Weekend Estimates by Klady the Number Slayer
Is there really anything of any significance to say about this weekend?
Just about everyone smelled Jack as a big, hairy bomb from miles away. The Last Anything 2 is a joke title. And 21 & Over is dead smack in the middle of all Relativity openings.
It’s nice that 1/3 of the Top 24 is made up of 8 Oscar Best Picture nominees.
8 new films on 1 or 2 screens this weekend.
Stoker doing $23k on 7 screens is NOT good. Searchlight doesn’t seem to have believed this was a commercial movie and continue to prove it. If they had gone out and sold it as a straight thriller, I think it could have opened to at least what $10m… but is that good enough to make it worth the risk of the marketing spend? Welcome to the great indie distribution question of 2012-2015.
Sony Classics had a decent/nice weekend with No and The Gatekeepers.
P.S. Odds are quite good that Jack’s $28m studio estimate will end up being more like $26.5m.
Seems like small consolation, but “Argo” had the biggest 22nd weekend at the box office since “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” If you count only wide releases, it’s the biggest since “Titanic.”
“Silver Linings” enjoys its 10th weekend in the top 10…which means Jennifer Lawrence has spent 23 of the last 50 weekends in the top 10 at the domestic box office. Julia Roberts would be proud.
The “disappointment” that is The Hobbit crosses $1B worldwide. Boy, that’s the type of “failures” I’d like.
December brings out the stupidest in box office non-experts.
(bad grammar intended)
etguild… kind of a dumb stat, born solely from circumstance.
Titanic didn’t have a weekend under $2m in its first 22 weekends. Argo had 8.
Big Fat, in the other side, didn’t have its first $2m weekend until weekend 11.
Sideways did $2.1 million in weekend 20 and never even hit $72m.
Chicago did $2.5m in weekend 17 (it’s last weekend over 2)… but also had $30m more in the domestic bank than Argo.
Silver Linings Playbook, weekend v weekend with Argo, has won every release weekend 8 – 16 by a big margin. I don’t know that Silver Linings will be at $2.2m in 6 weekends… probably not.
But that is one of those “Wednesday of a third weekend for a musical slasher movie starring a monkey” kind of stats. True, but so narrow and specific as to be pretty much irrelevant.
When THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA opened shortly after PASSION OF THE CHRIST, we advertised it in a few big cities as “America’s #2 Resurrection Movie!”
Stoker did 23k a screen on 7 screens, not 23k on 7. How is that disaster?
Yes, it’s kind of a dumb stat, but given that certain box office analysts are claiming that “Argo” had a “mediocre bounce,” it’s worth pointing out that it’s been in release for an extremely long time, and has been pulling between 1-2 million for months on end. That’s the point I was trying to make, that it’s been consistently pulling in money in a way that movies just don’t do anymore.
All of the movies you named aside from Silver Linings, which was a slow rollout, are a decade or more old, which shows to me that “Argo” is a positive anomaly given the shortened home market window.
Agro is also on Dvd. The fact that 2.1 million dollars worth of tickets were sold to people who thought- you know that movie that we can get on netflix, it won best picture lets see it in a theater 4 months after it came out is kind of amazing.
It’s not a disaster, Duvalin. But it doesn’t suggest a huge uptick on expansion. And it’s a thriller/horror film… not traditionally a long-legged word-of-mouth genre.
But we’ll see. I don’t see it getting to $10m at this point. I hope I am wrong, as I really like the film… and Searchlight, for that matter.
I don’t know who was expecting what for a film in DVD, but the great surprise of Argo was how it played through November. December into the 2nd week of January was pretty normal descent. And then WB did surprisingly well expanding back out, which was really like a re-release. The numbers this weekend is good… just not for people living in 1995, thinking Oscar would change the whole profile of an already successful gross.
I want to see Stoker but have no clue when (or if) it’s going to be playing in my city.
Disappointed! Looks like creepy fun
I also find the Argo figure a really good one Dave. You always lean towards the ‘nothing to see here folks’ mentality, but given the age of the movies you referenced, and I can’t say that I remember what the DVD/On Demand climate was ten years ago, the fact that Argo is already on On Demand on my cable, I think this post Oscar drop off, or lack thereof, was just a tad short of remarkable. People wanted to see it in the theater when they had other options.
Legs on a movie it seems will become a bigger and bigger story as it becomes less and less common. It’s why stuff like The Help and The Blind Side and almost anything that grosses 4 times it’s opening weekend number is deemed as having legs these days. It wasn’t too long ago when a movie that opened above $20m was almost guaranteed to get to $100m. Now, not so much.
Not sure where you are, HeartbeartBaby, but “Stoker” is supposed to go wider 3/15.
‘It wasn’t too long ago when a movie that opened above $20m was almost guaranteed to get to $100m.’
Longer than it feels, I just had to look it up, first two to open to 20 and fail to cross 100 were both sequels in 91, turtles and naked gun (though both cheap enough to make lots of coin). Then it only took another year for Dracula to open over 30 and not make the centuary mark. The 35 barrier was crossed with Scorpion King and Red Dragon, 40 with Scary Movie 4.
DP…probably not the place for it, but any thoughts on House of Cards? Both storytelling/narrative and the distribution/consumption angle. Also the development process relying heavily on user data to inform creative decisions?
Don’t think you’ve addressed yet but very curious. Thanks as always.