First weekend of March 2026
We’re about 10% ahead of 2025 right now, and we’re going to have another great weekend this weekend where we’ll come close to doubling the total gross from the same weekend last year (Mickey 17, Rule Breakers). The new titles for Oscar weekend next week don’t look terribly substantial right now, but because last year’s new titles weren’t great either (Novocaine, Black Bag) the difference between the holdover films should put us a healthy amount ahead again. After that we’re better or competitive with last year for the rest of the month, and then it’s just a question of Super Mario vs. Minecraft at Easter. But it’s going to be mostly surplus every week up unit we get to May, especially the back half of May, but we should have built up a pretty good cushion by then.
If there’s any genre where performance has evolved as entertainment has become insanely competitive (because of the rise of streaming), it’s the Family/Animated part of it. Even though the streamers haven’t really cracked the original IP content code (with the obvious exception of K-Pop Demon Hunters), that doesn’t mean the constant availability of the catalogues on streaming hasn’t had an effect. And what I constantly see in the Theatrical sector for Animated Family films all ties back to one aspect, branding and Parental trust.
Branding has always been a key factor in the Family/Animated sector, for years we saw the pecking order as Disney/Pixar (way ahead), then DreamWorks and then everyone else. Then as Illumination became a consistent player of known quality (aided by some very intentional brand building using the Minions), they built the brand up to a level where the parental trust level was right up there with Disney (with grosses to match).
And that’s where the key is in this sector, Parental trust. The Disney Castle has enjoyed such a high level of trust with Parents because it goes back almost a century, and we’ve seen that brand value with parents rise and fall over those 100 years. After years of malaise of the 70’s and 80’s it came storming back in the Katzenberg era, and up until 6 or 7 years ago it was the indisputable king of the Family sector, not only because the content was safe, smart and the movies were the ultimate ‘compromise’ movies, but the films were wildly entertaining. But then one of the great creative traps in our business happened…..bubble-itis.
I’m sure you’ve all been in rooms where someone suggests making a movie about something, and follows the idea up with ‘everyone would want to see that’; and by ‘everyone’ they mean everyone in their bubble. And in the Entertainment sector hotspots on the coasts, those bubbles can be way out of touch with the majority of the country; and the middle of the country is not only crucial to the Animated Family sector, it’s the core. If you started a parlor conversation here in LA with the question ‘if Noah Wyle, Connor Storrie and Peter Claffey all walk into a Houston, Texas Cheesecake Factory at 7pm on a Saturday night, who gets a table first?’, I’m pretty sure the room would gush towards Connor Storrie, imagining rose petals being dropped on the way to a table with Champagne ready to go, when in actuality they would hand him a pager and say it’s a two hour wait (and he’s actually from Texas), while Noah Wyle immediately gets the best table in the house. Hard to say where Peter Claffey would fit in here, but the bigger problem is understanding wtf he’s saying, is he asking for a table, where the bar is or is he suffering from a stroke?
Since writers have a battle cry of ‘write what you know’, Disney and Pixar ventured into some bubble-ish ideas that maybe the country wasn’t ready for (at least in a family film); and although pushing boundaries is part of making art, when writing about what is important to them, they forgot the entertainment part of the equation and they ended up with a twofer where the movie forced parents into a conversation they really didn’t want to have (yet) and it the movie wasn’t funny. And enough of those films in a row caused parents to ‘approach with caution’ on Disney/Pixar films with original IP; and we’re seeing that lack of trust in the brand today. Of course, the brand itself is rock solid; it hasn’t had any effect on sequel IP like Zootopia and Moana, and those still work so spectacularly well because of that trust.
But we’ve been down this path before with Disney, before The Little Mermaid reinvigorated the brand in 1989, they floundered around with middle of the road Animated titles like The Black Cauldron and Oliver and Co. Of course, The Little Mermaid started a sensational 30 year run, and looking at the reviews and the exits on Hoppers, it might be the start of another run that earns the trust of Parents on original IP’s with the Disney Castle or the Pixar Desk Lamp starting the movie.
Anyway, with the same expected accuracy as a Kalshi ‘bet’* payoff, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
Hoppers - If Kalshi was around 10 years ago, and you could place a bet that the DreamWorks Animation Brand would be more valuable at the box-office than the Pixar Brand, how fast would you have bet the mortgage (not that you’d ever get paid) on Pixar? But looking at the grosses today, they scream Dreamworks, not Disney. It’s coastal and looks a lot like a DWA critical darling like Best Animated Oscar Nominee The Wild Robot, but (and this is the shocking part) at this point the grosses aren’t as good as The Wild Robot. But with a great (95% at this point) RT score and excellent exit numbers, this could pick up steam over the weekend and run for a while. Apparently there’s an Eco theme to this story so we’ll see if the anti-woke police clutch their burning crosses and take a shot at the film (they love picking on Disney), but this looks like a good step in the right direction for the brand. Looks like a weekend in the mid 30s.
Scream 7 - The exits were a step below VI last week and that’s showing up today in the numbers. Looks down 70% for a weekend around $20 million.
The Bride! - There are a couple of interesting bits of data on this movie today. The RT score is currently hovering around 60 and looking at the reveiws, you can see the critics are really squinting to like the movie. They clearly love future Best Actress Winner Jessie Buckley and have respect for Maggie Gyllenhaal from her previous film The Lost Daughter. But similar to The Lost Daughter, the moviegoing public doesn’t seem to get it, and the exits are a big shrug. But when you look at the grosses there’s a clear connection to Jessie Buckley; they’re all the same theaters that did business on Hamnet, and although Hamnet was good at the box-office (for what it was), it never broke out past the upscale theaters. As much as Jessie Buckley is being referred to as ‘the next Meryl Streep’, Meryl Streep’s first three films were The Deer Hunter, Manhattan and Kramer vs Kramer, and that kind of rapid ascension doesn’t happen these days so we’ve got to pump the brakes a little on the Meryl Streep comparisons. But I do find it encouraging that she might mean a little in those theaters (and of course Christian Bale doesn’t hurt), and having someone of this talent level who might be developing a following is a good thing. Looks like a weekend in the $10 million range.
- sorry, ‘futures’, not a gambling bet at all, oh no no no.