Valentine's / Presidents' Day weekend 2026

We’ve got a solid lineup of films this President’s/Valentine’s Day Weekend, but unless tomorrow wildly over performs, we’ll still be short of last year’s similar weekend (Captain America: Brave New World, Paddington in Peru) by about 15% or so. However, we should get close to last year next week (depending on how these films that opened yesterday hold up), and then we’ve probably got the upper hand on last year for a while. We’ve even got an answer for last year’s biggest opening of 2025 (Minecraft), with Super Mario this year on the same weekend. So even though we’ll give some ytd back this weekend, we should be able to pad it for the next couple of months.

It was pretty funny getting emails and texts from a lot of you watching the Super Bowl who saw what I was talking about, it’s a little film festival. And now you can see that all the chatter this week wasn’t about any of the movie spots, it was more about which short film won the grand prize, the jury prize and the audience award. But it’s weird to me how very few of those very expensive spots did a good job of branding. Is it me or did the brand get lost in the exercise, it’s just a big useless money pit.

Because of the lineup of new films this week, I’ve got another chapter in my long running series ’this sector is hard’. For those of you who are golfers, you know there are three aspects to playing the game; the tee shot, the mid range shot and the short game. And if you have a good day, you get two of those consistently; if you have a great day you get all three (but that rarely happens), and more often than not you only have one or none of them working (and after you struggle through the day you can’t wait to get back out there and try again). The theatrical sector has a similar three element aspect if you want to be successful at the box-office; you need to make a good movie and it needs to be marketed well, but the way theatrical has evolved since streaming exploded you also need to have IP (Genre, Book, Star, etc) fanship that gets consumers into a theater. This weekend we have a roster of films that only check a couple of those boxes, and in each case it would have been significantly better if they had hit the trifecta. So I’ll discuss each of them individually below, but even though you only check one or two of the boxes, this sector is so intoxicating you can’t wait to get out there and try again. This sector is hard.

Anyway, with the same expected accuracy of the annoying Academy Emails that keep insisting I’m not eligible to vote for a particular category because I haven’t watched all the films (but I have on the app that’s supposed to track that stuff), here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Wuthering Heights - WB has been taking a nap for a few months (this is their first release since One Battle After Another), clearly they haven’t missed a step and they’re back at #1. Of the elements for high end success at the box-office this film has two of them. It has strong IP in the cast and the source material (even though they don’t have records of sales like we do today, I wouldn’t be surprised if the total sales of the book were similar to the Fifty Shades books, this just took 179 years to get there) has enough brand recognition to be an asset, and they had a really good marketing campaign that leveraged both a ‘girls night out’ tonight and a ‘you will get laid’ aspect for the Valentine’s Day crowd tomorrow. But on the quality side it looks a little short, and it will be interesting to see how this holds up over the weekend. The critics were good-ish, although the skew of the reviews will probably help the horny crowd tomorrow, and the exits are just fair. There’s one aspect to theatrical that a lot of you probably don’t know about, it’s the weekly battle in Distribution for the theaters that have a higher ticket price like IMAX, Dolby, Prime, XD, etc. If Bravo were ever to do a show about Theatrical, they should start there; The Real Executives of Distribution, and it’s a weekly slap fight. As I looked at how WB did on this film with those PLF theaters (they did very well) I was going to ding them because they didn’t get one category of ‘upcharge’ screens, the 4DX screens [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DX]. But thinking that through (for a movie like this), it probably goes against my rant about ’tag alongs, tagalongs, tag alongs’ and would probably generate mostly moviegoers attending alone. And then there’s the issue of the police being called, and there would have to be alerts at the concession stand when someone (who’s alone) orders just a ‘side of butter’ (which would trigger a preemptive call to the police), so, as usual WB is way ahead of me and thought this through. Anyway, this is really good today and unless the slightly tepid word of mouth is an issue for the panicky dudes who forgot to plan something for tomorrow (unlikely), this should romp tomorrow. It looks a lot like another recent successful President’s Day film, Uncharted right now. But looking back at 2014 when Fifty Shades of Grey opened on a weekend that sets up exactly like this one (President’s Day weekend with Valentine’s Day on Saturday), as front loaded as it was, it still went up 60% on Saturday from Friday, so the money shot for this film is tomorrow. After that it might be a different situation, and it could go soft on Sunday, but for now I’ll say this is in the low/mid 40’s for 3 and 50 or a little better in 4.

GOAT - Sony’s been on the struggle bus for a while now, over the last year they’ve had 14 releases with an average opening weekend of $10.5 million, and their best opening was 28 Years Later at $30 million. There was an opportunity to change that here, but this film had only two of the elements you need to soar at the box-office; the critics liked it and the exits so far are very good, and the IP is strong because it’s the tried and true ‘Animals are human’ animation angle, plus it’s Sony Pictures Animation (SPA) and they’ve been hot lately with the Spider-Verse films and K-Pop Demon Hunters. But then there’s the marketing angle, and it’s not that it was a bad campaign, it’s just that the angle they took that didn’t really unlock the box-office potential. For those of you who haven’t seen the materials, it’s Animals in a world where Basketball is the key story driver and it’s a lot of Basketball based story. But that’s where the limitations start, when you have a family movie about Basketball you get Basketball fans; when you have a movie about animals doing human stuff (i.e. Zootopia) who happen to play Basketball, you get animal lovers, and one of those movies opens substantially better than the other. But all that being said, for a Basketball movie the results here show that Sony did a lot with the iffy positioning here, it just could have been a lot better, maybe double. But when you decide on an iffy positioning angle you might be hidin’ instead of shinin’, like it was born to be. Looks low 20’s for 3, mid 20’s for 4.

Crime 101 - The last couple of films from MGM have showed us they are completely committed to theatrical, and both the quality of the movie here (both Critics and Exits are good) and the Marketing was full throated with a decent positioning angle. But the IP aspect is where they’re struggling, and with this film you need a star that has some Theatrical IP to boost the slightly genre-ish skew of the film. But just like Mercy last month, in this case it’s a star who got very very rich taking the bag from streaming and is now a TV star, and because of that the theatrical is gonna hit a ceiling. You actually need to emphasize Streaming instead of TV because we all know what it means when a film is described as ‘a Streamer’ and it’s not good. So you should be very careful about building a film around a notable name who’s been working in the Streaming world, but in this situation it’s a little deeper than that. Both Chris’s here didn’t have any theatrical IP value before they became members of the big budget Streamer ring of fame. As much as it seems great to be the lead in the new Marvel when it comes out, it doesn’t mean shit for the Actor’s theatrical IP, it’s all about the Marvel character and not the actor. We just can’t confuse minutes streamed with box-office dollars, it’s two different consumer propositions. Leo DiCaprio is a good example of a star who had good theatrical IP, worked in Streaming, but is now building his theatrical IP value back up. Anyway, this looks just behind Mercy right now but it should get a boost from V Day tomorrow and it won’t get killed by weather like Mercy did on Sunday, so figure it’s about $11 million for 3 and $14 million for 4.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die - Went 1600 runs and it looks just like most every other Briarcliff release, $2.5 million over the 3 days, low 3’s for 4.

Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie - Neon went 350 runs and there are some really nice numbers in the most upscale/art theaters, but it falls off really quick once you get past those. Looks somewhere around $1 million for 3, $1.2 million for 4.

Cold Storage - Went 1200 runs and it’s not good, maybe $600k for 3, $700k for 4.