Easter weekend 2026

It’s Easter Weekend, and that’s usually a good thing for the box-office, there’s 75% of K-12 on Holiday today and a lot of businesses are closed, so it’s always a good day. I’ve been saying for a couple of weeks how we have a shot at doing the same business this weekend as we did on the same weekend last year, but because A Minecraft Movie was so big last year, it was a tough hill to climb. But there’s actually a little wrinkle in the distribution math tm* that makes this year vs last year Apples vs Oranges. Because Universal opened Super Mario Galaxy on Wednesday this year and A Minecraft Movie opened on Thursday Friday last year, we’re comparing a 3 day FSS gross on Mario this year to a 4 day TFSS gross last year on Minecraft, and there’s $10.5 million from Thursday in the Minecraft gross that’s being counted as Friday. So let’s say the total this weekend is $195 million (which is where it looks like it’s going now), we’d officially be short $8 million from the $203 million total last year; but when you take out that $10 million on Minecraft, or add in the $25 million Mario did yesterday (to be fair), we’re ahead of last year. But it’s distribution math’s tm world, we’re just living in it.

I got a lot of fun responses about the Oscar stuff last week, and in regards to moving the Oscars up (so they’re first), a couple called out other aspects where we move things around the calendar to suit our purposes. The one that came up more than once was that the Governor’s Awards are now their own show in November and they used to be part of the Show in the Spring. And that created two thoughts.

If you’ve been to the Governor’s Award show, it’s a little light, they only give out a couple of awards and it could probably use a little fortification. I’ve been harping on giving Casting an Oscar for a long long time here, and it’s amazing that it’s finally happened (and I still think one of Conan’s best jokes was that there weren’t losers in the category, the Academy ‘just went a different direction’); but for those of you who’ve been reading this for a while, the radical idea I had was to make the nominations only eligible if they were released at least 5 years before that Oscar year. The example I kept bringing up was Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, where pretty much the entire Mansion Family has been nominated for an Oscar, and looking at that same Oscar year Little Women would have given it a run for Casting resonance. However, the way it’s set up now the Oscar probably would have gone to something more ‘of the moment’ like The Irishman or Ford v. Ferrari. But since we could use another award in the Governors show quiver, maybe award the Casting Director for a film like Once Upon a Time or Little Women where the work was so good that they saw the future. Since we’ve shorted this profession so long, this would be a great way to catch them up, there would be some astounding candidates and who knows how far we could go back? 40 years ago the casting director for The Outsiders basically hired the future, and I’m sure all of you can think of other films with a collection of actors that show astounding recognition of talent, and talent that hadn’t been recognized till then. Just look at one of the new releases this week, The Drama, and go back and look at the reviews for Twilight. The critics really hammered the acting of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart who have absolutely proved the critics wrong, this is the type of award that could recognize that foresight.

Secondly, I’m going to become a member of the IAC (the free version) for a paragraph here, and if there’s anyone that really deserves the Governor’s Irving G. Thalberg Award it’s Jerry Bruckheimer. I know the Academy likes to sniff at commercial success, but I’d challenge anyone to put a better filmography up against his, and there’s a key difference between him and some other Producers who have similar filmographies. He’s not a ’slap my name on it’ Producer and never was; he shows up, does the work, and he’s a Producer in the truest sense of the word. The talent tree that’s sprung from movies he produced is insane and the consistency throughout his career is as stable as anyone this business has ever seen. He produced tent poles before we called them tent poles and as much as we like to lean towards Producers of ‘important’ films, the big commercial successes made those ‘important’ films possible. The Academy’s definition of this award is “Presented to a creative producer whose body of work reflects a consistently high quality of motion picture production”. To me that’s Jerry Bruckheimer and this seems like a no brainer.

Anyway, with the same expected accuracy of the sign at my local driving range where a Golf Instructor promised to teach you to ‘Drive like Tiger’, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie - One of the traps in our business is the phrase ‘we always do it this way’, and looking at the (very big) grosses today (by doing the same thing they did on Super Mario Brothers 3 years ago), Universal might have left some money on the table. Don’t get me wrong, the grosses today are great and I like ‘great’, but I love ‘more’ and when you look at how much more front loaded this film is than the first one was, having all those fans go on Wednesday instead of the quasi Friday night we had last night (because of the Holiday today) and today makes it harder for the tent to grow with more tagalongs. It dropped almost double the percentage from Wednesday to Thursday as the first movie (-29% vs -16%) and today is up from yesterday about 20 points less than the first film. But it’s still going to be good enough for a 3 day of about $120 million, which would bring the 5 day to about $180 million. It’s an exceptional result but I think it could have been a little more exceptional; and if we want to grow this sector we need to make it easier on the tagalongs, not harder.

Project Hail Mary - Speaking of exceptional, even though it looks like it’s going to be down 35% from last weekend, they got wiped out of the PLFs for Super Mario and the PLF’s were a major part of last weekend’s gross. If you look at the theaters that had no PLF’s last weekend it’s actually up today from last Friday, so once again this looks like it’s going to be around for a while. If the -35% holds up this weekend, that should put them in the mid 30’s, and they will pass $200 million tomorrow. But with this holding up so well this weekend, it sure looks like they are playing the $300 million domestic cume game with a chance of getting well past that.

The Drama - A24 continues its path from making weird little movies with no one in them that open in the high single digits, to making weird little movies with Movie Stars that open in the high teens. In addition to the growth of A24 into a higher weight class, it’s also really nice to see a couple of younger Movie Stars like Zendaya and Robert Pattinson getting a movie open to a decent number. However, looking at the grosses today, it’s very A24 and the theaters in NY and LA are waaaaay ahead of the rest of the country; and if A24 wants to start opening movies with a 2 in front of the gross, they’ll need theaters outside of NY and LA. They had a nice start yesterday and if the numbers today hold up, it looks like a weekend of about 16 or 17 million.

A Great Awakening - Went 1200 runs and there are some decent numbers for this Faith Based Historical Drama. Looks like a weekend of about $1.5 million.

• of course it’s not Trademarked, it’s just my lame attempt to keep the DWP’s ** from stealing it.

** Dipshits with PodCasts.