Midweek dispatch, Super Mario Galaxy opening day

We’ve got a rare Wednesday opening (that matters) this week, Super Mario Galaxy opened today. It’s going to be interesting to see how opening today affects the rest of the weekend (and run), because I’m not a fan of opening on a Wednesday. The Distribution folks will say ’they are two really good days’ because there’s a lot of kids out of school today, and the exhibitors really egg on the studios to do something like this, but there’s a downside that bothers me.

When The Super Mario Brothers Movie opened on the same day 3 years ago, it pulled a really impressive 5 day number of $204 million, but by opening on Wednesday and spreading the gross over 5 days instead of 4, the FSS 3 day came in at $146 million, ceding the best opening weekend of 2023 to Barbie. But besides giving up a cosmetic aspect like ‘best opening weekend of the year’, there’s a big picture downside to opening on the Wednesday of Easter week that troubles me.

Of course, as usual, my biggest issue with Wednesday openings is the same battle cry I’ve got with a lot of other films; Tag Alongs, Tag Alongs, Tag Alongs. By opening a film on Wednesday, you’re going to get the most lathered up fans to go today, and a Wednesday is more difficult to get a casual or non-fan to go than it is on a traditional casual fan day (on the weekend). And as a general rule (in regards to Tag Alongs), if you don’t get them to Tag Along with the core fans on opening day, they probably won’t go on their own and you lose them.

But in today’s marketplace, with Distribution Math tm rules, going the Wednesday of Easter Week is especially head scratching. If this film opened on Friday, just like every other film these days, it really opens tomorrow for the ‘previews’ that get dumped into Friday’s gross. And as a bonus during Easter Week, 75% of kids are out of school on Friday and a lot of people have the day off for Good Friday, so during Easter Week, tomorrow is a quasi Friday and there should be less resistance for Tag Alongs. On the flip side, by opening today you don’t do the normal ‘previews’ you would do on Thursday (on Tuesday) because it’s discount day at a lot of theaters, so this film (as well as the first film, had some previews at 12:01 am). Bottom line, by having the release date on Friday (with Thursday previews) you are really only giving up about 24 hours of shows, and you’re shifting the first shows into a more attractive proposition for Tag Alongs.

There’s one more aspect to this that I find troubling. As I’ve studied the box-office for most of my life, films decay from week to week based on the 1st weekend gross, so you need to get the first weekend as high as possible; and by opening on Wednesday, you’re letting the air out of that gross so you decay in the following weeks from a lower number. Looking at a really strong playing film like Super Mario Brothers 3 years ago, had they opened on a Friday it looks to me like it cost them about 10-15% in domestic cume. Of course, when a film does $574 million domestic cume, you could say ‘who cares?’ but it’s still $60 million or so and that’s no small number.

Anyway (quibbling about the opening day aside), this film is really good today, and it’s actually a little ahead of where Super Mario Brothers was at this point in the afternoon. If the lead holds up tonight the numbers right now are saying it’s about 3% ahead of the $31.7 million the first film did on Wednesday, so figure about $33 million. Now we’ll have to see where the rest of the weekend goes. Super Mario Brothers wasn’t loved by the critics but they didn’t hate it either, and in this case the log lines in RT are pretty negative. However, the audiences really loved the first movie and it held like a rock in the subsequent weeks. At the time of this writing, I haven’t heard any exit poll data; but that might come into play this weekend, since the first movie didn’t have a super challenging competitive landscape (Air, week 3 of John Wick 4, and week 2 of Dungeons and Dragons) and this film has the leggy Project Hail Mary and the hard charging The Drama as well as Hoppers.

This is clearly a big number today, but every once in a while you have a situation that looks good but either could have been better, or it’s good for the sector but not necessarily good for the film/studio (more on that later this year depending on how this Christmas plays out), I’ll circle back on this Friday with more thoughts once we see what tomorrow and the Mats on Friday indicate.