Second weekend of March 2026

Even though we don’t have a ton of new movie gross coming in this weekend, it’s about the same gross as we had this weekend last year (Novocaine, Black Bag, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie); and the difference between the total gross last year will be the substantial contribution of the holdover films (and most of that will be because of Hoppers), so we should be up around 25% or maybe a little more from last year. Next week looks really good too, and although we had Snow White doing some decent business last year, the combination of what we’ve got on the screen now and what’s coming in should add to the cushion over last year.

Starting this week, we’ve got a decent amount of kids out of school for spring break, so the grosses today are a little pumped up and you won’t see the bounces from Friday to Saturday you’ve been seeing lately. In today’s world, spring breaks are spread from now through the 2nd weekend of April, and you have between 20% and 40% of kids out of school each Friday (with the exception of April 3rd where 3/4 of kids are out for Good Friday). Whenever you have a school holiday like you do during Spring Break, it’s good for our sector because a good percentage of households are two incomes, and having kids out of school on a workday is challenging for Parents so sending them to the movies is a good way of warehousing them.

Good luck on Sunday to all of the nominees who get this (and there are a lot of you this year). It’s great to see movies getting nominated that did substantial business in theaters; the two frontrunners for best Picture have a combined WW gross near $600 million, and although we’re still hovering at 3 or 4 Best Picture nominees that did serious business (it’s been that way for a couple of years), there used to be a big drop-off between the successful theatrical releases and the films that either had a streamer based phony qualifying run, or just didn’t really work in theaters. This year we have a tier of films that were pretty good from an upscale/art film point of view like Bugonia and Hamnet, so it’s probably a step forward. As great an achievement as winning an Oscar is, I still need someone to explain to me what (or where) the ROI is, because the campaigns are so insanely expensive and by the time you get to the actual award, none of the films are in theaters. I might also need someone to explain to me how K-Pop Demon Hunters is up for Best Animated Film, not just because it streamed before it hit theaters but because the Animation is really mediocre and the story was a big shrug.

As you may have read this week, Universal made an adjustment to their theatrical windowing strategy, and are back to the window they used to be at before we started experimenting with during (and since) Covid. As challenging as Covid was to the Theatrical sector (and pretty much everyone), it forced the exhibitors to go along with experimental window because they had no choice. Up till Covid, if a studio said ‘hey, we’re going to try a 21 day window’ the exhibitors said ‘cool, you do that, we’ll pass on playing the film’, so they held all the cards. But we really didn’t know until Covid came along and the exhibitors had no choice.

And what’s so weird about the direction things are headed now is that it seems like we had it right before we started experimenting. The data that’s been compiled shows that you need to exhaust the highest per viewer revenue, then move to the next tier, then the next, then the next; just like it used to be. And the cache of the Theatrical release speaks volumes about the viability of the title once it hits the bargain bin of a streaming service, and if you start in the bargain bin, consumers know why it started there. Why is that? Who knows, but it could be the 120 years of Theatrical history combined with the fact that the streamers had the opportunity to change consumer behavior over the last 6 years, but punted the salad by making a lot of shit. Had they made films that competed (quality wise) with what people expect from 120 years of movies in theaters, we might be in a different situation here; but the lesson might be that you didn’t have to work very hard to get someone to watch a movie on TV and it’s really hard to get someone to leave their house for a movie theater, so the challenge of the purchase generation showed in the decisions made at the green light stage.

Anyway, with the same accuracy as the Opera and Ballet folks yelling at Timmy Chalamet because the view from their bubble is different than the view from his bubble (and as far as their empty headed response of ‘no one cares about Ping Pong’, the $275 million WW gross on Marty Supreme says maybe they should rethink that), here are some thoughts about the weekend box-office.

Hopper - The strong exit polls are showing up in the grosses today (with an assist from the 20% of kids out of school), and this looks like it’s going to have another really good weekend. There are a lot of theaters that are up from last weekend, clearly they’re where kids are out of school, but the drop from last Friday looks a lot like the week #2 drop on Zootoopia, which finished the weekend down only 32% from opening weekend. So this looks like it’s headed for a really nice weekend in the mid/high 20’s.

Regretting You 2, Where the Crawdads Sing 2, It Ends with Us 1 3/8 Remembering Him - The run of Colleen Hoover (and Colleen Hoover adjacent) movies from books continues, and this seems like it’s falling in the same box-office bucket as it’s predecessors that didn’t make a lot of litigation attorneys rich. As with most of these films, it’s very red state/middle of the country, and you have to look waaaaay down the sheet to find a theater in LA or Manhattan. It will be interesting to see how deep this fan base goes and if it crosses over from the core older female skew, but it looks a little flat so far today after starting the day with robust pre-sales. Exits outside of the core base are just okay at best, so figure this ends up in the mid teens unless it does something unexpected tomorrow and Sunday.

Undertone - There’s one aspect to this film that’s interesting, A24 really has a brand in this space and if you can get the critics to bite just a little you can activate that A24 base and get a decent opening. The pre-sales here were pretty good, because the number at the opening bell was strong, but it’s been super flat ever since. And the exits aren’t even close to what the critics were saying, this was living in the 80’s on RT for a while (it’s in the mid 70’s now), but the exits so far are terrible. Right now this is headed towards a weekend of about $6 million or so, but with those exits anything could happen for the rest of the weekend.

Project Hail Mary - There’s something really exciting going on this weekend with this film, MGM/Amazon has dug deep into their rich history and went Roadshow [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadshow_theatrical_release] this weekend. They have one show each night today through Monday only in 70mm, and the grosses are really flat since the opening bell…because there are no seats left, they’re all pretty much sold out.

There’s an aspect here that has some current resonance considering what’s been going on the last couple of months. Next week marks the 4 year anniversary of Amazon buying MGM at a price that most people thought was way too high, and about a year later they added a couple of senior executives to beef up the company. Now, the slate (that’s a product of the staff that came over in the acquisition and the smart hires) is paying off; because they acquired and ended up with a bunch of people who know wtf they are doing. Next week on the anniversary of the purchase they’ll have a really substantial Theatrical release with this film, but it took a lot of highly experienced people to get it there; and just the idea of doing a 70mm only weekend on a film that apparently plays through the roof and is super Theatrical is brilliant. We always talk about building word of mouth, so why not do it in a format that showcases the film in a way that reminds consumers why the Theatrical experience is worth the very low price of a ticket. But people did this, and as much as the WB tug of war that played out over the last 3 months might be about platforms and library’s, there are a lot of top notch people involved and looking back at the price Amazon paid for MGM, it’s a fraction of what WB cost. And Amazon is way ahead of both Apple and Netflix now because of the people who came with the purchase.

I’m not going to the show Sunday, because I didn’t win the Academy ‘lottery’ for the 12 tickets they allocate for the General Membership, but I’ll be at the Night Before tomorrow. If you’re there, look for me, I always love to say hi in person.