Weekend Numbers | estimates | 45.2M GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE | 17.6M DUNE II | 16.8M KFP IV

[Krissykins]

9 minutes ago, Boxofficerules said:

Did you shit yourself in the cinema due to pure terror?

Haha imagine! 
 

Have you seen it or Immaculate yet?

[MightyDargon]

Very, very few horror films are actually scary once you're past a certain age. The last scary one I actually remember was The Lighthouse. Eli Roth's Thanksgiving had some imaginative gross out work but was about as scary as a He-Man episode.

[M37]

Can't help but wonder if the backloaded NCAA schedule today - only 2 games before 530pm Eastern - is helping to boost matinee shows, but at the expense of the evening shows later.  Shifting business earlier rather than those strong early numbers being indicative of a strong day overall

[MOVIEGUY]

16 minutes ago, MightyDargon said:

Very, very few horror films are actually scary once you're past a certain age. The last scary one I actually remember was The Lighthouse. Eli Roth's Thanksgiving had some imaginative gross out work but was about as scary as a He-Man episode.

 

I just judge horror movies based on how fun they are now. I'm not looking to be scared because films rarely do that for me, just keep me entertained. Malignant was my favorite horror of the last few years because it was a god damn blast, not because it was frightening in the least.

[Brainbug]

16 minutes ago, MightyDargon said:

Very, very few horror films are actually scary once you're past a certain age. The last scary one I actually remember was The Lighthouse. Eli Roth's Thanksgiving had some imaginative gross out work but was about as scary as a He-Man episode.

 

I mean, the feeling of fear in the context of a horror film is probably one of the most subjective feelings one can have in moviegoing, in line with comedies where some people find a film like The Hangover for example extremely funny, while others think its boring and unfunny.

 

With horror films, ive made the experience that watching them with a group of people is really enlightining in terms of finding out what people find actually scary. It Follows was a case where i think its tense and effective and has 2 or 3 good jump scares, but i didnt really find it scary - two people i watched it with absolutely lost their minds watching it and screamed my ears off.

 

So imo its not necessarily an age thing, but the exposure to the genre (the more horror films you see, logically the less they probably scare you) and peoples personality where some are just easily scared, while others are unfaced.

[von Kenni]

5 hours ago, von Kenni said:

I'm not doom and gloom about the box office or industry even though arguably we are at a low point right now. As @DAJK said, it's transitory and I'm wondering where we are heading. The following underlying currents and their overall strength in molding the future box office and film industry are what I'm pondering after drinking my morning coffee (meaning that I probably forget a lot of other drivers):

 

1. Changes in the overall media and entertainment landscape in the past 10 years from the consumer side. How TikToks and other short format instant gratification formats have made us less inclined to watch movies even at home, let alone to schedule and reserve a ticket, drive and get our asses into a movie theatre and sit down for a couple of hours without using our mobile phones. How does this change (shrink) the overall potential moviegoer customer base?

 

Does the increased entertainment content supply (TV, social media, games, etc.) shrink the potential customer base in the same way?

 

2. Changes in the film and TV production side when streamers and studios are trying to push out too much content without having an adequate talent pool to do so or don't allocate enough time for production. I.e. writers don't have enough time to write (there are billions of examples of this and it's analogous to what has happened in news media, how the demand for pushing news stories and articles out in a shorter timeframe has become unsustainable), there aren't enough talented production crews and craftsmen/people to produce, or groomed directors to direct (e.g. MCU and Disney have a growing tendency to give big budget productions to inexperienced filmmakers as a norm rather than the exception). All this ends up producing mediocre results at best with a few outlier success stories. I think after the writers' strike we (hopefully) have passed the pinnacle of this and are getting back to the common sense on how you make a good movie production-wise.

 

3. The recession in creativity and underlying reasons for it. How much is it due to studios over-milking existing IPs with reboots, sequels, prequels, and spin-offs and trying to make a franchise or a universe out of everything? Then how much that is due to having the financial decision-making power in the hands of calculating "Wall Street" type of entities with public stock pressures? How this has changed and is changing?

 

How much are the representation quotas (merit and talent as secondary), political correctness (or whatever we call it), DEI, etc. flavor of the zeitgeist limiting creativity and estranging parts of the overall moviegoing audience? At least comedies and comedians are more risk-aversive due to this. Will this in part be addressed by the deterioration of Hollywood and the rise of new filmmaking epicenters?

 

4. How do theaters adjust and change? Is the play to have more pure cinematic experiences as Dune and Oppenheimer taking advantage of IMAX while people are dining in providing extra revenue for exhibitors? How can theaters lower the friction for consumers to do the all things that they need to get there? How can they make themselves more attractive? Can they make movies more as shining events?

 

5. What other big currents are there? I think that how MCU and superhero genre ate up the air from other kinds of productions for a large extent for 10 years or so makes now a void after their downfall but that will be filled eventually when the new shiny thing is found (hopefully Oppenheimer and Dune are steering that a bit). Though they exacerbated points 2. and 3. But what are more fundamental currents of change that I'm missing and what are the real extent of my previous wondering points?

 

I think 1. is the most fundamental competition and challenge for the box office and to address it 2.-4. need to be fixed, i.e. investing time and money to groom filmmakers like Nolan, Villeneuve, [insert other solid ones] and the crafts teams around them step-by-step while giving them room to fail along the way. I think market dynamics will much correct 2. and 3. but it's a bit sad to see time and time again studios taking the wrong lessons and making over and over again the same mistakes so it might take time. Overall I'm hopeful for the future of cinema as a shared experience when seeing movies like Oppenheimer and Dune in IMAX. There's always a market for that regardless of how funny TikTok videos, engaging games, or virtual reality experiences I could enjoy at home.

 

1 hour ago, Hatebox said:

Said it before when this topic comes up, but cinema needs to decide whether it’s cheap entertainment or a luxury experience. Because right now, where I live at least, it feels like neither. I want to want to go to it more, but it’s just not selling itself. 
 

 

 

Very good point especially on the exhibitor side. I was thinking the positioning of cinema when writing my #4 driver. Worst place to be is in the middle, I.e. neither specifically. Cheaper one has wider audience number potential but luxury has potentially higher revenue/profit potential.

 

One option is to create two separate brands, e.g. (cheaper, family oriented?) popcorn cinema and (adult, couples, cinephile oriented?) luxury cinema and somehow brand them stand alones, different, and not just as the real experience and the lite experience.

 

But how you would do that in cooperation with filmmakers, distributors, and studios would be trickie.

 

If you choose one or the other, luxury option would make business wise more sense from customer acquisition perspective.

 

And ways, a conscious chose needs to be made and then really run with it.

[wildphantom]

2 hours ago, Brainbug said:

For me personally, im just glad that movies and movie theaters so far survived Covid and also are still surviving the streaming age despite all tge struggles and problems. Im glad for every film like Dune 2 because i dont know when the time will come that such movies wont get made anymore. Or when the viewing habitats changed so much that theaters really get closed everywhere. Im pretty sure that this (terrible) scenario will come someday, but i hope that its still a long, long way ahead of us.

 

But since i dont know when the death of movie theaters will happen, i just enjoy them in the present as long as i can.

so long as there’s people like you @Brainbug that will see the latest dino/lizard film over ten times in theaters, we’ll be ok.  We salute you. 

[cannastop]

1 hour ago, Hatebox said:

Said it before when this topic comes up, but cinema needs to decide whether it’s cheap entertainment or a luxury experience. Because right now, where I live at least, it feels like neither. I want to want to go to it more, but it’s just not selling itself. 
 

 

I think it should lean towards cheap Sure AMC used its investor money to install laser projectors and recliners in their theaters but I don't think it's doing it, quite. And the investor money is dried up now.

[Brainbug]

18 minutes ago, wildphantom said:

so long as there’s people like you @Brainbug that will see the latest dino/lizard film over ten times in theaters, we’ll be ok.  We salute you. 

 

Ive already planned 5 viewings for GxK (i hope it will be more), but what annoys me greatly is that i wont have a chance to see it on OW because of other appointments. Earliest i will be able to see it is on April 2nd ☹️

 

[BadOlCatSylvester]

25 minutes ago, Brainbug said:

 

Ive already planned 5 viewings for GxK (i hope it will be more), but what annoys me greatly is that i wont have a chance to see it on OW because of other appointments. Earliest i will be able to see it is on April 2nd ☹️

 

The 5th for me, since our distributor delayed it to avoid Ramadan. I can't say I blame them though, since John Wick 4's total admissions were marred by it, and Mario did pretty poorly here because of it, to the point where it ended up falling behind Sonic 2 by around 10% here.

[Daxtreme]

3 hours ago, terrestrial said:

Dune 2 is the first movie I watched in a cinema since COVID. Tried to get back into the interest to watch another movies since COVID before, but every time it fell through, like the movie was not interesting enough for whatever reason or people around me got ill again

Out of those that are already watching movies in a cinema again, most started to visit cinemas again in 2023, a smaller part was not back even yet.

 

Welcome back! Glad to see you around these parts again 

[filmnerdjamie]

 

[filmnerdjamie]

 

[filmnerdjamie]

 

[charlie Jatinder]

7 hours ago, charlie Jatinder said:

BIG SAT jumps all around. GB can touch 16. Dune 7.5. KFP 7.25.

GB can be 16.5 ish. Dune 7.5-7.75. KFP 7.25-7.5.

[Starphanluke]

Good Saturday bumps all around. Dune getting near $18m on a weekend where it is starting to lose some PLFs is pretty nutty.

[marveldcfox]

As expected Ghostbusters doing well. 40+ ow.

 

Next weekend GxK will break franchise records. 

[John Marston]

21 minutes ago, marveldcfox said:

As expected Ghostbusters doing well. 40+ ow.

 

Next weekend GxK will break franchise records. 

 

nah. GvK may beat Skull Island but it ain’t touching Godzilla 2014’s 93M opening 

Edited March 24 by John Marston

[LonePirate]

6 hours ago, MightyDargon said:

Very, very few horror films are actually scary once you're past a certain age. The last scary one I actually remember was The Lighthouse.

What? The Lighthouse is a scary flick/horror movie? I thought it was something else entirely and decided to skip it even though the performances are supposedly very good.

[Krissykins]

9 hours ago, MightyDargon said:

Very, very few horror films are actually scary once you're past a certain age. The last scary one I actually remember was The Lighthouse. Eli Roth's Thanksgiving had some imaginative gross out work but was about as scary as a He-Man episode.

You can imagine then, that’s it’s very rare for me especially to be scared when most of the films I watch are horror. 
 

Late Night with the Devil has a moment in it that gave me actual chills. Horror is great fun, but this wasn’t even a jump scare. Very well done.