Box Office - Unhinged, 8/23

I thought it would be worth doing a deeper dive into Unhinged's weekend "win" because the trades are being indulgent in their coverage and this is the start of a few weeks, at least, of the effort to reopen theatrical.

The most generous reading of the Unhinged weekend is that the film did $2,195 per theater. Why is this generous? Because the "screen count" we were used to is really a count of theaters, most of which are now multiplexes, and thus, the window for this "B" movie is wider than it would ever be in a normal time for distribution. In places where it would normally appear on one or two screens, it is on three or four.

No one should expect pre-pandemic numbers from any movie opening for some time to come. New York, California, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington, Oregon, North Carolina and Arizona are all still closed for movie theaters. Still, that is less than half of the Top 30 markets in America.

$2196 per theater is still just 75 tickets sold per day per theater. And that math …