2024 At The Box Office (2 Viewers)

[Tino]

Index

		Movie Title	Distributor	Gross	%LW	Theaters	Theaters Change	Per Theater	Total Gross	Weekends In Release
1	N	Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga	Warner Bros.	$25,550,000		3,804		$6,717	$25,550,000	1
2	N	The Garfield Movie	Sony Pictures	$24,775,000		4,035		$6,140	$24,775,000	1
3	(1)	IF	Paramount Pi…	$16,100,000	-52%	4,068	+27	$3,958	$58,667,000	2
4	(2)	Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes	20th Century…	$13,356,000	-48%	3,550	-525	$3,762	$122,805,252	3
5	(4)	The Fall Guy	Universal	$5,920,000	-29%	2,955	-890	$2,003	$72,211,000	4
6	(3)	The Strangers: Chapter 1	Lionsgate	$5,610,000	-53%	2,856	n/c	$1,964	$21,343,988	2
7	N	Sight	Angel Studios	$2,695,930		2,100		$1,284	$2,695,930	1
8	(5)	Challengers	Amazon MGM S…	$1,380,000	-52%	1,089	-849	$1,267	$46,475,000	5
9	(-)	Babes	Neon	$1,060,000	+550%	590	+578	$1,797	$1,287,799	2
10	(6)	Back to Black	Focus Features	$1,050,000	-63%	2,013	+3	$522	$4,825,000	2
11	(7)	Tarot	Sony Pictures	$750,000	-63%	864	-1,470	$868	$17,029,000	4
12	(8)	Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire	Warner Bros.	$595,000	-64%	664	-1,109	$896	$195,502,000	9
13	(12)	I Saw the TV Glow	A24	$513,899	-49%	458	-11	$1,122	$2,657,827	4
14	(14)	Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire	Sony Pictures	$370,000	-16%	228	-591	$1,623	$112,645,000	10
15	(10)	Civil War	A24	$306,800	-71%	451	-661	$680	$68,018,736	7
-	(11)	Unsung Hero	Lionsgate	$287,150	-72%	1,736	n/c	$165	$19,800,839	5
-	(13)	Kung Fu Panda 4	Universal	$243,000	-74%	485	-952	$501	$193,261,000	12
-	(-)	Evil Does Not Exist	Janus Films	$123,912	+2%	138	+35	$898	$535,055	4
-	(-)	Wildcat	Oscilloscope…	$79,248	-43%	94	-7	$843	$384,714	4
-	(15)	Abigail	Universal	$57,000	-86%	109	-585	$523	$25,838,000	6
-	(-)	The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare	Lionsgate	$55,000	-77%	405	n/c	$136	$20,489,600	6
-	(-)	Star Wars Ep. I: The Phantom Menace	20th Century…	$33,000	-80%	70	-260	$471	$487,563,553	1,306
-	(-)	The First Omen	20th Century…	$29,000	-77%	95	-55	$305	$20,098,637	8
-	(-)	La chimera	Neon	$14,200	-16%	15	+10	$947	$836,071	9
		24		$100,954,139

 

[Osato]

I enjoyed this article..

After ‘Furiosa’ Misfires, When Will Summer Movie Season Rebound?

'Furiosa' didn't live up to the hype of 'Max Max: Fury Road,' as evidenced by its box office debut.

variety.com

 

[Jake Lipson]

They've been saying that for most of April and May. Such-and-such movie opened below expectations, but there are more big titles coming in a couple weeks. But then more open and they underperform too. Only Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes seems to be performing in line with expectations. It seems like there just isn't a lot of stuff right now that is exciting a huge audience.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

The spending and expectations are out of line with the reality of post-pandemic moviegoing.

 

[Osato]

The spending and expectations are out of line with the reality of post-pandemic moviegoing.

Agreed. It will be interesting if there’s anything that will go over $100 opening weekend in 2024.

 

[Malcolm R]

Agreed. It will be interesting if there’s anything that will go over $100 opening weekend in 2024.

I think the only possibilities would be Deadpool & Wolverine, Despicable Me 4, or Inside Out 2. I thought I read somewhere that opening weekend tracking on IO2 was near $80 million, which I think would be a big relief to Pixar/Disney after audiences seem to have indicated with their recent releases that they're fine with waiting to see them on Disney+.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Deadpool & Wolverine probably has the greatest opportunity since it has the potential to pull in from different segments of Marvel Studios and Fox X-Men fandom.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The studios really shot themselves in the foot with the drastically shorter theatrical windows and the premium theater-at-home early digital sales. Audiences have grown accustomed to just waiting for it to hit streaming.

 

[TravisR]

The studios really shot themselves in the foot with the drastically shorter theatrical windows and the premium theater-at-home early digital sales. Audiences have grown accustomed to just waiting for it to hit streaming.

Yeah, it's not exactly a mystery and it's not just that one thing but it is the biggest problem. Unless the studios decide they don't want hundreds of millions of dollars from theatrical runs or they're making waaaaay more money from VOD than I think, they're going to be forced to bring back the longer windows too. They won't go to 90 days but it's sure going to have to be longer than two and a half weeks.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

The studios really shot themselves in the foot with the drastically shorter theatrical windows and the premium theater-at-home early digital sales. Audiences have grown accustomed to just waiting for it to hit streaming.

Maybe. I’m a little skeptical of this being the sole cause when the available viewership data - this has been covered by Variety and Hollywood reporter - indicates that for the most part, the audience for PVOD digital (the premium early rentals) doesn’t overlap with customers who generally attend theaters. The research has discovered that this is mostly new found money, coming from people who generally wait to watch a title on a subscription service they already have. That audience segment has proven willing to pay a premium price to access a theatrical new release at home because it speeds up the timeline at which they were going to watch it.

I get what you and Travis are saying but I think the issue predates that. I think it’s more of an issue where the past decade or so of tentpole releases has conditioned the audience that does attend theaters regularly that if they want to see a new release, they must see it within the first two weekends of release. Even before the pandemic, the box office for most new releases, successful or not, was falling off a cliff after a couple weeks. In that context, I think it does make sense to start moving most films to streaming once their box office dries up. You could force these titles to stay in theaters for more weekends but I don’t think that will really move the needle much because us audience members have been trained to make our decisions of whether or not to see something immediately when it opens. If we’ve decided we’re not interested in week 1 or 2, adding more weeks to the run isn’t likely to change a lot of minds.

I honestly think there are bigger culprits. Too much content is being made across too many platforms. There’s too much choice relative to the number of people consuming the content. Costs are way too high, and some of that is in the rush to produce tentpoles at absurd speeds where they have to double the amount of manpower and money thrown at a project to meet an arbitrary release date. And then if it’s already a given that most films have two weeks to get the bulk of their earnings, the only way to mobilize that kind of audience is to overspend on promotion, which doubles the production costs on a lot of these projects as an accepted business practice.

So you look closer at Furiosa and see a $165 million production budget, you add another $100 million in promotion, and now the breakeven is $500 million before the movie has even opened. And then you look at the history of the Mad Max series and no film in the series has come close to hitting that target. And then you gotta say, why did someone agree to spending that kind of money when there’s absolutely no indication that there’s that kind of audience for it?

I think if you look at nearly every underperforming film this year, and it’s some version of that. It’s not so much that the movies are underperforming in my opinion - box office is down, yes, but for years tentpoles overperformed and studios got too comfortable with that - it’s that nothing is budgeted sanely from the start.

Meanwhile, Sony spent more than $100 million less to make their Garfield picture and made about the same amount of money.

The ceiling is now lower for most films. It has been for everyone post-Avengers: Endgame. That was five years ago. It’s more than past time to make the adjustment and go back to expecting that each year will get one mega blockbuster result, not dozens.

 

[Jake Lipson]

they're going to be forced to bring back the longer windows too.

I don't think it's going to be that easy. Even if everyone agreed to bring back strict 90 day windows immediately, the average audience member who goes a couple times a year won't suddenly come back more often. They've gotten accustomed to waiting and they'll just wait a little bit longer.

Last June, a friend of mine wanted to go see one movie. She was interested in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 or The Little Mermaid or Across the Spider-Verse. She knew I had already seen all of them. Instead of going three different times, she asked me which one of the three was the best. I recommended Across the Spider-Verse and she went to it and loved it. She didn't mind waiting for the other two to stream. She eventually got around to watching Guardians on Disney+ at some point but didn't rush to do so as soon as it dropped. The idea of waiting didn't bother her.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

I'm the odd duck who's been going to theaters post-pandemic waaaay more than I've done over the previous ~3.5 decades... and largely benefiting from the usually smaller audiences (at least for now anyway)...

Plan to see Furiosa on Tues (probably evening) w/ a prime (immersive) seat on probably the best screen in town for it -- and this will actually be my 1st Mad Max movie seen during its original theatrical run, NVM during the 1st week... and if I like it, will probably see it again (possibly w/ some buddies if we can swing it) in the following week, especially since it's likely to stay on premium screens for all of week 2...

_Man_

 

[TravisR]

I don't think it's going to be that easy. Even if everyone agreed to bring back strict 90 day windows immediately, the average audience member who goes a couple times a year won't suddenly come back more often. They've gotten accustomed to waiting and they'll just wait a little bit longer.

Agreed that it won't be easy to bring back longer windows but I think it's going to be the only option if the studios want to get anywhere close to making the kind of money from the theatrical release that they're used to. If they don't do it soon, they're only going to continue to devalue their product to the point where it'll be in the same gutter that the music industry is in.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Yeah, I don't know that it's that easy to put the genie back into the bottle now that audience's habits have changed.

 

[Jeff Adkins]

Yeah, I don't know that it's that easy to put the genie back into the bottle now that audience's habits have changed.

They've certainly changed to an extent, but films like Spider-Man:No Way Home, Avatar: The Way Of Water, Top Gun: Maverick, Oppenheimer, The Batman, Barbie, Thor: Love And Thunder, etc.....all made massive box office within the last two years. In the case of films like Top Gun and Barbie, the streaming window ended up being quite long (by today's standards). If Top Gun had gone to VOD within 15 days, they would've ended up throwing away a ton of revenue.

 

[TravisR]

They've certainly changed to an extent, but films like Spider-Man:No Way Home, Avatar: The Way Of Water, Top Gun: Maverick, Oppenheimer, The Batman, Barbie, Thor: Love And Thunder, etc.....all made massive box office within the last two years. In the case of films like Top Gun and Barbie, the streaming window ended up being quite long (by today's standards). If Top Gun had gone to VOD within 15 days, they would've ended up throwing away a ton of revenue.

That's why I think they have to elongate the theatrical windows now rather than keeping the audience in the habit. The audience will still come out for the big movies but the studios have made it easy to skip the smaller stuff and that's bad for business. Like Adam said, it won't be easy to break the audiences of their new habit but if the studios don't at least try, they're going to ruin the movie industry the way that the music industry ruined itself.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Top Gun wouldn’t have gone straight to VOD for several reasons, the most relevant being that the deal we were discussing involves Universal having an arrangement with the studios that a film can go to VOD after about three weeks if it’s grossed less than $50 million and is already being dropped from screens. Top Gun was Paramount, so not part of that arrangement, and did gross more than $50 million in its first three weeks so those terms wouldn’t have applied.

To the rest of the films that Jeff is citing, I think he’s actually reinforcing something I said earlier, which is that studios need to adjust their expectations and not count on having more than one or two mega blockbuster results per year. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect 2-3 films to hit big per year. What has been unreasonable, in my view, is expecting there to be multiple box office successes at that level per month and expecting that every single release was gonna do that.

I know I’m at risk of beating a dead horse on this, but since Furiosa inspired a lot of this talk, it’s just insane to me that the studio created a scenario where a Mad Max film needed to gross $500 million in about two weeks to break even. There’s a reasonable argument to be made that a Spider-Man or Avatar or Batman has the box office results history to justify that spending but there simply wasn’t one for Mad Max - that was a lot of wishful thinking on Warner’s part.

Warner got luckier with Barbie, but the trades also reported that they spent $145 million to make it and an additional $150 million to promote it. I don’t see why either of those things needed to cost that much. Oppenheimer was done for a $100 million budget with an additional $100 million advertising spread, which is better, but still in that twilight zone where they’re spending as much on advertising as production. I really liked Barbie but there’s nothing in the film’s script that demands it cost as much as a special effects extravaganza. I really liked Oppenheimer but how is it sustainable to have to spend $100 million to alert people of the existence of a film?

For the past decade or so, the ethos around Hollywood for every aspect of their business has just been to throw more money at everything, and they’re now in this vicious cycle with themselves where everyone else is doing it for every project so everyone has to keep doing it or else.

It’s my opinion that they’re asking and expecting too much of their audiences if we have to show up and throw half a billion dollars at everything they put out within ten days in order for them to break even.

I can’t say that audience behavior doesn’t factor into this at all, but at the same time, in my opinion the box office went through a bubble in the past decade, the same as we’ve seen with other industries, and rather than enjoying that extra attention while it lasted, the studios retooled their approach with the expectation that it wasn’t a bubble and would last forever. I really don’t see the audiences as being villains here and I don’t see the existence of streaming as being the major problem. It’s the budgets setting unreasonable requirements for break-even that are sinking everything.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

“Shelf life” is a big thing and I genuinely don’t know how to extend that so that new content retains premium value for a longer window.

I don’t think extending the window automatically changes audience behavior. There’s a perception that when something is brand new on a platform, it is worth more when it debuts, and loses value almost immediately afterward.

Not every film goes through such a short window and it still doesn’t matter if audiences aren’t picking up on it. Last summer, Indiana Jones came out in June and underperformed, didn’t hit streaming until September, and didn’t hit disc until December. It did get to play in theaters longer than most underperforming films. The longer theatrical window and the delayed home video release didn’t drive more people to theaters. It opened low and never picked up momentum and its low opening became the story. If you look at some recent underperformers like Indy 5, the most recent Mission Impossible and Furiosa, all were budgeted at far higher than their historical box office attendance would indicate was wise.

If I invite ten people to a barbecue and make a hundred hot dogs, it’s not the fault of my guests that I have too many leftovers. It’s my fault for poor planning. I think there is a lot of that going around.

Movies that were successful at the box office and with audiences don’t seem affected by their availability on streaming. Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Top Gun all kept coming back to screens after their streaming debuts and those reissues all had measurable box office impact.

Heck, The Phantom Menace just made over $10 million in found money despite being readily available on disc and digital, and despite the fact that Disney spent almost nothing on promotion - they sent some new posters to theaters and made a few social media posts and that was about it.

I think we also have to look at “too much content being produced” as a culprit here because when there’s a brand new $100 million movie in theaters every week and a brand new $100 million streaming limited series being released every week and all of this advertising pressure to watch it all immediately, I think that is driving audiences to see a lot of these projects as both disposable and interchangeable. Most people have a finite amount of leisure time and there just isn’t enough of it to watch everything.

I just don’t feel that enforcing an arbitrary and artificial scarceness of availability fixes the problem. I don’t know if anything does, frankly. But I think it’s worth looking at trying to retrain studios to behave differently to begin with as the solution before trying to take things away from the audience.

 

[Desslar]

To me the window length issue affects not only how and when people are able to access the film, but also the perception of quality. If a film shows up available to stream mere weeks after theatrical release I'm likely to assume it was a bomb at the box office, dampening my enthusiasm for it. Plus, it blurs the line between honest to goodness "films" on the one hand, and mere "content" churned out by the Netflix/Amazon/etc. product mills on the other. The endless parade of terrible direct to streaming Adam Sandler movies being one of the most prominent examples of the latter.

 

[Jake Lipson]

If a film shows up available to stream mere weeks after theatrical release I'm likely to assume it was a bomb at the box office, dampening my enthusiasm for it.

Almost every film does this now, so I don't see how a qualitative inference can be made. If they only rushed bombs out on streaming, that would be one thing. But even the biggest titles have a short window now. Dune Part Two is the biggest-grossing film of the year to date. It had great reviews and audience response. There is no question that it worked theatrically. But it arrived on streaming on April 16 following a February 29 theatrical release. It's just the way the industry has chosen to work now as a standard for the vast majority of films being made. Dial of Destiny which Josh mentioned is an exception that proves the rule.