THB #205: The 10 Week Box Office Drought Begins

Lobsters in slowly boiling water.

The box office this weekend is not really a shock, but the horror of it is no less real.

The box office gross of the Top 10 on last Friday was $30.3 million. It still wasn’t good. The hope would be that Bullet Train would deliver at least one more $100 million overall box office weekend for theatrical. It didn’t crash, but the engine was little more than a nice caboose.

This week, the Top 10 Friday box office gross is just over $16 million.

Friday’s average percentage as part of the weekend hole is 32.1%, with a low of 23.3% and a high of 44.6%. (Not to confuse more, but in a way, low is high and high is low… 23% means that the full weekend gross is more than 4x Friday and 44.6% means the weekend gross is just over 2x Friday.)

This was only the 4th sub-$16.5m Friday of 2022 and the 1st since February 25.

As a result, expect a 3-day total domestic gross of well under $70 million and perhaps as low as $58 million. It will be the first such low weekend gross…