Third weekend of March 2026
And for some of you today, avoid reading this while driving or operating heavy machinery.
What if I told you 5 years ago that in 5 years one of the streamers is going to have a slate that will be a substantial force in the Theatrical Sector? And if I asked you to rank the probability in order, it probably would have been Netflix, Apple and then Amazon. But on the 4 year anniversary of Amazon purchasing MGM, it’s the reverse order. And because of MGM/Amazon this weekend, we’re probably going to double the total gross from this weekend last year, and last year had some decent gross coming in (Snow White, Alto Knights). And the difference in total gross from last year to this year will probably be a number very close to what Project Hail Mary grosses. I was a little worried about next week and the week after, but with excellent exit polls today we have a really good shot at being even next week, because this year we only have 1 1/2 wide films (They Will Kill You, Forbidden Fruits) and last year we had 4 (A Working Man, The Chosen Last Supper, A Woman in the Yard, The Last Unicorn) grossing a total of $43 million, but because of the new films this weekend and the probable strong holdover, we should be about the same or a little better next weekend. On Easter week, it’s going to be a question of how close Mario gets to Minecraft last year (and we’d have a easy shot at a similar gross if Mario was opening on Friday instead of Wednesday, because when you open on Wednesday it just stretches the same 3 day gross into 5, and Universal chose to water down the gross by opening Wednesday), but we’ll probably be a little behind that weekend. But we should be pretty good for a while, the end of May looks dicey because we don’t have an answer for Lilo & Stitch this year, but considering this was the period last year where ’the business came back from it’s rough patch’ and we’re keeping pace with that this year, it’s a good sign for the sector.
As many of you know, I’ve got no love loss for the Entertainment Press, but this week post Oscars they over delivered on their usual ‘glass half empty’ viewpoint (and the mainstream press piled on too). Personally I thought it was a pretty good show, considering what it is (it’s an Awards Show where you give awards and people give a speech when they win); the monologue was pretty good and the musical numbers seemed to work, I’m not sure what more you want. But then, here come the negatives like ‘it’s boring’ and they cut off the K-Pop folks twice. Okay, sure. It’s boring because almost everyone who won has been giving the same speech for the last 9 weeks, and since the press has to cover all of the other awards (and most of us in the industry have been watching those shows too), of course it’s boring to them/us. And it’s ironic that there are complaints about the K-Pop folks getting cut off; but since 3 of the other nominees got cut off in pre-production and weren’t allowed to perform (mostly because the songs were just as boring as the speeches that got played off) it’s kind of like the forces of the universe stood up for the omitted songs and playing them off kinda makes sense.
But let’s go back to the ‘it’s boring because we’ve heard it 100 times already’ issue; in the pecking order of Awards shows, exactly why are the Oscars going last? With the current voting systems in place, the nomination window could close at noon on a Tuesday and the nominations could be announced at 1pm on….Tuesday. Same for the final voting; so why are the awards in mid March instead of late January? Yeah, of course, it’s the Industrial Awards Complex and the extra 2 months of revenue time they get. And because the Academy hasn’t evolved from a time period where the show was this time of year because of snail mail and counting ballots without shoes on (so you can use your toes to count) were the norm, in today’s instant result world, the media’s thirst for content has created a bunch of programming that (on a downstream basis) makes the Oscar telecast a big yawn because we’ve seen it already.
The easy (and logical) answer here is that the Oscar Awards need to be on the 3rd Saturday* of January (the weekend the NFL Championship games are on Sunday), and let all the other awards follow the Oscars. The telecast is such a massive part of the Academy’s income (and the show was down this year even with a lot of movies that people have seen), you can Zhuzh up the show all you want but you’re still going to have the core of the show the same; people saying things we’ve heard a bunch of times before, we’ve seen the winners win already and we’ll see that slow drip drip drip in ratings. The Publicity branch will scream like hell to prevent it and keep their honey pot flowing, but if we’re going to have a serious discussion about moving it up the entire Public Relations branch needs to recuse themselves from the discussion because they have so much income at stake. And since Publicists are kinda Lawyers without the JD, they spin by nature and you have to take whatever they bring to the conversation with a grain of salt. Kind of like watching Jessie Buckley’s Oscar acceptance speech and trying to figure out if it really meant something to her or you’re listening to a speech by a great actress (who just won Best Actress). But unless the Academy wakes up and realizes that all those critiques of ‘boring’ might have a point, it becomes an ‘us or them’ scenario between the Oscars and all the other Award shows.
Anyway, with the same expected accuracy as a Taylor Frankie Paul chair throw competition (coming soon to Tubi), here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
Project Hail Mary - Last week I pointed out how this film was doing things that pointed towards something special this weekend, and because of some top shelf Distribution and Marketing, that’s exactly what we’re seeing today….and then some. We’ve been seeing strong work from MGM since being acquired by Amazon, but it’s been little things here and there. From reinvigorating Jason Statham’s career with Beekeeper and Working Man (so his opening weekends had a teen at the end of them again), to the impressive series high of Creed III to getting something really mediocre like Crime 101 open to a respectable number. But there’s an old cliche (that I truly believe in) when you talk about doing good work: Fundamentals, Fundamentals, Fundamentals; and when you look at what’s going on this weekend at the box-office you can see the invisible hand of someone who had the tough task of teaching the quirky (and that’s putting it mildly) fundamentals of Theatrical to a company like Amazon who think they know everything**, and a lot of what I’m seeing today is MGM distribution 101. he passed 3 years ago this Sunday, and a lot of the work that went into what we’re seeing this weekend are part of the culture that he brought with him when Amazon bought MGM; what looks like fearlessness is actually just exercising fundamental knowledge with confidence. As I spoke of last week, getting a film open to this level is all about that confidence and having people in place that know wtf they are doing who are brave enough to exercise that confidence. He used to have an expression when you asked him how he was, he said ’never had a bad day in my life kid’, and with what he left behind at MGM, the fundamentals he taught were so they’ll have a lot fewer bad days there, and this weekend is the opposite of a bad day.
It’s going to be really fun to see what this movie does over the weekend, it’s got excellent playability and from what I hear there’s an upside with Families so we might see some extra growth tomorrow and Sunday. It’s also not super Coastal, it’s really good across the board including the fly over states, so the broad success of this shows what a terrific job MGM Marketing did. For now I’ll say it’s in the low/mid 70’s, but the only thing keeping me that low is that there are a decent amount of kids out today and it might be a little flat tomorrow.
Hoppers - Of the Friday’s in March (when we have rolling Spring breaks for kids), today has the most kids out (other than Good Friday) and that’s showing up in the kids films today (GOAT is also having a good day). But the playability here is still showing up and this looks down about 30% for a weekend around $20 million.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come - Looks a little better than the first film (however, that opened on a Wednesday so they spread the 3 day over 5 days), but it’s pretty big city and a little Hispanic. Exits are pretty good though and it looks like a weekend around $10 million.
Reminders of Him - Doesn’t look half bad today, looks down 45% for a weekend of about $8.5 million.
Dhurandhar: The Revenge - The Bollywood films just keep getting more and more consistent, but similar to someone like Angel, it’s pretty much the same theaters over and over again. Looking at where this is doing business, you wonder if there was a promotion that offered a free popcorn if you showed your H-1B Visa. They opened on Wednesday and already have $4 million in the till, and the weekend should add another $8 million or so for a 5 day of about $12 million.
The Pout Pout Fish - Went 1800 runs and depending on how much it pops tomorrow, looks like it will end up in the $1.2 to $1.5 million range.
*why are we so locked into Sunday (and it used to be Monday)? By airing on Saturday, we can go back to an 8pm East Coast start time and we don’t have the same issues we have on Sunday because viewers in the East have to work the next day. And frankly, doesn’t a 4pm West Coast start time suck?
**and if you talk to anyone who’s tried at Apple or Netflix, it’s like trying to teach calculus to a pigeon.