Weekend Thread | October 18-20 | 23M SMILE | 9.3M TERRIFIER

[AniNate]

25 minutes ago, M37 said:

That doesn’t seem right? 1999 sure, that was all TS2 (back in 35mm film days, when 3 prints of one movie was shocking, so capacity limited), but 2000’s Grinch led TG 5-day was ~$190M (when factoring in films that only reported a 3-day weekend total), and that has to adjust to upwards of $350, if not $400M

 

 

It adjusts to $340mil. Slightly above average compared to most pre-Covid Thanksgivings. 2012 adjusts to about $400mil.

 

Thing about the 2000 Thanksgiving was it had three films doing strong box office but then bupkis. 2012's had a pretty good amount of variety drawing interest with seven movies doing over $20 mil. 2018's strength was four movies doing over $40 mil (including the Illumination Grinch, as fate would have it) 

 

 

 

 

Edited Monday at 03:03 AM by AniNate

[marveldcfox]

11 hours ago, Eric is Smiling said:

 

Kinda flop. You would think smile 2 would be breaking records since the first one was so called phenomenon. 

[Mojoguy]

18 minutes ago, marveldcfox said:

Kinda flop. You would think smile 2 would be breaking records since the first one was so called phenomenon. 

Smile has much stronger competition this time with Terrifier 3. First Smile faced Terrifier 2 which only made $10.9M DOM total.

Edited Monday at 03:14 AM by Mojoguy

[M37]

33 minutes ago, AniNate said:

 

It adjusts to $340mil. Slightly above average compared to most pre-Covid Thanksgivings. 2012 adjusts to about $400mil.

 

Thing about the 2000 Thanksgiving was it had three films doing strong box office but then bupkis. 2012's had a pretty good amount of variety drawing interest with seven movies doing over $20 mil. 2018's strength was four movies doing over $40 mil (including the Illumination Grinch, as fate would have it) 

How are you adjusting? ie can show your work, because I’m getting different numbers (admittedly I don’t usually bother with adjusted gross, so the error may very well be mine)

[AniNate]

I'm going off CPI inflation, which I think is a fairer way to compare prior years than simple ATP, especially with all these new PLFs and stuff making it more difficult to draw conclusions from that. The results are actually remarkably consistent pre-COVID

 

1999	233
2000	340
2001	331
2002	352
2003	372
2004	371
2005	360
2006	349
2007	347
2008	335
2009	392
2010	373
2011	315
2012	398
2013	395
2014	302
2015	342
2016	343
2017	343
2018	396
2019	323
2021	165
2022	145
2023	173

 

 

But I mean, when you look at the individual charts it's really not hard to see how 2012, 2013, and 2018 beat it out. Variety matters.

 

 

Edited Monday at 03:40 AM by AniNate

[Cooper Legion]

40 minutes ago, AniNate said:

I'm going off CPI inflation, which I think is a fairer way to compare prior years than simple ATP, especially with all these new PLFs and stuff making it more difficult to draw conclusions from that. The results are actually remarkably consistent pre-COVID

 

1999	233
2000	340
2001	331
2002	352
2003	372
2004	371
2005	360
2006	349
2007	347
2008	335
2009	392
2010	373
2011	315
2012	398
2013	395
2014	302
2015	342
2016	343
2017	343
2018	396
2019	323
2021	165
2022	145
2023	173

 

 

But I mean, when you look at the individual charts it's really not hard to see how 2012, 2013, and 2018 beat it out. Variety matters.

 

 

You should use ATP. It's the industry standard and what "adjusted" means by default. anytime you use adjusted and don't clarify your using your own calculations instead of the regular ones will just cause confusion for no reason (as it did here!).

 

If you want a nonstandard calc that's your prerogative but the onus is on you to be clear about upfront each time (and it will oilely lead to a lot of discourse like "okay your personal adjustment show xyz but actual adjusted nums show the opposite")😛

Edited Monday at 04:20 AM by Cooper Legion

[AniNate]

2 minutes ago, Cooper Legion said:

You should use ATP. It's the industry standard and what "adjusted" means by default. anytime you use adjusted and don't clarify your using your own calculations instead of the regular ones will just cause confusion for no reason (as it did here!).

 

If you want a nonstandard calc that's your prerogative but the onus is on you to be clear about upfront each time (and it will oilely lead to a lot of discourse like "okay your personal adjustment show xyz but actual adjusted nums shoe the opposite")😛

 

I mean I don't think it really matters what metric I used, pretty sure those other years would beat it even if you did use ATP. The number it adjusts to isn't as relevant to my point as how it compares to other years.

[Cooper Legion]

2 minutes ago, AniNate said:

 

I mean I don't think it really matters what metric I used, pretty sure those other years would beat it even if you did use ATP. The number it adjusts to isn't as relevant to my point as how it compares to other years.

It's true that cpi and atp will usually show pretty similar stuff. I don't know for sure if that's exactly what's causing the discrepancy here or something else, but having to wonder if the disagreement comes from a calculation mistake or just talking about different numbers is pretty not ideal, right?

[Cooper Legion]

I am seeing Thanksgiving 99 adjusted from 190+ to around 410 in 2023, closer to 420ish in 2024. I suspect you're missing a lot of movies (The world is not enough, end of days, etc)

[AniNate]

It's possible, I'm just going off the data BOM provides me. May very well have been in line with those 300s CPI numbers of later years. Maybe there's some data missing from 2000 as well but no one has offered any yet.

 

Regardless, the initial premise was Thanksgiving box office peaked in the early 2000s and has declined from there, and I'm positing that at least from a willingness to pay perspective, it hadn't, and it's mostly due to a lack of recently appealing product post-covid that that theory has taken hold. I think there is plenty of room for Gladiator, Wicked and Moana if they all deliver.

 

 

 

 

Edited Monday at 04:42 AM by AniNate

[Cooper Legion]

10 minutes ago, AniNate said:

Maybe there's some data missing from 2000 as well but no one has offered any yet.

 

If you compare the 5 and 3 day on BOM it's missing rugrats in Paris, bounce, men of honor, little Nicky, and more small stuff. Around 110M+ in 24 dollars. I think the combined Thanksgiving really did peak around two dozen years ago and it was only missing movies giving you the opposite impression 😛

Edited Monday at 04:51 AM by Cooper Legion

[Cooper Legion]

18 minutes ago, AniNate said:

it's mostly due to a lack of recently appealing product post-covid that that theory has taken hold. I think there is plenty of room for Gladiator, Wicked and Moana if they all deliver.

I do agree with this however

[AniNate]

23 minutes ago, Cooper Legion said:

If you compare the 5 and 3 day on BOM it's missing rugrats in Paris, bounce, men of honor, little Nicky, and more small stuff. Around 110M+ in 24 dollars. I think the combined Thanksgiving really did peak around two dozen years ago and it was only missing movies giving you the opposite impression 😛

 

Well, fine then, I guess that was the real confusion. Had nothing to do with the inflation metric being used. 

[Cooper Legion]

11 minutes ago, AniNate said:

 

Well, fine then, I guess that was the real confusion. Had nothing to do with the inflation metric being used. 

Yeah seems not. I do wish the tables were more complete for that stuff -- you really tend to think of 2000 as being pretty firmly in the modern information era and then some basic stuff like that will be just missing 

[Krissykins]

lol why did Regan jump 400% without adding any cinemas? Fudge! 
 

 

Good for Smile 2, wish it was bigger but that’s a good international start too. 
 

Excellent for The Substance overseas 

 

 

[Lory88]

Reagan over 30 million is really good and amazing, for what it is

[justnumbers]

I also saw Smile 2 last night and I'm shocked I liked this much. It was scary as F, loud as F, the score was amazing and Naomi Scott...Dude. She was incredible. That has to be one of the best performances I've seen in a horror movie. 

 

What a beast of a performance. The standout for sure.

[M37]

Alright @AniNate & @Cooper Legion, let's do this for real

 

Since we don't have reliable 5-day TG reporting until mid-2000s, let's just look at the 3-day Thanksgiving weekend over time. For adjusted values, using the ATP from The Numbers, for as back as their data goes. And lookie here!

 

Sure enough the 1999 (TS2) and 2000 (Grinch) years stand head and shoulders above, and a long term declining trend is clearly visible, from a peak of ~$310M to sliding down to (UPDATED) around $230M pre-pandemic. Glad to see my memory isn't failing me in my old(ish) age!

 

Two social factors are likely helping to drive this trend: in the 2010s, retailers started opening earlier, first at midnight TG in 2011, to full afternoon and evening hours only a few years later. Additionally, school districts have been slowing increasing the time off for the holiday. For example, my kids' local school district went from Wed half-day, to Wed off, to now the full week over the years. The combination of those two has helped spread the TG business out, pulling some of those previous FSS sales into Wed & Thur, so the full 5-day (if we had reliable data) would likely not show as stark a decline, with a couple of years (2012, 2013, and 2018) being among the best during this period

 

However, the larger impetus for this decline in the FSS TG weekend is likely what happened in 2001, when the first Harry Potter film debuted the Friday before Thanksgiving, and the success there made that release window a YA film staple for the next two decades. So let's look at the full 10-day - Friday before until Sunday after - TG gross over time (frankly, this is what I have always considered the "TG Holiday" for box office purposes). Definitely a more nuanced picture here

 

 

There still a slight decline visible, from a peak of nearly $800M adjusted down to ~$600M, with 2000 remaining the GOAT, but in the years with one of those YA tentpoles (shaded red), there far less of an overall drop-off. However, since Catching Fire (2013) and end of Hunger Games in 2015, the declining trajectory becomes more apparent [Not counting Fantastic Beasts or latest HG as YA, as by this point the "Y" doesn't really apply]

 

tl;dr - did TG Box office peak in 2000? From both perspectives YES, though some business has shifted to both W/Th and the prior weekend over the years.

 

For this upcoming year, if Wicked does like Mockingjay P2 numbers ($220M) for the 10-day, Gladiator maybe approaches or exceeds $100M over 10 days, and Moana 2 goes for a record-setting $100M+ for its 5-day opening, we're already at a new post-pandemic peak, plus whatever else the rest of the weaker slate can bring in, though likely still below even the pre-pandemic $600M cumulative benchmark.

Edited Monday at 02:49 PM by M37

[Cooper Legion]

In other words, historically plenty of room in the 10 day window for wicked 300M, Gladiator 120, Moana 170  

 

 

The big thing there to me is that while you can get a good read on the 95-19 macro dynamics, 3 post pandemic TGs just is not a very meaningful sample size by any stretch. So opinions on how much of that reflects a new environmental dynamic (hampering this year's potential) vs pure product variability issues (no effect on this year) will come down to personal expert judgement. Especially as 2h 21 and 2h 23 were  not fully covid recovered and strike impacted, respectively. Will have more clarity in 5 weeks but for a real picture on how the new normal for the frame looks we'll want more like 5 years 😅

Edited Monday at 01:08 PM by Cooper Legion

[M37]

13 minutes ago, Cooper Legion said:

In other words, historically plenty of room in the 10 day window for wicked 300M, Gladiator 120, Moana 170  

 

 

The big thing there to me is that while you can get a good read on the 95-19 macro dynamics, 3 post pandemic TGs just is not a very meaningful sample size by any stretch. So opinions on how much of that reflects a new environmental dynamic (hampering this year's potential) vs pure product variability issues (no effect on this year) will come down to personal expert judgement. Especially as 2h 21 and 2h 23 were  not fully covid recovered and strike impacted, respectively. Will have more clarity in 5 weeks but for a real picture on how the new normal for the frame looks we'll want more like 5 years 😅

Room? Yes. Demand? Well, that’s another question…

 

My original comments on “perspective” was not meant to imply a hard ceiling, for individual films or in total, but rather to illustrate what kind of rarefied air the more bullish Moana 2 projections were sitting in, in contrast to how TG period in general had fallen off even pre-pandemic

 

I still believe Moana 2 is much more a bigger Ralph 2 than a step below Frozen II, but that’s still good enough to put $100M+ in range for the 5-day
 

For the record, I’m definitely bearish on Gladiator 2 (k-shaped recovery and all), and Wicked … I haven’t made up my mind yet, but early sales data can’t be brushed or explained away, so it’s just a question of how much one believes