Box Office: 'Flight Risk' Tops With $4.4 Million Friday as 'Wolf Man' Drops 80%
The various Academy Awards contenders like 'September 5,' 'A Complete Unknown' and 'The Brutalist' got relative Oscar bumps in the first-post nominations weekend.
Good for studios, bad for theaters…
For the third weekend in a row, the top performing newbie is a lower budget, non-fantastical, star+concept programmer that is opening at least as well as it needs to in relation to budget and expectations. Granted, we’re not talking tentpole-sized numbers, and that’s a problem for the overall marketplace. It again highlights (and will continue to highlight) the push-pull between “each film doing well on its own merits” and “the overall revenue isn’t anywhere near what it needs to be in a macro-sense.” For example, this weekend will pull in around $63 million combined, which will be -48% from this same weekend in 2020. For all the talk about #Survivetil25, it might be a while before 2025 catches up to 2020.
The overall 2020 year-to-date was at $411 million for new releases, a total not seen in January since the jaw-dropping “Everybody gets a car!” breakout performances of Paul Blart: Mall Cop, My Bloody Valentine, Gran Torino and Hotel For Dogs (with Taken about to overperform over Super Bowl weekend). Recall that the first Jan-to-March quarter of 2020, specifically in terms of new releases, reached $1 billion, and that was with most of March being essentially “canceled” due to COVID-19 outbreaks. With both Bad Boys for Life and Sonic the Hedgehog overperforming, 1917 racing to Oscar glory and both A Quiet Place Part II and Mulan on the verge of breaking out, the industry was likely anticipating a Q1 total exceeding $2 billion.
The first fourth of the year hasn’t exceeded $1.5 billion since 2019, which was frankly deadlifted by the $427 million-grossing Captain Marvel. Unless Captain America: Brave New World performs more like a Phase Three MCU film than a Phase Two one, Dogman behaves like a nostalgia-fueled DWA sequel, and/or Companion is the second coming of Get Out, and none of those should have to perform as such, we could see a comparative 2025 box office that falls behind 2020 well into the second quarter. The difference isn’t the absence of tentpoles, but rather that moviegoers can no longer be expected to show up for Taken, Hotel for Dogs, or Paul Blart: Mall Cop in anywhere near the numbers that once were typical.
The good news is that studio programmers are performing at the lower end of frankly lowered expectations. While it’s not a perfect comparison, consider how hit television shows from the 1990s differ from today’s viewership standards. ER averaged 22 million viewers during its 1995-1996 season, with 48 million people tuning in for the November episode in which George Clooney rescues a child trapped in a storm drain. In the 2023-2024 season, the most-watched scripted show was CBS’s Tracker, which was the only one to average over 10 million viewers. Concurrently, HBO’s The Penguin is a cable and streaming smash with 2.1 million viewers watching its series finale on its premiere night. So, yeah, Flight Risk is #1 this weekend with around $12 million.