[The Box Office Buzz, Tracking, and Pre-Sale Thread]

10 minutes ago, charlie Jatinder said:

Will be funny when you are wrong for both.

Naa G:empire is avg so I’m safe   
 

Spoiler

Am thinking maybe like 35&65 yeah

 

[The Box Office Buzz, Tracking, and Pre-Sale Thread]

5 hours ago, filmlover said:

I can't be the only one who has to do a double take as to whether the movie being tracked is Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire or Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire right? 

Predicting G:Empire to open with 40-60M

[The Box Office Buzz, Tracking, and Pre-Sale Thread]

Starting so early for a small nonIP like this basically makes any D1 stuff useless, as well as the middle period. I wouldn’t want to draw anything but the most broad conclusions (“looks like single digits guys”) until at least like t-10

[The Box Office Buzz, Tracking, and Pre-Sale Thread]

19 hours ago, M37 said:

Mind the Gap

 

I know this really isn’t quite the place to post this analysis, but wanted it in an active/ongoing forum to be able to refer back to it; but hiding most under spoiler boxes to not clog up the thread

 

 

So you know that whole $225-$325M domestic total Dead Zone I keep going on about? After further review, turns out it's both very real (and spectacular?), and is not a direct result of a shrinking post-pandemic theatrical audience, but rather started even a few years before COVID

The Data

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Pulled all $100M+ grossing films since 2015. (Why 2015? Hold that thought). Counted the number of films finishing with 10% of a given final domestic gross (shout to @Legion Again for that suggestion), to account for outside factors like competition, holiday effects, etc, that can either boost or hold down the final total. Given that the $100M+ level is only the last 15-25% of the distribution curve for all major/wide releases, if the sample were random (normal), we would expect to see a continually declining line as values go up, like this

 

 

 

But instead we get clear peaks and valleys, clustering and then voids, and while some of that fluctuation could be noise in a smaller data set, the disparity between those highs and lows is significant enough that to me indicates that there is some additional force/factors at play. Here's how it looks if the X-axis values are continually increased by 10% rather than a flat value (ie so no overalp in the ranges)

We get another small mini-peak around $625M, and what looks like what could be another peak around $100/$110M (but data doesn't go that low ... for now)

 

 

Note: final totals for 2023 films still in release, as well as those cut off by the pandemic in 2020, have been estimated

There are better odds of a film picked at random of grossing $600-$650M than $250-$300M!

 

Since 2015 only one PG13 or R release has finished with final domestic gross between $235M and $315M. Can you name it?

 

 

 

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Hunger Games Mockingjay Part 2, with a $281.7M final gross all the way back in 2015

 

The Theory

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When I first began pointing out this void, the underlying hypothesis was that there was some unseen bar that had to be cleared, for a film to break out from the more limited audience pool to a broader one. They either had some kind of “it factor” or did not, with nothing in between (until Little Mermaid became one the one post pandemic exception).

 

Looking at the longer term data set, that’s not quite true: family films quite often slide into The Dead Zone. Stepping back, I suppose that makes sense: the primary audience are kids, and the parents buying the tickets probably have a lower threshold for what family films are acceptable to watch in theaters as opposed to all adults selecting films on their own. But setting those PG family films aside, there is a clear gap between the haves and have nots

 

 

The Catch

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So why does this natural resistance to middle tier grossing films seemingly kick off in 2015? Likely because we saw the domestic market become more top heavy. From 2010-14, the top 5 films released in a calendar year averaged just under $350M each, which accounted for 16.5% of the roughly $10.5B annual total. But from 2015-2019, those same 5 films per year jumped to over $516M on average, now collecting 22.5% of the $11.5B total. To put it another way, the top 5 ballooned by nearly 50% on average, while the overall market only saw 10% growth. Attendance was largely being shifted upwards to the top, at the expense of the titles below.

 

Perhaps this string of giant “event films” – MCU, Star Wars, Jurassic, etc – began to take up so much attention, not just during their runs but even in the weeks/months leading up to them, that it became more difficult for films a step or two below, that previously been able to grind their way into the Dead Zone, to gain enough traction to do so anymore. They didn’t have the “it factor” of the big brands, and instead topped out at a soft ceiling of ~$230M, most even below $200M. The rise of streaming likely also plays a role in this effect, as with larger new content libraries readily available, it becomes more difficult to pick up those tail end stragglers to add another $20/$30/$50M to the total.

 

The But

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After all this verbosity, will we ever see another $250M non-animated film? Almost certainly we will, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were several this year in particular. Why? The release calendar is largely absent of those top heavy tentpoles, typically with their Spring/Early summer, mid to late Summer and Xmas flags already planted, and probably gives films that were destined to run up again the invisible wall more space to flourish.

 

The adults who typically see a handful (3-6) movies a year, who in 2022 could have had dates circled for Strange MoM, JWD, BPWF and Avatar 2 (maybe TGM too) probably have only late July’s Deadpool 3 as a must see, followed by (I suppose) Joker, and then … surely IO2 and DM4 will pick up some adults, but after that I guess Beetlejuice 2? And, uh ...? And none of these (at least to me) scream $500M potential (though to be fair, neither did Mario or Barbie)

 

Looking back at 2014, the last non-pandemic affected year without a true major event film and the top release under $340M (note: Sniper is really a 2015 release), and you instead find FIVE films settling into the void that would open up the following year. So in a year lacking the big draws at the top, should not be at all surprised to see the mid-tier films return, find their way into the Dead Zone, perhaps starting off with Dune II

 

 

My first comment was going to be that I think the baseline scenario would be lognormal rather than normal… but the 2nd graph (with exponential x-axis) basically covers that perfectly. And we did indeed get my suspected triple peak, exactly where I was suspecting it    
 

18 hours ago, Porthos said:

 

re: The But

 

ATP hikes are also gonna play a part sooner or later.  Yes, as ticket prices rise, some folks will either get priced out or decide tickets are too costly.  At the same time as purchasing power rises and memories fade about how much ticket used to cost, then it starts to ebb back.

 

Or to put a different way, might just see the gap shift a bit as time moves on.  Be interesting to look for at the macro level over the next three, four, five years.

Perhaps unsurprisingly this would be my 2nd comment, although it shouldn’t make a huge difference in 2015vs 2019 or 2021 vs 2024 I feel like nominal introduces a bit of noise whereas admits/adjusted would reveal more of a real pattern across time. Definitely not going to change the big picture takeaway though.   
 

If we didn’t pull anything 90-100 then the 100-110ish range is suppressed a bit by only getting 50%+ of the adjacency window that the other values have, right? This is another thing that doesn’t really affect the main point just want to make sure I’m understanding the process correctly.  
 

The lowest hanging fruit going forward imo would be seeing the graphs for like 5% or 20%, but this is already a very cool dynamic to have quantified a bit more

[What Will The Next Film To Do 200M-300M?]

Hmm, I guess Panda could kill gap 🤔

[3/08-3/10 Weekend Estimates : KFP 4 : 58,3M , Dune 2 : 46,3M , Imaginary : 10M , Caprini : 7,6M]

8 minutes ago, Eric Atreides said:

I thought we as a culture moved on from offensive redface.

Look if you wanna sell “Turning White” to the boys in marketing, be my guest

[What Will The Next Film To Do 200M-300M?]

2 hours ago, M37 said:

 

 

Double peaks!

 

 

I'll do a full write up in a more visible/high traffic thread (prob tracking?), but wanted to at least share the first aggregation of the data

Ooh, that’s a great choice of metric. Although, I feel like +/- 10% would also be very interesting. And of course you can turn parameters up or down — I wonder if it’s possible to get a meaningful triple peak

[3/08-3/10 Weekend Estimates : KFP 4 : 58,3M , Dune 2 : 46,3M , Imaginary : 10M , Caprini : 7,6M]

39 minutes ago, Eric Atreides said:

Thank goodness for that. These movies are the only gigs @The Panda can get in Hollywood. Though maybe there’s an opening for Zootopia 2.

Gotta initiate talks for Turning Redder

[3/08-3/10 Weekend Estimates : KFP 4 : 58,3M , Dune 2 : 46,3M , Imaginary : 10M , Caprini : 7,6M]

26 minutes ago, titanic2187 said:

CABRINI (2024)

IMAGINARY (2024)

KUNG FU PANDA 4 (2024)

All one tick below genre avg, how sad  

[What Will The Next Film To Do 200M-300M?]

I mean, it was a better guess for OWeek then total — but it basically came true for total, so very much a moment

[The Box Office Buzz, Tracking, and Pre-Sale Thread]

36 minutes ago, Minnale101 said:

I mean I’ve only been following kfp4 for weeks now and for most part besides week, I saw 30-35 million predictions ow

 

so I mean if it does 50 million that’s amazing to me, growth from kfp2 and kfp3 especially when budget is 40% less than 2nd and 3rd movie 

We are still talking quite a bit down from KFP2 tickets tbf

[The Box Office Buzz, Tracking, and Pre-Sale Thread]

4 hours ago, charlie Jatinder said:

I don’t think KFP4 has done anything extraordinary. Was thinking 45-55 for it for last 3 weeks or so and its doing that.

Yeah I feel like mostly thread had been expecting/I had been expecting based on thread 3-4*12-15ish, which comes out to 41-53 or so.

[Dune 2 Opening Weekend Thread [3/01/24 -3/03/24] [82.5m DOM OW]]

1 hour ago, ando said:

So Timothee is the lead in the two biggest films since last summer. Pretty crazy moment for him. 

Pretty crazy moment for "since last summer" when you consider that the two films combined don't make for an especially large number of tickets 

[Dune 2 Opening Weekend Thread [3/01/24 -3/03/24] [82.5m DOM OW]]

3 minutes ago, HummingLemon496 said:

If my club works out who's getting the credit?

I mean I was OUT at closing time, so

[Dune 2 Opening Weekend Thread [3/01/24 -3/03/24] [82.5m DOM OW]]

2 hours ago, Bob Train said:

So Dune had a lower Thursday than expected, but IM'd better than expected, ending in the expected mid-80s range...

No it had the expected Previews of 12 and expected IM of 7.

 

The Golden Path 

[What Will The Next Film To Do 200M-300M?]

Still nothing 216-298 since SC

[Dune 2 Opening Weekend Thread [3/01/24 -3/03/24] [82.5m DOM OW]]

2 hours ago, HummingLemon496 said:

 

Just gotta buy $8M worth of seats 😭

Sat PS looks good, maybe 33-29-22  

[Dune 2 Opening Weekend Thread [3/01/24 -3/03/24] [82.5m DOM OW]]

11.5-21-25-18.5// 76

[Dune 2 Opening Weekend Thread [3/01/24 -3/03/24] [82.5m DOM OW]]

2 minutes ago, lorddemaxus said:

I don't see it doing 85+. Gonna go with 82 mil.

😈

[The Box Office Buzz, Tracking, and Pre-Sale Thread]

HummingLemon pulling zaslav's strings

[Dune 2 Opening Weekend Thread [3/01/24 -3/03/24] [82.5m DOM OW]]

The prophecy marches on

[The Box Office Buzz, Tracking, and Pre-Sale Thread]

Always hard to tell how much being an aging franchise with some aging fanbase will weigh on the scale until it happens but I have been thinking like 12-15x fwiw

[The Box Office Buzz, Tracking, and Pre-Sale Thread]

39 minutes ago, Arlborn said:

 

Fall Guy seems to lean a lot on its romantic angle, much more than Bullet Train or Free Guy. As in, probably enough to bring quite a few women to the theater, something that I doubt Free Guy or Bullet Train did.

 

I'm bullish on it, studio seems bullish on it as well, it has a lot going for it both with men and women, and it seems that it picked its leads perfectly for a movie coming out in 2024.

 

I think it can break 200M if the quality is there.

and this is how I learned that the Fall Guy movie people have been talking about was not a years late video game adaptation 

[The Box Office Buzz, Tracking, and Pre-Sale Thread]

I mean in general a performance is always a bit of movie specifics+background market content, right. The bad news here is that even if you think the background market context is reasonably healthy there are very few movies this years with the specifics to do serious biz

[The Box Office Buzz, Tracking, and Pre-Sale Thread]

10 minutes ago, HummingLemon496 said:

 

That was for 2023 release Dune

On 1/27/2024 at 8:14 AM, Legion Again said:

Haven’t been looking closely at Dune and don’t plan to, but being a sequel instead of a first entry is another pretty important variable. Verrrrrrrry loosely from this start thinking like 8-12*6-7.5 for 55-75ish

Here is 2024 release Dune

 

My prediction a few hours ago would be 11*6.73