[Repost] THB #534: Box Office, Mid-May
Having covered weekly box office professionally for 30 years and doing amateur sleuthing for 20 years before, one thing is clear. Summer and Holidays-Nov/Dec are the times when box office is most interesting. Other periods have their moments, but these are the periods when there is some serious head-to-head competition between studios. This is more true now than ever, as distributors focus on less and less of the calendar, misguidedly setting up an increasing threat to the entire exhibition business by de-risking in a business where risk drives the entire enterprise.
I don’t know that I have said this clearly enough anytime recently, but remember that exhibitors open their doors 365 days a year, paying rent every day, paying staff every day, regardless of whether distributors are releasing movies and supporting all of their titles with the needed marketing to sell those movies to the still-small percentage of the potential audience that is willing to spend money to go see movies in theaters… which is the #1 per unit revenue source possible in 2024, not only generating its own cash, but upgrading revenues in PPV, physical media, and yes, even Streaming. (Note: I write “still-small percentage” because moviegoing has been driven, aside from a few blockbusters each year, by less than 15% of the population… as it has been for 40 years or more. Comparing the current popularity of theatrical to the 1940s, pre-tv and everything else, remains… well… stupid.)
Here is what we know so far about 2024 at the movie theaters…
We are just ending Weekend 19. We have had only 4 $100 million overall gross weekends this year. I consider the $100 million overall weekend the first key measure of how things are going. And this sucks.
Last year, after 19 weekends - pre-BarbieHeimer - we had 12 $100 million overall weekends already. In 2019, the first 19 weekends saw 18 of 19 weekends with more than $100 million overall.
You have to go back to 2006 to find even 1 of the first 2 opening weekends of the non-COVID (leave out 2000/2001) summer delivering under $100 million overall. That was the summer that Mission: Impossible III opened to only $48 million, lighting the fuse on Sumner Redstone’s blackballing of Tom Cruise for 4 years because Cruise made a fortune on the film and Paramount was in the red for at least a couple of years on the picture. (Stop blaming the couch.) Regardless, M:I3’s opening weekend was just enough to get the overall box office over the $100 mark that weekend. But not on Weekend 2 (#19), when Mission dropped by 48% despite the soft start and the new titles were the disastrous remake, Poseidon ($22m) and Lindsey Lohan’s Just My Luck ($6m), which coincidentally was Chris Pine’s first career poster appearance as co-star, with Star Trek 3 years away. $99,324,950 was the overall.
The establishing landmark for the $100m overall weekend as standard for the first 2 weekends of the summer is, as with so many other things box office are, Spider-Man. Before that, the rules were different. And for the record, the only other pre-Spidey occurrence before this summer of missing $100m on either of these weekends was the year before MI:3, when Kingdom of Heaven came up short in kicking off the season. What saved Weekend 19 of 2005 from ignominy that summer? A comedy double-dip of Monster-in-Law and Kicking & Screaming. These days, we are lucky to have one straight comedy (meaning, not hooked into some other genre gimmick) all summer. Studio fail.
Anyway… what happened to THIS year?
Unsurprisingly, all 4 $100 million overall weekends were in March. Why? Because the studios released all 4 of the year’s top grossers to date, the only $100 million domestic titles so far, on a Friday in March.
One non-March title, Bob Marley: One Love, almost got to $100 million, released in February. There were only 3 other pre-summer titles to get past $50 million domestic. Paramount took Mean Girls (The Musical…shhh) from Paramount+ and released it. A success. The Beekeeper was always low-budget fun. And in April, A24 released the “overperforming” Civil War.
Studios are creatures of habit… even when the habit is self-destructive. 3 of the 4 $100 million domestic movies last year were released in March (the outlier being Febuary’s Ant-Man release), plus soft-performers Shazam! 2 and Dungeons & Dragons. So what do they do? Shove everything they think can do solid business into March this year and underfeed the other 3 pre-summer months.
Of course, this doesn’t account for Super Mario Bros, which killed from the first weekend of April last year. So what do they do with the first weekend of April this year? Monkey Man and The First Omen!!! Did they think families were going to mistake Monkey Man for Donkey Kong? Not a single new family film from a major all month… just a re-release of Shrek II and Crunchyroll’s Spy x Family Code: White.
I understand why Universal didn’t want to put Despicable Me 4 or the launch of the challenging-to-sell The Wild Robot into April. But couldn’t Kung Fu Panda 4 go into February or April and be as successful, if not more so?
Disney had nothing to throw into the first 4 months of the year. Literally nothing… except The First Omen, which blew off the original franchise and tried to do the Blumhouse thing… but then got beaten on profitability by Immaculate, which opened 2 weeks before Omen, playing out all but the hardsore horny nun audience.
But Sony sat on The Garfield Movie, holding it for the upcoming Memorial Day Weekend… WHY??? If IF is The Movie It Hopes To Be, it will be a word-of-mouth hit and eat Garfield over the holiday weekend. But even if IF is not, why wouldn’t you take an animated film with a classic (newspaper) character and try the April slot that was so good for Mario & Luigi when you have 1.5 months from there to own the family window and not 2 weekends after IF and 3 weekends before Inside Out 2? Kung Fu Panda 4 just did $2.5 million in Weekend 9. Why? Not because it is any good at all, but because there are no other kids films and parents know what they are getting when they drop the hoard off.
Now… getting to the last 2 weekends, launching summer.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes did exactly what it was supposed to do. In fact, it is shocking how predictable that franchise is. Three of the four films in the current version of the franchise have opened to $55 million or $56 million domestic. Only Dawn opened better ($73m), the beneficiary of excitement around the first film of the relaunched series. It settled back down after that to its core constituency and this time, the same group seems to have showed up.
The second weekend of the summer is historically a brutal slot. People clear out from the opener. Even in the year of 3-quels from 3 huge franchises, Shrek II slotted 2 weekends away from the opener, Spider-Man 3. The only film to open better than Kingdom in that slot was Star Trek in 2009 ($75m). So kudos to Disney for taking the shot there.
But the solid Kingdom opening was not enough to get to $100 million overall because The Fall Guy, which started disastrously weak, remained weak, dropping over 50% from its poor start to a horrible 2nd weekend.
For perspective, Universal’s Seth Rogen comedy Neighbors, the #5 best 2nd Weekend Of The Summer opening ever, opened to $49 million and its 2nd weekend - against the $93 million opening of Godzilla - was $15 million… for a $91m 10-day domestic total, as compared to The Fall Guy’s $50 million 10-day total.
Again… DISTRIBUTORS!!! Comedies!!! Flat out comedies!!! Neighbors cost $18 million to make. The Fall Guy cost $130 million to make. If Neighbors had done Fall Guy numbers IT WOULD HAVE BEEN PROFITABLE!!!! (If Fall Guy had done Neighbors numbers, it still would have been weak and borderline profitable maybe, but certainly not humiliating.)
And I have news for everyone… quote me if you like… if The Fall Guy’s screenplay had stuck to the Burt Reynolds movie origins it came from, it could have cost less and been much more successful using the much simpler formula. He’s The Stunt Dude. She’s the Brilliant Woman dragged into his violent action situation. Figure out the damned murder mystery together! He gets smarter because of her. She gets more physical because of him. Shit blows up real good. Laughs are had. A real romance happens on screen. People want to see that movie… not just critics who, completely understandably, are rooting for your 2 lead actors, who I adore personally and professionally, neither of whom has ever opened a movie to big numbers.
Ryan Gosling has never opened a movie to $20 million on his star power. Emily Blunt at least has A Quiet Place and Jungle Cruise opening over $35 million… but did those movies open on her star power? Great, great actors and both very funny and both Oscar nominated this year… which is a bit like Norbit opening while Eddie Murphy is Oscar nominated. Oscars noms aren’t meant to open The Fall Guy. So much so that they didn’t even make fun of that disconnect in the marketing. They just let it be. (You know someone pitched the comedy/stunt freeze frame with “Oscar nominee” and a big comedy arrow pointing to their faces!)
As we can assess from the Apes movie opening to the same number as the franchise did in 2011 and 2017… the problem is not movie theaters or the audience. The audience is waiting… willing… wanting to be fed what excites it. Obviously, what excites it changes all the time. “Better movies” is a con line for the suckers. “Better” is in the eyes of the beholder. Junk does great. Greatness does poorly. “Better” is great… it certainly isn’t a bad thing… but it is not the standard for selling movies to audiences.
Marketing, on the other hand, is marketing. The best can sell anything. And for the record, Universal did just that last year. Unhappy New Year! The studio has enjoyed a stupendous - truly - marketing run under the amazing and charming Michael Moses and is having a shit year so far. (Happens.)
Abigail and Monkey Man were not disasters, but not on the level of last year’s low budget run. Opening Kung Fu Panda 4 is just not that hard… same as any Batman or Marvel sequel. No kicks or kudos. But The Fall Guy is - and is likely to remain - the or one of the biggest miss(es) of the year. It didn’t belong in that slot. For many reasons. But it was an act of hubris to put it there. The movie, which is very entertaining, is not great. The franchise is from TV and older than dirt.
I had never really looked at the all-time domestic chart to figure out what the most successful conversions of old TV shows to movies was. I was a little shocked when I looked. The highest ever was The Simpsons Movie - a direct extension, not a remake or reboot - doing $183m domestic and $353 international. All kids movies follow, with The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water as the high at $325m ww, Trolls, Scooby Doo (live), Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, and The Smurfs. (I don’t count the 3rd generation of Star Trek movies, which are not directly based on the series. The biggest of them hit $386m ww.)
The #1 TV conversion for an non-child audience is 21 Jump Street, with $138 million domestic and $63 million international, costing a reported $42 million… less than 1/3 of The Fall Guy.
What made Universal think that The Fall Guy would even do double 21 Jump St, $276 million at a minimum worldwide…. which would still pretty soft for the summer opener?
It would have done better in a different slot. How much better… who knows?
But I must repeat… this market, itself, is not depressed. There is not enough or the right kind of coal being thrown in the fire. And there is not a damned thing that exhibitors can do about it, even if Coke was $1 and all cell phones were checked at the door.
Repeating the narrative - the current version of which now goes back 20 years, but really started more than 100 years ago, as generation after generation of journalists have predicted the end of theatrical - is just ignorant. Maybe not malevolent, but utterly uninformed.
Next weekend, IF is the movie of the weekend to watch. And I just don’t know. As I have written repeatedly, when the marketing changes so many times, with so many focus points, I can’t imagine things are going well. But some tracking has it opening to a similar number to the Apes this weekend… and to me, that would be a win, big enough for the movie - assuming it connects with audiences - to gather legs for a month’s long open run before hitting the 800-lb gorilla for families that I expect Inside Out 2 to be. But even if the number is more like $35 million - $45 million, I see this is a movie about legs, not about opening. And as a family movie, it could certainly be that. So unless it opens under $25 million, let’s keep it in perspective.
The weekend after, it’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which looks like a wild, loud, relentless joy. But don’t forget, no George Miller, whether Maxes, Babes or Penguins has opened to over $45 million. None of his films have grossed as much as $400 million worldwide. So if Furiosa opens over $50 million, it is a win. And we go from there. I feel like WB is, smartly, leaning into the grrrrrl power angle, looking for their Barbie audiences to be curious. We shall see. I would have suggested going all in and making a fake commercial for Furiosa Barbie, beating the crap out of all the Kens. But those kinds of ideas scare people. A lot.
One thing we rarely discuss when taking box office is what a great crop of human beings are having films open this month. I mean, one after the next, people at the top of their form… good, thoughtful people… people we all should want to succeed, not just for the film business, but for the sake of the form.
And then comes June… which comes in like a lion cub and goes out like a pack of hungry mature killers.
Until tomorrow…