A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE | HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA CHAPTER 1 openings | June and year-to-date 2024 box office | June 28 to 30, 2024 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: June 28 to 30, 2024
1) A Quiet Place: Day One opening
- This is an outstanding opening for the 3rd episode in a horror series. A Quiet Place is doing what legacy series do — it’s growing its audience. Critics' reviews and audience scores are down slightly from episode 2, but they’re still excellent for the genre (a B+ CinemaScore).
There have been bigger horror movies, but no series has been as consistent after three films as this. Stephen King's It movies were giant through two pictures, but they stopped after #2. Five Nights at Freddy's opened to $80m last fall; let’s see where it goes from here:
- A Quiet Place’s hook — keep quiet, or else… — is going to carry it indefinitely into the future. Only 13 horror series have moved on to a 4th episode. That list is going to get longer now.
2) Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 opening
- This is an ambitious vision for a four-part Western series backed by Kevin Costner. Chapter 1 is opening below average for a Western, with weak critics' reviews and audience scores (a B- CinemaScore).
The film is an outlier. There have been 19 wide release Westerns over the last 27 years (pure Westerns). That’s one every year and a half, and none of them were designed to launch a series, as this one is:
- Kevin Costner has had a lot of exposure in Yellowstone on Paramount+. In this market, a theatrical production that looks like television has a disadvantage. Two Horizon films are already complete, at a cost of $50m each (Chapter 2 is dated for mid-August). Good ancillary income will mitigate some of the red ink, but not all of it.
There are movies that overcome the odds, break the mold, and prove the skeptics wrong. It happens regularly and it’s an important part of the business. In this case, the mold is still in tact: Westerns are not in fashion on the big screen, and there hasn’t been a successful theatrical Western series in the last 50 years.
3) June and year-to-date 2024 box office
- In spite of record-breaking numbers from Inside Out 2 and an excellent performance by Planet of the Apes, the June domestic BO was down -20.8% compared with the pre-pandemic average (the average of June 2019/2018/2017). Year-to-date, January-thru-June is now down -38.8%.
June struggled because two of its weekends were very quiet. If each of those weekends had had a solid ($30m+) summer opening, the month would have finished down -5% compared with the pre-pandemic average — a respectable deficit. But that didn’t happen, and Inside Out could not make up all of the difference:
- For comparison, pre-pandemic Junes had Toy Story 4 (2019, $1.07 billion worldwide), Jurassic World 5 (2018, $1.3b), and Incredibles 2 (2018, $1.24b). And June 2023 had Spider-Verse 2 ($691m), Transformers 7 ($439m) and Little Mermaid/live-action ($570m).
Looking ahead, July
- The July period is going to be crucial. July 2023 was when Barbie, Oppenheimer and Sound of Freedom went on their remarkable runs. But for the first time in a long time, we’re looking ahead with some confidence…
Despicable Me 4, Twisters and Deadpool 3 will open during the next month, and they should hold their own in very tough comparisons. Theatrical momentum can change quickly, and it's changing now.
[Note: For our monthly BO calculations, we take the complete weeks of each month (each week runs Friday to Thursday) and we line up the same weeks across the years, so we are comparing the same days, same weeks and same day-mix, like apples-to-apples. There are different ways to do this and you might see slightly different industry figures — this is how we like to do it.]