THB #613: Studios' October Fail

It’s easy to figure out what happened to studios financially when they started chasing Netflix in streaming about 6 years ago. (D+ launched November 12, 2019… production started in earnest in the year before launch.)

But I feel the need to explain - perhaps, ad nauseam - that things have changed in such an extreme way that to think this is a possibility is to utterly misread or not know industry history. This is the first part of that analysis, to be followed by “When The Money Changed,” a look at how the spending at the major studios has changed dramatically in recent years and can never fulfill the fantasy that spending less on big movies will lead to spending more on small movies.

Meanwhile…

October is the best symbol of the failed reality of the path the major studios have been on for the last few years. They swore up and down to exhibitors that they would be changing this at CinemaCon this year… but no evidence of that yet.

Adding $8 million - for Wednesday the 30th and Thursday the 31st - onto the $444 million cume that Box Office Mojo has on its pages, this October’s $452 million total gross will be the lowest grossing October - excepting COVID’s 2020 - since the year 2000.

Why?

Everything looked pretty rosey after a soft September with only Beetlejuice Beetlejuice delivering serious numbers. But The Wild Robot launched on Sept 27 and would do more than 2/3 of its total domestic business in October. Joker: Folie à Deux is the sequel to the highest grossing October release ever. Venom 3 followed the #5 and #6 biggest October releases ever. And there was the sequel to Smile, which opened on the last day of September, but did $85 million in the month of September.

There was, literally, only ONE other new major studio release on more than 1000 screens this month… Sony’s Saturday Night. ONE!!! That makes 4 total.

So what is the result of the “all tentpole” strategy that studios are shoving down our throats? Worst October (aside from 1 COVID shutdown year) in more than 20 years. Exhibitors have to thank their lucky stars that Cineverse made something of Terrifier 3, which represented about 10% of the gross for the month, within $15 million of the top grosser for the month. It’s not unlike last year, when Taylor Swift accounted for 27% of the October gross out of nowhere.