THB #586: What's Going On With The Box Office?

I used to write an analysis of the box office every Saturday and Sunday, for many years. What I didn’t do, which all of my brethren - then, just a couple… now a phalanx - do is talk to the studios. I never spent my weekends on those calls with the studios… even when I was respected as one of the couple top box office writers in town. (Yes… there was a time.)

I love the studios. I care about the studios. But there is nothing that they are going to tell a journalist - a soft one or a tough one - that exposes anything they haven’t already decided to expose. And like all sources, familiarity either breeds contempt or a friendship of some kind that as a human, you don’t want to undermine. It’s no fun telling a director you like and admire that their new movie doesn’t work and it’s also no fun to suggest that a studio distribution or publicity exec who you have a pleasant relationship with is spinning their story.

Len Klady

Anyway… I never wanted to be that guy. And for many years, Len Klady was that guy for my outlet, Movie City News. He was older than me and came from an era in which relationships were different... lies were surely told, but the stakes were less anxiety-provoking. And for the record, when I mention lies… often, even the smartest people have no real clue when a surprise is about to happen. Yes, I took calls from angry executives, usually about the size of budgets that they swore were not as I suggested. (They were.) And I got calls about theories on what motivated marketing choices that I was actually wrong about sometimes.

I got tracking for various people… but I also learned from people who understood tracking better than I that when you get past the bottom lines, very smart execs read tracking differently. As they should… since it is not a tool primarily to guess opening weekend grosses. Marketing execs are using tracking to figure out awareness first and then the strengths and weaknesses they have in their marketing game for each movie. Millions of dollars are being directed and redirected every week based on the ambitions of the distributor and their hopes to maximize each release, region by region, state by state, sometimes city by city. The primary purpose is not to set a Twitter betting line on opening weekend grosses.

La Finke

Nikki Finke changed all this by getting Drudge to post her pre-opening guesses and then her coverage over the weekend. If you knew Nikki, you knew she HATED box office and award season most of all… and so the irony that Deadline was built on those 2 things. She was nuts, but she was no dummy.

There was no Friday box office reporting - claiming to know the weekend based on east coast matinees by noon Friday - until Nikki. There was very little Saturday reporting of box office. For some big movies, but because it drew clicks for Deadline via Drudge, Nikki did it every single weekend. The current trend of “reporting” analytics, which is much more marketing for those analytics companies than valuable journalistic information, started with Deadline and continues with shocking ferocity.

Anyway…

This may have been the oddest summer in my 30-year detail-focused experience of the summer box office. And as each week has clicked by, I have read rationales, but almost all of them are about this or that specific Movie.

So of course, I made a chart around $50m openings.

Since escaping the May Mess™, it seems like every weekend has had the box office guessers underestimating what is arriving. Bad Boys: Ride or Die… surprise… Will Smith is back! (He isn’t, imo, but that was the sentiment.) Then…

“We got Inside Out 2 potentially reaching $90M this coming weekend, Paramount’s Quiet Place: Day One north of $40M+ on June 28, and the July 3rd release of Illumination/Universal’s Despicable Me 4 targeting a $100M+ over 5-days”

Inside Out 2 opened to $154m, Quiet: Day One opened to $52m, and the 5-day on Despicable 4 was $123m. That’s more than 20% off on every one of these 3 movies, including the one that was opening the day this was written, which was off 72%.

I’m not here to kick the author… I’m here to point out how tracking… or reporting on tracking… or manipulation of tracking for promotional intentions… has been missing the mark all summer long… and all of it low. Well, except for May, when all the tracking being promoted seemed to be too high…. except for Apes.