the three films going wide today that’s a real possibility.

As far as the rest of the holdovers, Zootopia, David and SpongeBob all look up about 50% from yesterday. Of those, David is the one film I’m super curious about over the rest of the holiday. Generally the Christmas themed films time out after Christmas Day, and if this film fades quickly over the next week it will show you that Angel needs to understand how this time of year works, and they should have released this at Thanksgiving to take advantage of pre Christmas mindset. The one outlier today is Housemaid, it’s pretty good today and showing some life, doubling yesterday’s gross; so this might be a film that’s around a while.

No Other Choice - Went 13 runs today and the grosses are very good, the psa looks a lot like opening weekend for Parasite, which is amazing because that was only in 3 theaters. Today’s psa should end up in the low teens, so figure a 3 day psa in the 30k to 40k range and a 4 day in the 50k to 60k range.

Is This Thing On - Expanded to 33 runs and the grosses are decent. Today’s psa looks around $4k, so the 3 day would be about $8k and the 4 day would be about $12k.

The Testament of Ann Lee - Went exclusive NY/LA in 4 theaters (with a couple of 70mm runs) and considering the star power here, it’s good but just good. The psa today looks headed for about $7k or $8k, which would put the 3 day in the mid teens and the 4 day in the low 20’s.

As the end of the year has arrived, I’m still trying to figure out how I got to do stuff like this, and getting a chance to blabber at all of you on a regular basis (and that someone actually reads this shit) fills me with gratitude. I hope you all have a great Holiday and a terrific New Year.

However, I usually get a week off next week, but those assholes at Vertical put a film on next Friday so you’ll have to deal with me again next week.

• last night’s audience and today’s audience behave similarly, and the gross they reported doesn’t really pass a sniff test when Anaconda is running 2/3 of Marty Supreme today but they apparently grossed the same thing last night. But Distribution would never lie, no, it violates their code of conduct.