Surely the opening weekend demonstrates nothing at all about the quality of the movie, but only the quality of the marketing. When your friend tells you “I saw such a great film last week, you must go and see it!” then that is the sign of the movie’s quality. Why would anyone who wasn’t financially invested in the movies care about opening weekend figures?
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It’s also in large part due to how the theatres and movie studios split the box office money.
The general business model is that in the first few weeks, the movie studio gets most if not all of the money from ticket sales. The theatres only makes money from concession sales and advertising. As the weeks to go by, the theatre gets a larger and larger share of the ticket sales.
This means that the studios really want the movie to make most of its money if the first few weeks. If they movie does not make money in the first few weeks, then the studio loses out. For the studio, it is much better for a movie to make $100 million on the first weekend instead of $10 million per week for ten weeks. In the former, the studio gets most of that $100 million. In the latter, the studio might only get $50 million or so.
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