Was that really the stated reason? Believing there would be much omicron in mid March would be crazy.
I guess we’ve seen studios do sillier things, but still.
Edit: I agree with Eric though — even with the best possible date this is like a 40M movie or something. What’s the draw?
Pretty clear top 10 next weekend of:
Sonic
Morbius
Ambulance
Lost City
Batman
EEAAO
Uncharted
NWH
Dog
JJK
EEAAO reported expanding to ~1200 locs @CJohn
This is the exact same runtime as IM1 which was a great length. IW was a great length. AEG was a great length. Amount of stuff you want to cover*how fast you want the movie to feel= ideal runtime.
In this case I am expecting a fast pace like IW+ a bit less stuff to cover.
I think what’s going on is that this as perceived, by many, as the 7th “large cast crossover event movie” — after Avengers, CW, and NWH. Those have an avg runtime of 2hr 31 (though more like 2:26 excluding AEG). Also been a lot of long blockbusters recently outside the mcu like Batman and NTTD.
Through infinity saga the runtime to gross correlation was reasonably strong but my sense is that the next 5 movies are gonna do some damage to that R^2
It was reported to expand to 30-50 as of last Monday, and was mentioned in last wk’s derby thread while discussing this weekend’s likely top 10. If it was staying flat at 10 theaters I doubt it would even be included.
BoxOfficePro reported the precise 38 location count on wed https://www.boxofficepro.com/weekend-box-office-forecast-morbius/
I don’t personally have a strong opinion on its inclusion this weekend, I was fine with it or sing rounding things out. Expanding small releases are more interesting, but also more volatile. But I also agree with XXR here — it’s hardly unfair to players of a box office game to expect that they’ll do some theater count research on platform releases when it’s available well before the deadline.
Not sure a primarily WOM mechanism makes sense — if you have like 1M Th admits instead of 100k, then it’s true Fri will be more hurt by negative WOM but Sat should also be more hurt.
Pretty confident that higher preview % helps the sat/trFr by deflating the trFr. Cushioning negative WoM movies sat % relative to olden days, but also boosting positive WoM movies Sat % relative to the olden days.