electride

Thought the trades reported the budget to be $75 million, so basically around Mutant Mayhem's ballpark.

I don't think it would've reviewed as well as it did if it didn't work on its own. The fact that it's a unique origin story makes its take on Optimus and Megatron free of a lot of baggage, the latter of the two was especially a surprise and carried a pretty compelling and largely organic tale about the divide between two friends paving way to two large scale rival factions.

That movie got topped today. It's a shame the marketing seems to have failed it so far.

I suspect Deadline have no qualms accounting merch sales into TMNT because Paramount themselves own the franchise after Laird sold it off to them. It's sketchy to estimate how much of those sales are attributed to Mutant Mayhem but as of August last year it was announced to have made $1b in global retail sales altogether, so $135M seems like a modest estimate of how much of that is exclusively Mutant Mayhem merch. Those sales go directly to them, and the movie successfully driving merch is the whole reason it exists and is getting its own sequel/spinoff TV show. Warner Bros. and Universal meanwhile are most likely not seeing a cut off of Barbie or Mario merch sales; as far as the latter is concerned it seems like part of that partnership was that Nintendo would own the rights to the film itself. Of course, that still leaves Disney up in the air. You'd wager GOTG3 or Elemental would potentially see a bump from merch.

Ironically as if to validate the point, Star Wars actually did try it once. Well, at least Dave Filoni got to do a big Disney+ spinoff.

+37% from Saturday, biggest Sunday jump out of the top 5.

WB being pissy about wanting another week at number 1 when they're going to finish this week already being the number 1 movie of the year is the kind of arbitrarily peak corpo entitlement that I can't figure out if it makes box office races more of a fun popcorn spectacle or if it just creates a sobering disconnect in the experience of watching dollar sign statistics go crazy.

The way I see it it's mainly three factors: 1. Moving a live action property to animated format is extremely difficult. 2. The strike probably affected things more than people like to admit, the movie had an extremely star studded cast that didn't get to do a lot of PR for it. 3. TMNT was never that big to begin with in the cinema space, which compounds on the first point. We underestimate that Spider-Verse had to run a marathon to get to the status it has today; it continued to enjoy a prolonged revival in home formats after exiting theaters, and even with that all accounted for the sequel is still not even making as much money as the worst live action Spidey. If Spider-Verse 1 could only get to high $300M during a holiday period I realistically think the most Turtles could've hoped for was half of that. Even PIB2 was probably a stretch to envision since both its predecessor and Shrek were huge household franchises once and only needed a good movie to remind people to stick with it. The ideal scenario is Turtles enjoying some prolonged late legs and then having a second revival through home formats and the upcoming series. It could help boost it for the sequel.

So everything is down from Sunday estimates except Gran Turismo which is up and TMNT which is way up, then? Paramount really did go super conservative on their NCD estimations after all.

Paramount might be making a conservative estimate for what's a guaranteed fifth place regardless since last week was lowballed as well, walkups are going to be all out of whack today and Blue Beetle also had a bit more audience overlap than expected. Plus, last year's NCD coincided with Labor Day and was on a Saturday, so I don't think there's enough data to make absolute patterns on how much some films should jump or drop. Overall though, I doubt some of these Sunday jumps will be as big as studios reported them.

As I suspected, a mid-30% drop was too optimistic for TMNT given Blue Beetle covered a very similar demographic and took a number of screens from it. I still think this is a solid drop though, and I'd expect softer drops moving forward since Blue Beetle's WOM looks really weak and may have harder drops, much like Meg 2. Still feeling fairly confident that this will end up on the better end.

TMNT has a decent chance at becoming the second highest grossing TMNT film domestically if it benefits from decent weekend drops onward, an empty schedule, and upcoming cinema day/labor day boosts. It has maybe an equal, perhaps lesser chance at hitting the $200M worldwide mark if international holds and remaining markets are kinder to it. Falling short of that, Mutant Mayhem still laid the groundswell for what has been cited as a year where the franchise pulled in $1b in global sales based off of the work Paramount put into licensing and merchandising for the series, because at the end of the day that's really what it's all about ain't it? It'll get its streaming series and its sequel, and even if it isn't quite the Spider-Verse/PIB success story, it's still a pretty respectable performer for a summer that has had marketing and release plans hamstrung by strikes and Barbenheimer, especially given it was made on the cheap.

Setting aside that this is Deadline numbers, what kind of precedent would there have been for TMNT to pull off $12-14M when it did $15.2M last week and has to share screen real estate with Blue Beetle this week? A mid-30% drop seemed like the most optimistic scenario to me.

Had slightly higher hopes for everything (except Meg 2 seems about as expected) but then I looked at the calendar and realized those halcyon days are coming to an end. Back to the weekends being more exciting I guess.

Deadline sources report that Paramount's work on TMNT has pulled in $1B in global sales in 2023 alone. https://deadline.com/2023/08/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-retail-sales-1235519233/