Weekend predictions: movies are showing better legs during the pandemic
September 24, 2020
Disney’s announcement earlier this week that it is moving its upcoming MCU releases into 2021, starting with Black Widow taking over Shang Chi’s previous slot on May 7, was a body-blow to the theatrical business. October’s release schedule is now looking very thin indeed. November isn’t looking much better, and there’s a high probability that at least one of No Time to Die, Soul, and The Croods: A New Age will slip from their current planned release dates.
This weekend has four films technically opening wide: the re-release of The Empire Strikes Back, Shortcut (an Italian horror movie from Gravitas Ventures, opening in around 600 locations), and two movies honoring Ruth Bader Ginsberg, On the Basis of Sex and RBG. However, all of them are such special cases that they don’t fit our prediction model. Instead, I’ll focus on a rare piece of good news: films currently playing in theaters are showing better week-to-week legs than was the case before the pandemic.
We have now had six wide releases since enough theaters opened in North America to allow for wide releases. That doesn’t give us a huge amount of data with which to perform analysis, but it’s already fairly clear that films are enjoying better legs in theaters than normal.
Two metrics we can easily measure to gauge week-to-week strength for a film are the number of theaters it is playing in, and the average box office it’s earning in each theater. As the chart above shows, by week four, movies released during the pandemic are averaging 87% more than what one would expect prior to the pandemic, and are playing in 33% more theaters. By a simple piece of math, their theater average is about 41% higher than normal (1.33 x 1.41 = 1.87). The first number, 33%, is a rough measure of the relative lack of competition for space in movie theaters thanks to the lack of new releases. The second number, 41%, is a rough measure of how the lack of competition is affecting what movies people go see. All else being equal, one would expect them to be about the same, since theaters base their decisions on what to play based on what they expect people to want to go see.
This data also allows us to start predicting box office for movies returning to theaters this weekend, which I’ll be doing every week going forward. Here are the predictions for this coming weekend. The Relative Strength column shows the performance so far for each film compared to all wide releases during the pandemic. The Broken Hearts Gallery is showing the best relative strength so far, followed by Tenet, with both films performing somewhat better than average. Infidel doesn’t yet have a relative strength number because it was released last weekend.
The big unknown this weekend is how the new releases will affect the performance of the returning films. Given their niche appeal, I don’t think they will have a big impact, but we may know more on Sunday, depending on what movies the studios decide to report box office for.
Filed under: Weekend Preview, Star Wars Ep. V: The Empire Strikes Back, RBG, On the Basis of Sex, Tenet, The Broken Hearts Gallery, Shortcut, Ruth Bader Ginsburg