Weekend prediction: Infidel

September 17, 2020

Infidel

Cloudburst Entertainment makes its theatrical debut this weekend with the political thriller Infidel opening in 1,724 theaters nationwide. New distributors often have a challenge generating revenue when they start up, even if they manage to get their films into a decent number of theaters, and doing so in the midst of a pandemic is very challenging indeed. Here’s what our model has to say about its chances, and how the market as a whole is looking in light of the soft opening for The Broken Hearts Gallery last weekend.

First up, I should acknowledge that our model’s first attempt at predicting an opening weekend was less than successful, with Broken Hearts Gallery coming in with $1.13 million over the weekend, compared to our model’s prediction of $3.47 million.

When I introduced our weekend prediction model last week, I noted that one of the biggest challenges right now is to measure how the pandemic is affecting box office revenue. While distributors are now reporting theater counts again, without which no predictions would be possible at all, we don’t yet have a good picture of how enthusiastic moviegoers are about returning to theaters. Our model includes a “pandemic adjustment” that attempts to do this. It’s essentially an estimate of the percentage of the population who will not go see a movie on opening weekend when they have the opportunity to do so, and would have done under normal circumstances. Last week, that variable was set to 60%, based largely on the performance of Tenet the weekend before.

Based on our weekend prediction and the actual result, the value for Broken Hearts Gallery was around 87% (meaning just 13% of its normal audience was willing to so see it). While it’s good to have a number to work with, we don’t know exactly how much of that was due to the pandemic, as some of the audience might have just not been interested in this particular film, or perhaps the audience for romantic comedies is more reluctant to go to theaters right now than the broader population. Since we don’t know for sure, the appropriate adjustment to the model is to combine our prior expectation (60%) with the new measurement (87%) using what’s known in the trade as Bayesian inference. To cut to the chase, our new pandemic adjustment figure is -72%, or, to put it another way, our model now assumes that about 28% of regular moviegoers are inclined to see movies at the moment.

I’ve used that new figure in our prediction for Infidel, which is based on a comparison with other non-studio thrillers that have received wide releases in recent years:

Note the very wide range of results for this type of film, from Assassination Nation’s $1.05 million opening, to $11.85 million for The Gift. Our model is predicting $1.2 million, roughly, but in all honesty a result over $1 million would be impressive given that this is a new distributor, and that market conditions are so tough right now.

At the very least, Cloudburst should be recognized for putting a movie in theaters, and giving those moviegoers who are comfortable making the trip something new to see this weekend.