THB #93: The Batman (no spoilers)
| March 6, 2022
I’m getting back into this habit… but a little uninspired so far.
Frozen 2 opened in the same slot as Frozen, although the first time around, it opened on a single screen. This time, it started wide, as has become the norm. The $41 million Friday is great, although it is dwarfed by the The Hunger Games: Catching Fire opening of $71 million in the same schedule slot in 2013. But the number today (Saturday) will be the really interesting one. It would be no embarrassment for it to be flat or drop some. A significant rise would be exciting for Disney. A significant drop less so.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood isn’t an exciting number, but if you look at recent November opening comps, films like Hacksaw Ridge, Instant Family and A Bad Mom’s Christmas got into the 60s and some the 70s with this kind of launch. This is the rare case where I am interested inCinemascore responses (Tony D left their Cinemascore off his piece today as did Cinemascore’s website), as it will be interesting to see how audiences react to the film being less about Mr. Rogers than they might expect.
Not a great Friday-to-Friday hold for Ford v Ferrari. We’ll see if it accelerates.
21 Bridges falling down. I don’t think the repeated references to Marvel helped this very non-Marvel movie.
There are only three serious Best Picture candidates in theaters right now. Parasite has kept an edge over the more-widely-released Jojo Rabbit. (FvF is above.)
According to what’s left of Box Office Mojo, we’re $758 million behind last year’s total domestic gross as of today. Frozen, Jumanji: Welcome to The Jungle, and Star Wars 8 generated over $860 million domestic through December 31 in their releases. If the sequels do 90% of the previous ones and there isn’t even another dime coming in, this will be the highest-grossing year in the history of the movie business, with over $10.5 billion. If they do 80% as much business by year’s end, we are still only $70m from the record, which Cats, Richard Jewell, and Bombshell will surely deliver between them.
To be honest, I am not 100% trusting the Mojo numbers right now, so I hope this is as accurate as history has suggested the site is. (Oy!)
-30-
May 1, 2022
"Netflix, the great disrupter whose algorithms and direct-to-consumer platform have forced powerful media incumbents to rethink their economic models, now seems to need a big strategy change itself. It got me thinking about the simple idea that my film and TV production company Blumhouse is built on: If you give artists a lot of creative freedom and a little money upfront but a big stake in the movie’s or TV show’s commercial success, more often than not the result will be both commercial (the filmmakers are incentivized to make films that will resonate with audiences) and artistically interesting (creative freedom!). This approach has yielded movies as varied as Get Out (made for $4.5 million, with worldwide box office receipts of more than $250 million), Whiplash (made for $3.3 million, winner of three Academy Awards), The Invisible Man (made for $7 million, earned more than $140 million) and Paranormal Activity (made for $15,000, grossed more than $190 million).From the beginning, the most important strategy I used to persuade artists to work with me was to make radically transparent deals: We usually paid the artists (“participants” in Hollywood lingo) the absolute minimum allowable by union contracts upfront, with the promise of healthy bonuses based on actual box office results—instead of the opaque 'percentage points' that artists are usually offered. Anyone can see box office results immediately, so creators don’t quarrel with the payouts. In fact, when it comes time for an artist to collect a bonus based on box office receipts, I email a video clip of myself dropping the check off at FedEx to the recipient."
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