THB #176: Mid-Summer Check-Up
THB #176: Mid-Summer Check-Up
The good news has been that most of the movies expected to perform have performed pretty well.
The bad news is that in the last month alone, regardless of the success of Top Gun Maverick, the domestic box office has underperformed my intentionally broad estimates for this first half of the summer by almost $150 million and the likely final gross for the summer is likely under $2.9 billion.
The domestic box office in Summer 2019 was $4.3 billion. (Self-quote, April 29: “$2.9 billion seems to be the cap on box office this summer… and it is 100% a choice by these distributors.)
My intentionally broad estimate for the rest of the summer is about $1.3 billion domestic. We are currently at about $1.6 billion.
There is a lot of misguided, myopic thinking amongst many of the professional box office writers whose writing influences and gets quoted by other media that does no analysis of their own but feels compelled to discuss office.
This last weekend (#45), in spite of what some trades will tell you, was not a reason for celebration. It is a lot better than last year for exhibition, but still rough. In 2019, the “same” weekend (June 21-23 vs June 24-26 this year) grossed $204 million domestically. This last weekend, it was just $133 million, off about one-third.
In 2019 “this” weekend, 102 films in release. In 2022, just 24.
In 2019, the #6 weekend grosser pulled in $5.6 million. This last weekend, #6 grossed $1.7 million.
This last weekend, the #7 - #10 slots combined grossed $2.58 million. In this weekend in 2019, $15.07 million.
It takes an ecosystem of the high, the middle, and the low for exhibition to be most successful… not just a bunch of mega-hits strung out over the year, each written about glowingly while the demand for seats in half the auditoriums, except on a big opening weekend, goes fallow, since there is nothing to draw any added business, fresh or holdover.
In terms of media, again, these writers are writing what is in front of them… nothing else. They are delivering as much insight and as much foresight as the executives that offer them “insights” each week allow them. They are not dumb. They are not incapable. But this is the job as they have been told to do it… and it is profoundly dangerous to the future of the industry.
These are the writers that were touting Netflix stock right until it crashed. These are the writers who see the return of exhibition as an annual number and recovery as based on that big number and nothing else. They are industry tourists. This is a media that has been mostly co-opted by companies that advertise, not seekers of fact.
And now back to the good news…
We’ve had 3 summer films do more than $300 million domestic and $750 million worldwide in the first half of the summer.
What does this tell us? That audiences - mostly the same audiences as before COVID - are mostly ready to come back to movie theaters.
And we have Minions: The Rise of Gru, Thor: Love & Thunder, Nope, and Bullet Train still on the way.
This is good. I hope they are all wonderful and over-perform. I am also hopeful that Elvis and The Black Phone will be leggier than expected.
But we don’t have a major opener on July 15, then July 29, then 3 straight weeks in August. At least 2 of these weekends are likely to have a cumulative weekend gross of under $100 million. And there may not be another $100 million weekend until October 21’s Black Adam!
This is not because audiences that were exciting by some summer movies will have lost their movie appetite. It’s because the studios are not putting content into theaters than can either deliver a huge opening OR build to over $100m a weekend with 4 or 5 or 6 strong, but not “mega” movies.
What audience willingness does not mean - nor should it be expected to mean - that the audience of theatrical is suddenly going to wildly expand. The consumer spending side of the TV business is about $175b - $200b a year. Theatrical has been about $40 billion. But theatrical does that number with about 10% of the audience that spends all that money on TV. In other words, there is a lot more money per customer, whether you - thinking about how things should be prioritized - personally love going to the movies or not.
Disney is abandoning theatrical from Thor until November. Universal and Sony, with a light sprinkle from Warners and Paramount, are holding the exhibition business up almost by themselves outside of prime time slots.
No one looking at the schedule can tell you otherwise honestly.
And with all respect to Universal as the most consistent provider of theatrical movies and the marketing that supports them… their titles still come out under their King Solomon shortened window that discourages theatrical legs.
A personal tale… my sister and brother-in-law went to Downton Abbey 2 a couple weekends ago. $50+ all in. And then, a few days later, found out that it was available “for free” on their TV. They like going to the movies. They don’t think about $50 much. But they were still kinda pissed.
If the industry doesn’t think it is training people to NOT go to the movies, it is agonizingly myopic.
So let’s celebrate what is going well in the industry. It’s no time to be a Debby Downer.
But at the same time, it is not time to get excited about challenges being overcome. If distributors continue to starve exhibitors 6 or 7 months a year, just wanting to bathe in the cream of major hits in the other 5 or 6 months, there will be a lot fewer screens in America by this time next year… and every year it continues.
I am optimistic. But I am also aware that the future of exhibition is in the hands of the same kind of thinkers that built the DVD business into a juggernaut in 3 years… then killed it off by mistake less than 4 years later.
The great illusion of film and TV is that it just happens. But anyone who is close to the reality knows that every frame of every show and film is a choice… some taken more seriously than others… but every one a choice.
Choose wisely.
Until tomorrow…