It seems like even before the first weekend is over, all the box office analysts have already declared the success or failure of the movie. I know personally, I don’t see a movie until the end of the run, so I don’t have to deal with huge crowds and lines and bad seats, it’s safe to say that nearly everyone I know follows suit. Doesn’t the entire run – including theater receipts, pay per view, home media sales, etc. – have to be considered for that hit or flop call is made? If not, why?
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The fact that you wait so as to avoid crowds should be an indicator that most people don’t wait, right?
Statistics. It’s the same reason an election can be called for a candidate with only limited returns. They have models and history that says where the votes in different jurisdictions will go
It’s an educated guess. There are rare instances where a movie does build momentum and makes more then anticipated. But usually the film makes the most on its opening weekend. So they set a goal for what it needs to make ( and assume it will follow the regular pattern of starting strong and making less as it’s out) and if it doesn’t make that they assume it’s not going to reach any of the needed goals. Like I said though there are rare times to where a movie does do much better after the opening weekend. But it’s not normal. And it’s pretty easy to predict how much it will make after even just one weekend.
>I know personally, I don’t see a movie until the end of the run, so I don’t have to deal with huge crowds and lines and bad seats, it’s safe to say that nearly everyone I know follows suit.
A very common mistake in statistical analysis. Your personal experience is basically meaningless. How many people is “everyone you know”? If it’s isn’t at least thousands, you have far too small a sample size to tell you anything.
The overwhelming majority of people go the first couple of weeks. Movies will often make up to 75% of their gross on the first weekend. The average run of a movie these days is about four weeks. Only huge Mega hits stay in theaters for months.
If a movie doesn’t have a really successful opening it’s basically over. Numbers only go down over time, they ltetty much never go up.
I feel like people are missing out on one of the biggest factors here:
The desire to be first to print.
Publications want to be the first to declare something a win or a loss or to just throw out literally any declaration about a movie at all (but being right more often let’s you carry more weight later on).
So everyone gets into pre-sale numbers, marketing campaigns, early viewing reactions, etc. just so they can make an educated guess on whether a movie will be a hit or not.
And because it’s self feeding they are also usually correct.
They movies they say are going to hit big get more coverage, more eyeballs see the ads and articles, and more people want to see the movie “everyone else is seeing because everyone is saying it’s going to be a hit”.
This is further compounded by the fact that movies are more expensive than ever and people have to really choose what they want to see. So we get mega hits and mega flops. It’s harder for mid tier movies to have long tails because if they aren’t making money they get axed off of screens to make room for whatever mega hit needs the show times.
There is an interview with Matt Damon that goes around every once in a while about why movies like Good Will Hunting don’t get made anymore and the answer he gave was streaming. There are no DVD sales. And DVD sales used to absolutely be factored into a movies success. So much so that studios were fine losing on ticket sales for a small low budget film knowing they could double their profits selling DVDs to all the people who bought a ticket to see Kevin Smiths latest weird film.
Why are we so quickly declaring movies hits and flops and failures? Because media is hyper capitalized more than ever before and everyone in the pipeline; studios, theaters, old and new media, and customers, are all squeezed to their last cents and have to obsess over every penny.
Opening night/week surveys are really predictive of how well a film does.
Those audiences are the people most excited to see the movie. You don’t go opening night to a film you don’t care about. If that audience doesn’t like the film, either 1: it’s failed to find it’s target audience 2: it’s target audience is small and niche or 3: even it’s target audience doesn’t like it much. Of those the only one that might work out long term is the first option, and even then that’s possible future ‘beloved cult classic’ status. You may not see a movie till the end of its run, but at that point if everyone tells you it’s pretty mediocre, how likely are you to actually go see it instead of something else?
Cinemascores is a major source of that kinda of survey. Hit their site and check movies where you know how they performed or track the recent releases. They give letter grades F through A+. Anything under an A will have underperformed (still successful but not what the studio wanted) and B down will have flopped to some degree (Catwoman got a B). C under tends to be really bad flops. At the extreme end there are very few F grades, and they all ended up some of the most legendary flops of all time. Alone in The dark and The Turning are two examples there.
>I know personally, I don’t see a movie until the end of the run, so I don’t have to deal with huge crowds and lines and bad seats, it’s safe to say that nearly everyone I know follows suit.
This is the inverse of Yogi Berra’s famous criticism of a restaurant: “No one goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.” It also doesn’t make sense for the same reason. If you and all your friends are going to a movie towards the end of the film’s run, and everyone else is too, how is there such availability of seating?
Blockbuster movies make their budget in the first 2 weeks if they are successful.
Also the decline curve in ticket sales is fairly uniform among most movies, i.e. If a movie makes 100 it’s first week it’ll make 75 the second week 40 the third week etc.
So if a movie doesn’t make enough in it’s first weekend for the standard run of week 1,2,3,etc, to add up to more than the budget you can be 90% sure it’s not gonna make more than the budget.
> Doesn’t the entire run – including theater receipts, pay per view, home media sales, etc. – have to be considered for that hit or flop call is made?
It’s true that some movies do end up making money in the long run thanks to media sales (although since streaming those have taken a MASSIVE hit, Matt Damon has talked about that), but studios don’t drop hundreds of millions of dollars on making a movie for it to become profitable “eventually.” They want a movie to not only make back its budget but also turn a profit before it ever leaves the theater; anything after that just gets to be gravy. And again with them losing so much on the streaming market (seriously most are not profitable) that is not being made up by home media sales, they need these movies to turn a profit fast, not wait a year or two until they start to see profit on it.
Also, in general you can tell if a movie will make back its budget or not by looking at a) how much it cost and b) how much it made opening weekend. Movies need to make at least 2.5x their budget back which accounts for budget, marketing, distribution costs, etc. And most movies have a typical drop on the second weekend that’s hopefully around 60% (this is referred to as a movie’s “legs”). If a movie makes Y in its opening weekend, you can predict using typical legs that it will make Z during its second weekend and so on and so forth. So you can usually tell opening weekend what a movie will end up grossing in the end. The actual number might finish up or down a bit but you have a general enough idea to know if it’s gonna turn a profit before its run is done or not. (There are exceptions where exceptionally good worth of mouth means a movie recovers after a bad opening weekend – Greatest Showman opened badly but actually gained steam after release – but that’s SUPER rare).
The studio makes the most money during the first couple of weeks. Not only is that when most people see the movie, but each week the studio’s cut of the ticket sales
Opening week the split is 90/10 studio/theatre, the next week its 80/20, then 70/30, etc
(numbers pulled out of my ass for illustration purposes)
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