Fourth weekend of January 2026

It’s going to be a similar situation this weekend as we’ve seen the last couple of weeks, but with a little twist. The new films this weekend should be in the same range as the gross last year’s films generated (Flight Risk, Presence), and the holdover films being a little better should give us the same high single % surplus over last year. However, as you’re probably well aware of, there’s a decent amount of weather going through the country; and how bad that storm is, as well as when it gets bad may have a profound effect on business this weekend. At this point it looks like Sunday is a wipeout, between the storm and the NFL playoffs, it might be a really rough day. But since this weekend is where the Academy Nominated films that are still in theaters can flex a little, if the storm is a big issue tomorrow (because those films skew older and older moviegoers attend on Saturday), it could be a rough weekend.

Congratulations to all of you who are Nominees today (and there are a lot of you this year), make sure to take a moment to appreciate the rarefied air you’re in today.

It’s always amusing to me when the Nominations come out, because the Industrial Awards Complex now needs to shift blame away from the promises they’ve made to justify their exorbitant fees; and the key phrase that gets thrown around is ’snubbed’. To me snubbed is what happens in 3rd grade when the cool girls won’t let someone sit with them at Lunch, and applying it to creative work is just weird; so it’s not that you voted for something you liked better, it’s that you didn’t vote for something because of some variation on hate?

I’m always amused that the IAC uses it to deflect blame by saying ‘our work was good, there were other issues here’; but we’re also dealing with some of the same people here that took a fee to deflect blame away from the LAFD and the City of LA after the fires last year [https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-01-21/celebrity-pr-firm-helped-lafd-shape-messaging-after-palisades-fire]. And of course the lazy trade press (and it works for them because negative headlines generate more clicks) plays along. I think when you look at some of the reasons films didn’t make the nomination cut, it’s something we knew was there from the beginning, and because there’s very little ROI for nominations (or even wins) these days; maybe the amount of stupid money that gets pissed away on these campaigns needs to get a rethink.

Now obviously all the ’snubbed’ press pieces revolve around big name stars and the combination of big name stars and a negative headline is just another angle on search engine optimization. Things like ‘Brad Pitt snubbed’ is hilarious. So….Brad Pitt playing Brad Pitt got passed over, shocker (F1 was one of my favorite movies of last year, and I’m super happy it got nominated for Best Picture). Wicked 2 got shut out? Is it really news that the 2nd act of Wicked pales in comparison to the 1st act (just like a healthy percentage of all Broadway Musicals), and the 1st act was only good enough to be a nomination all star last year.

But let’s go back to the stupid money that gets spent every year during the awards window. I’m sure a lot of you (if not most) have been involved lately with a film that doesn’t look great as you get close to release, and the marketing budget gets cut because the studio doesn’t want to spend good money after bad. And it seems like (for the most part) the big studios aren’t spending a ton of money on awards losers (because they know it’s not going anywhere); with the exception of something like Wicked, where they’re kind of trapped by the last films noms. But what troubles me is the amount of films from non majors that seem to have really big budgets for an awards campaign, but didn’t seem to find money to spend on getting normal consumers to see it in a theater.

I floated the idea a couple of years ago (as we were dealing with the streamers exploiting gaps in the rules, by making their TV movies eligible for awards through outdates bullshit theatrical runs) of limiting the awards budget to no more than they spent to get consumers to see the movie in a theater (or even limiting it to a % of the theatrical marketing budget). After I brought that up, a few of you (mostly members of the IAC) said ‘but these little films don’t have the budget for a decent sized marketing campaign in theaters and it will be unfair’. Okay, that reminds me of an old joke. A person walks up to the front door of a Casino, and right before they walk in someone walks up to them and says ‘excuse me, could you help me out? My wife is very sick and needs medicine, is there any way you could give me $100 to get her the medicine?’ The person walking into the Casino says ‘oh, I’m very sorry about your wife, but if I give you the money, how do I know you’re not going to go into the Casino and gamble with it?’ The other person responds ‘Oh, I have Gambling money’.

With all the ways we’re looking to close the loopholes (on these films that want to be in contention for an Oscar*), but seem to forget why the Oscars were started and what they’re for; it seems like the most level headed way of doing that is making all films prioritize the theatrical experience to be eligible, and if they don’t have the money to do that and campaign for awards, sorry. If we want to keep this sector alive, the Academy needs to send a clear message that they only give awards to theatrical movies.

Anyway, with the same expected accuracy as a Ted Cruz OOO reply this weekend, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Mercy - Before I go in a different direction, this is a film the critics didn’t like (currently 21% on RT) and the public seems to concur. But MGM is showing us how they really believe in the theatrical sector by giving this a full throated theatrical campaign, and found a date with not much going on where it had a shot. So from a Marketing/Distribution point of view, everything is good here. But, speaking of things we need to rethink, non (or insignificant) IP Sci-Fi. Go Sci-Fi and die is the new phrase you need to know, and there’s a really good reason for it. 2 Months ago we had The Running Man, last week we had 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and now we have Mercy. You know what they all have in common? The core fan base for Sci-fi is older males, and they really struggle with tagalongs, apparently they have no friends, and as an industry we seem to struggle activating anyon outside of the older male demo. As I’ve made very clear here, this sector rises and falls on tagalongs, and usually these Sci-Fi films are 50% or more Males over 25, and 1/3 of them go alone. If you have a core demo where 1/3 of them came alone, how many didn’t come at all because they couldn’t get anyone to come with them? And that’s the Prime (rimshot) reason this film is going to gross in the same range as the other two. Another aspect is rearing it’s head here; as much as the gross on The Running Man got beat up as disappointing, it’s going to be significantly better than this is, and the difference there might be that Glen Powell only spent a cup of coffee on a platform with Chad Powers and Chris Pratt has made streaming his permanent address**, so the choices actors make matter at the box-office. Pick a lane, are you a TV Star or a Movie Star? Right now this looks a lot like 28 Years Later did last week, but they had a holiday Sunday to prop them up, and this film might get killed by the weather (and the low playability). Figure it ends up somewhere around 10 or 11.

Return to Silent Hill - Cineverse went 2000 runs with the usual highly targeted campaign that leverages their Bloody Disgusting fan base and so far this doesn’t look bad at all, especially considering what they spent. I’m concerned this might be a one day wonder and the base is super shallow here (plus the weather issues), but this looks good enough for $3 million or so.

Holdovers: So, back the whole ROI of Academy campaigns thing. Since the noms are out, you would think we’d see a nice boost to the films that still have box-office meat on the bones, but I just don’t see it today…..at all. Marty Supreme and Hamnet both look about the same as they’ve looked from week to week before the noms. And it’s not the weather, the theaters in the west look about the same as the ones in the east. Both films have been holding well lately, Marty Supreme looks down 35% or so, and because Hamnet held back it’s wide break till this week (now 2000 runs), it’s going to look decent because they added runs, but I expected same theaters grosses to be better. Maybe they will pop tomorrow but I’m a little disappointed today.

One last thing that I forgot about last week. There was a re-issue of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and it did pretty good, but usually those re-issues are one and done, but the 2nd Friday on the first film (Fellowship of the Ring) has a % drop very similar to the non Academy films like Avatar and Housemaid. There really looks like there’s something to these catalog titles.

*And the way the Academy is doing it is really stupid.

• Kind of like Jaxson Dart and the blue injury tent.