THB #534: Box Office, Mid-May

not in the car… the theatrical exhibition business

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?