Friday Estimates

Sicario grossed $47 million domestic, $38 million international. This start for Sicario: Day of the Soldado suggests that its sequel will be over $100 million worldwide, so… a win.

Uncle Drew is a cheap movie and will be over $15m this weekend. It is not the launch Lionsgate was hoping for with its very aggressive marketing and promotional effort. But the hope is that it will be the silly, feel-good film that takes off. Either way, it will be a profitable effort… even though it is unlikely to do as much as it did in the US this weekend in the entire rest of the international market.

Leave No Trace and Three Identical Strangers are doing excellent per-screen business on 9 and 6 screens.

Weekend Estimates by Goldblum Cameo

So Jurassic World: Lost Kingdom is the latest example of why making weekend projection based on Friday numbers (especially on Friday afternoon) is dumb. Projectors were off by more than 10%. Could have gone the other way. Whether JW2 opened to $150 million or not will only really matter in the history books and when future guys like me do data analysis and look at the $150 million tipping point as reference. (My bet would be that another $2 million shows up in the “Actuals.”)

Kinda sick of feeling compelled to point out how well things are going. We now have 5 $100 million domestic grossers this summer, plus Avengers 3. Last year? 3 at this point.

If you include Avengers and J-World actuals over $150m, this will be the first summer ever with 3 $150m openings. Interesting notes on that is that Avengers has been part of the only years with 2 or more $150m summer openings (2012 and 2015) and the last one (2015) was in tandem with… Jurassic World.

The only box office blemish on this summer so far is Solo. And for all the speculation, no one talking to press really knows the story of what the future holds for LucasFilm’s spin-offs. Maybe they should give the control of those to Feige, as he has done them brilliantly for Marvel. I continue to content that Solo would have done better if they just stuck with Lord & Miller… the budget wouldn’t have exploded… and while it may not have done Rogue One numbers, it would not have lost money as Solo has. I’m sure someone thinks I am wrong… but Lord/Miller is 4 for 4 in profit. They have not had a flop. (And for the record, I don’t put any of this on Ron Howard, who did heavy lifting in a bad situation because he is an A #1 pro.)

Won’t You Be My Neighbor brings the rare appearance of a doc in the Top 10 at the box office… especially in the middle of the summer… though RBG got there twice in May. Great summer doc season this year, including a bunch of titles that will not do this kind of business. This includes the Jarecki film, The King, which was the per-screen king for arthouse this weekend. Get going.

Next weekend brings 2 movies that should get a good reception, albeit not mega-numbers, from audiences. Uncle Drew tantalizes as a potential summer break-out feel-good comedy, skewing to black audiences first, but getting more color blind as it rolls along, like Girls Trip. And Sicario 2 (Day of the Soldado is a HORRIBLE title to sell a movie with) is a movie that has critics twisted up in knots, but really is “the kind of movie they don’t make anymore.”

Sicario: Day of the Soldado is not a real sequel or more than a kissing cousin to the Denis Villeneuve masterwork (co-authored by Roger Deakins in a very real way). Nor is it the kill-kill-kill movie that they are selling in the ads. The opening sequence of this film is a good lead towards understanding the way the two films relate. It is tough and interesting, but nowhere near the gut punch of the original’s opening sequence. But not being one the great films of the decade doesn’t make it anything less than a solid film, unique in today’s studio output. It lingers on the theme of loyalty amongst mercenaries, which was a small part of the original Sicario. And it takes its time.

The end of the film is a hat tip to the Sicario Cinematic Universe, which I wouldn’t mind seeing at all… but I can’t argue with those who don’t care for it either.

Friday Estimates Analyzed by Dino David

Never know when it will be the last one…

And not very interesting. Just another weekend of massive success. The 4th $125m+ opening in 8 weeks of a one-week extended summer season. Hasn’t happened before. Best before was Captain America: Civil Wars, Finding Dory, and Suicide Squad over the entire summer. I don’t actually foresee any ore this summer, but I do see 8 or 9 legitimate hits to come.

Here is the idea… wait more than a decade and bring back a beloved franchise,s how some promise, and you have a shot at an absolutely insane opening. The next film will not open as well. But it might gross the same or more.

Then there are franchises with bigger openings to the 2nd film, like The Dark Knight trilogy or The Hunger Games, which saw their second films open to $2 million and $6 million over their $150m+ launches for the first of their series. Wow. Big whoop.

My point is… J-World: Fall opening over $125 million and under $150 million is an epic non-story. Well, except that it’s a terrific gross.

I am also very curious about why some critics seem to have a raptor claw up their ass about this film. It is better than any Jurassic movie other than the first. Yet reading reviews, it seems that some critics were expecting something other than a Jurassic Park movie… like the dinosaurs were going to Wakanda or something. If you love movies and you can’t handle a dinosaurs teaching humans a lesson in humility because scientists and money grubbers do stupid shit, you might need a new job.

Don’t get me wrong. If you don’t like the movie, you don’t like the movie. But I haven’t read a bashing criticism that was much more considered than, “This shit again?” Boring. Lacking perspective. Afraid to pick on the mess that is Ocean’s 8 or Tag?

Hold on! My DirecTV just went blank! Who is reading this?!?!?

Nice hold for Incredibles 2… which I wouldn’t mind seeing again today.

Would You Be My Neighbor? is going RBG-like numbers. Finding that feeling of integrity and nostalgia would seem a good way to postilion any doc about now.

Later, gators…

Weekend Estimates by Mr. Credible

Fourth time there have been 3 $150 million openings in a year. (150 is the new 100.)

About to be a record-breaking 4 $150m openings in a year… and all before July 1.

I don’t actually expect a 5th, given the poor opening of Solo and the lack of a Star Wars film over Christmas. However, we will tie the record for $100 million openings before July 1 with 5 next weekend. And I see 4 potential additions to that during the rest of the summer and 4 more in the fall/winter. Obviously, not even half of those 8 will make the mark. But the annual record is 8 and that is well within reach.

Theatrical is dying. Kids don’t go to the movies. Etc, etc, etc… blah, blah, blah…

I can’t say this enough times – and you won’t hear me say it many more times in public – the future is coming… subscription access to virtually everything is coming… and theatrical window will, above all, be the way success is defined in the future of movies. Streaming services, of which you will subscribe to a group, not unlike the cable bundle, will tout their successes and numbers only to keep subscribers from churning. Someone will try to charge a premium for early access in 2021 and the experiment will fail. There will be no YouTube Red in the future, but people will pay for subscriptions to get YouTube access overall… and life will go on. If you want it, you will pay for it in some manner.

And the only way to pay for Avengers movies and Pixar movies, etc, as we know them now, will be theatrical. Eyeballs will be cheap. Dollars will be – as they really are now, though people are all in a tizzy – the way things are measured. And the difference between a movie that premieres on Disney Family Streaming and a Pixar movie will be the billion dollars that the Pixar movie adds to Disney’s coffers. And don’t think that money is minor. Figure 100 million households in America paying $10 a month for Disney Family… that’s $12 billion a year. One movie improving revenues by 8.5% is major. And if you think Comcast is leaving behind the $370 million for Fifty Shades Freed‘s spin-off stepchild, you are wrong.

We are all too distracted by the shiniest, most expensive objects. The giant movies are great and highly profitable in all windows. But the middle business is business too. And when the film/tv business gets capped – nearly permanently – by what is currently being touted as the disruption of streaming, it will matter even more. For a lot of companies, a $24 billion cap on annual revenues across 200 million paying households worldwide is a step up. But when there is nowhere to go from there, they will all chafe.

The Incredibles 2 not only broke the record for an animation opening… it smashed it by $45 million.

Decent hold for Ocean’s 8, following a decent opening. A successful movie, even though it is not very good. As I have said a thousand times, succeeding with mediocrity is the real test of growing opportunity in Hollywood for women and POC. (By the way, I expect “POC” will be seen as a glib diminutive sometime in the next couple years.)

Tag is not It. But it felt somehow appropriate that a mediocre movie that is so Toby Emmerich, sold with such mediocrity, opened on WarnerMedia’s opening weekend to such a mediocre number. I know that the people employed by Warner Bros are capable of better on every level. But if you look hard at the last couple of years, there have been some very beautiful weeds, but the garden is pretty lame. How much will change how quickly at the studio that seems on a collision course with a Best Picture win and a surprise smash with Crazy Rich Asians to compliment a run of mediocrity or outright flops. (I so want to believe in The Meg.)

And Gotti goes into the potty. Though, I have to say, $1.7 million for what looks like an endless disaster is a tribute to Travolta working the movie. And some loonies will attribute it to MoviePass’ involvement… which will be deeply misguided.

(More to come…)

Friday Estimates

Hot Button Rules of Thumb (first published in 2006)

Top 10 Hot Button Rules of Thumb

Top 10 News Stories – Hot Button, Dec 2017

Top Ten Movie News Stories of 1997

My First Online Column. June 6, 1997

So, you want to know how show business really works? OK. Let’s start at the beginning. Attributing the quotation above to Jack Nicholson is a little like crediting your 6-year-old nephew with coming up with “Allllll- righty then!!!”

Jack Nicholson is an actor. A great actor. And the magic that he does, in cahoots with a whole lot of help, is to make you feel that he was really upset and reacted to Tom Cruise. But he didn’t. Not really.

See, Aaron Sorkin wrote a play that ran on Broadway and probably a dozen guys said those words eight times a week in various productions, but Rob Reiner went to the theater one night and liked what he saw, so he and his partners at Castle Rock, who had a lot of cash lying around from Japanese businessmen (see: Sony), who knew virtually nothing about how to make movies (see: Peter Guber/Jon Peters), bought the feature rights to the film and Reiner, who decided to direct Sorkin’s screenplay based on his play, talked Cruise into being in the movie, which led, in part, to Demi Moore and Nicholson joining the cast and then, one day, 80-odd people got together in a giant empty sound-proofed box (a soundstage) in Los Angeles that had a set in it designed to look like a real military court in Washington, D.C., and after they did a master shot (generally, all the actors doing the entire scene from start to end), Tom did his close-ups and then Jack did his close-ups and on some take, Nicholson said those words and the performance was great and the sound was good and there was no dirt in the gate (like hair in the projector at the movies) and Reiner said, “Print,” and the lab didn’t screw it up and the editors (Academy Award nominees Robert Leighton and Steve Nevius chose the close-up and spliced it together and every one of about a dozen people agreed that it worked and the composer (Marc Shaiman) created the mood music and the film was test-screened and audiences went wild when Nicholson went off and they used it to sell the hell out of the movie, which led you into a movie theater where you bought popcorn and Coca-Cola products and generated enough profit to convince Ted Turner to buy Castle Rock.

Run-on sentence, you say? Artistic license, I say.

And besides, you’re missing the point. THAT was the shortened version of how Jack ended up arching his brows and making your heart beat faster. I didn’t mention the screenplay development, the casting of secondary roles, the pre-production, the lighting, the electrics, the costumes, Demi Moore‘s bust in that uniform, the publicists, the caterers, the foley artists, the trailer producers and hundreds of other steps that help make magic.

Magic. That word. Sleight of hand. Illusion. It’s the little things that you barely notice. Hair that doesn’t move in a stiff wind. Characters who never pass wind. Wind that blows at the moment the lovers part. It’s perfect skin and Joe Pesci‘s hairline. It’s perfect teeth and airbrushing so heavy that actors are unrecognizable (Minnie Driver and John Cusack are great-looking people, but who are those people in the Grosse Pointe Blank ads?). It’s photographing an actress only from the left side because she’s more Wicked Witch than Dorothy from the right. It’s Dennis Quaid‘s voice in Dragonheart … OK, that wasn’t so magical. But you get the point.

It’s also Tom Cruise.

Absolute magic, that guy. Most of you will go to the movies to see him no matter what the movie is. That’s why he’s worth $20 million a picture to nervous studio chieftains. Because almost every time out, 3 or 4 million of you will pay for tickets the first weekend his movie opens. That’s movie magic. But what the hell do you really know about Tom Cruise? Almost nothing. He has charisma. He makes good choices about who he works with. Just look at his last dozen directors — Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire), Brian DePalma (Mission: Impossible), Neil Jordan (Interview With A Vampire, The Crying Game), Sydney Pollack (The Firm, Tootsie), Ron Howard (Far and Away, Apollo 13), Rob Reiner (A Few Good Men, When Harry Met Sally), Tony Scott (Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide), Oliver Stone (Born on the Fourth of July), Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Diner), Martin Scorsese (The Color of Money, GoodFellas) and, most recently, the Howard Hughes of directors, Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut, 2001:A Space Odyssey). Only three of the dozen haven’t been Academy Award or Golden Globe nominees, and those three directed Cruise in mega- hits Mission: Impossible, Top Gun and Cocktail. Magic.

Cruise also has the most powerful publicist in Hollywood by his side, Pat Kingsley of PMK. Bad buzz about homosexuality, Scientology, marital problems and “the squeaky voice machine” (A Scientology invention to make Tom’s voice more mellifluous, reportedly added to the equipment list of Far And Away) have all melted into the background as true-life tales of Tom saving lives, Tom defending Nicole and Tom winning a Golden Globe have taken center stage, no matter what the vultures of the press (me included) might prefer (it makes our job so much easier). Magic. Almost enough to make Tom … well … tall.

The truth is made of A-cup breasts and 3 feet of duct tape. It’s 49 years old and dates 23-year-olds. It can’t eat dairy and it’s two months late on its BMW lease payments. The truth was a high-priced call girl before she started playing virgins in the movies and became your bedroom fantasy for seven bucks a crack instead of $300. Like the old joke: A man asks a woman to sleep with him for $1 million and she says “yes.” Then he says, “Well how about for $5?” Offended, she says, “What do you think I am?” He responds, “I know what you are. We’re just negotiating the price.”

So now the real question: Can you handle the truth? If you can, I’ll write it for you, as best as I can, every week, right here. You want to know how the studio system really works? I’ll tell you. How is advertising designed to trick you into going to bad movies? I’ll tell you. How does Oprah‘s weight get the cover of the tabloids and a gay TV actress get the cover of Time? If you believe the tabloids got scooped, go to another site now. If you know better and want to know more, stick around. Hang with me and I’ll give you The Whole Picture. Bookmark it, baby! Questions? E-mail me, and I’ll do my best. But first, some answers: 1. Yes, they’re implants. 2. No, you can’t get paid for that, unless you can figure out how to light it. 3. Maybe, but I’ll need blood work results first.

Weekend Estimates by Sex Flip Klady

Hard to really analyze the Ocean’s Eight opening. It feels… about right.

It’s not explosive. It’s not a step backwards for a franchise idea. It will be profitable, but insignificant financially. The “empowered” movie of the summer still looks to be Crazy Rich Asians, which WB tagged to Ocean’s “prints.”

If Sandra Bullock is as smart as she has been, she will take this franchise by the horns and find a young, clever screenwriter or screenwriters to write a movie worth making with this remarkable group of actresses. Or get some old hands in there who know their way around this kind of material. Talk Edgar Wright, who loves women and loves a good puzzle, into doing it. Or get Amy Seimetz to direct a script from Glazer and Jacobson and Ed Solomon. Bullock made a not-so-great film with David Gordon Green… but go get David and the people he works with to make something more indie. Or Richard Linklater. Write something that Chivo would consider directing (but pass on, because he is Chivo) and then get a great DoP who isn’t Chivo (maybe Peter Andrews?). Maybe get serious about the difference between a 50-year-old woman and a 25-year-old woman… which would give the movie something more interesting than just another heist. Just whatever you do, don’t make another mediocrity… because Ocean’s 8 is one and it is mostly on the script, which has nothing to say except “take this ride you are so familiar with you could call every beat out and get 85% of it right.” Y’all gathered one of the groups of actresses ever assembled for a movie and didn’t give them anything much to do when all the audience wants to do is to love them. Frustrating.

Solo dropped, in its third weekend, pretty much like Deadpool 2. Nothing extraordinary there. But the soft start makes that normal trajectory an ongoing disappointment. That should put Solo around $190m at this time next weekend and past $200m domestic. But not by a lot.

Meanwhile, Deadpool 2 is on track to pass $300m domestic and around $700m worldwide. The film’s budget roughly doubled the original’s… but they could have spent more and didn’t… which is a huge win.

Hereditary is easily A24’s biggest opening ever (by 48% over The Witch) and once again shows the upside of publicity-centric, targeted, relatively inexpensive marketing. The story for this film will get more interesting, as it is more accessible to wider swaths of the potential audience than was The Witch, which did about 3x opening. Lady Bird is A24’s #1 domestic hit, with $49 million. Can Hereditary threaten that? It would be unusual for a horror film and the summer is getting to its strongest run of films now, but… who knows?

Hotel Artemis wanted to rely on the John Wick audience to make the connection… which doesn’t actually exist. Drew Pearce, who wrote-produced-directed, is hot in Hollywood. But less so today than last Sunday. He assembled a remarkable cast… but whether it is the fault of the movie (haven’t seen it) or just the marketing, no one seems to have known or cared.

Adults are clearly hungry for something worth seeing, with strong numbers for RBG, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Hearts Beat Loud and the re-release of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Meanwhile, quickly fading MoviePass had its second weekend and first expansion for American Animals, which will have to stretch to get close to $1.5 million domestic, in spite of MoviePass pumping it hard to its membership of (allegedly) 3 million. To be fair, it’s in the same space as The Orchard releases The Dinner and The Overnight. Does this suggest that MoviePass has a future in distributing movies? No. The Orchard curates an interesting set of films and relies heavily on VOD and streaming sales to profit. MoviePass is a company built on the idea of theatrical. And the stock, which peaked at $38.86 in October is now selling for 35 cents a share. So….

Weekend Estimates 060318

Keeping it to myself…

Friday Estimates by Still Solo Despite The Media Han On Its Head Shoving Down

Deadpool 2‘s second Friday off 77% from its f1rst Friday
Avengers: Infinity War off 70%.
Guardians 2 off 70%.
Spider-Man: Homecoming off 73%.
Pirates last Memorial Day off 73%.
X-Men: Apocalypse the Memorial Day opener in 2016, off 75%.

Solo off 77%… THE SKY IS FALLING!!!!

Tthis is an annual occurrence. Every summer, in the last couple decades, there has been a summer movie or two that has gotten overpraised and anointed falsely and a movie or two that has gotten slaughtered by the media for no apparent objective reason. It’s never the movies that are truly the most loved or the most disliked. It’s usually the step down in both categories.

I would love to tell you that there is now a formula for killing a franchise. But no. Look to the more traditional answers on Solo and you will find the much more likely culprit(s).

The Marvel, Zach Snyder DC films, and X-Men films are instructive… because you can’t build a consistent trend line on them. There are some simple consistencies, but they all get crushed by reality in various ways. For instance, the standalone Wolverine movies undergrossed the X-Men films… until Logan outgrossed X-Men: Apocalypse. Or Wonder Woman nearly doubled the domestic gross of Justice League. Or Black Panther, the fourth Marvel movie in less than a year, almost doubled the domestic gross of any of the other three and then Avengers: Infinity War did similar business just 2 months later.

Just because you don’t understand what happened doesn’t make it magic.

I am not suggesting that there are easy answers. Except for this one: look at the movie and how it was sold. And look at the movie and what story LucasFilm decided to make and whether it had any real connective tissue to the trilogies from which it was spun.

Deadpool 2 is not going to do Deadpool business. However, it will be an R-rated comic book movie that does $600 million worldwide. Fox marketed the crap out of it and it probably niche’d itself a little more and suffered the tyranny of the not new. Deal.

Adrift will be well into the top half of STX openings. Could it have been more? Probably. But Woodley seemed someone M.I.A. in the process of pushing the film and the quirks of the movie kept STX from going, as it probably should have anyway, the full “this is woman, hear her roar” on the marketing. Here’s a hint… men were never going to go.

The disaster of the summer to date, for me, is the sub-$3 million opening of Action Point. How do you kill a Johnny Knoxville movie about, essentially, Camp Jackass? Paramount found a way. I will pay to see this movie, because even though I find the “smash Johnny in the balls” thing obnoxiously childish, the movies have always made me laugh. They are low-rent crap and they know it and they don’t care because they are honest and having fun being idiot boys. And it may be the worst of all the Jackass-y movies… doesn’t mean that you need to signal it to the audience with bull fight marketing. There are 23 Rotten Tomato reviews of the major studio release on 1,682 screens… 57 for American Animals… 31 for Breath, which as best I can tell is only playing at the Angelika in NY. Someone chose not to do their job here.

Speaking of American Animals, nice number per screen. Should be a $25k per screen for the weekend on four, around $110k for the weekend (aka 10,000 people seeing the film). For MoviePass, which was hoping to spark off of this film which they bought partial rights to, the gross is unhelpful and even if every one of the ticket buyers was inspired to see the film and pay by MoviePass, that’s less than half a percent of MoviePass subscribers seeing the film and the loss on every ticket almost equal to the film rental being paid back to to the company as an owner. They were always going to lose money on this title, but the low tipping point where this adventure might have gotten interesting for the investors/stock market was somewhere around a $2.5 million gross (10% of subs)… but really $5 million for it to be at all impressive, representing 20% of subs (assuming 100% of viewers are MoviePass subs) being driven to a movie because of being a MoviePass subscriber.

BYOB: Where’s Your Thrill

Summer upon us. What’s next, what’s next??