THE FALL GUY opening | TAROT opening | April and year-to-date 2024 box office | May 3 to 5, 2024 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: May 3 to 5, 2024
1) The Fall Guy opening
- This is a fair opening for a big action comedy. We’re looking at this as the potential start of an action comedy series, and by that standard the weekend is average. Critics’ reviews and audience scores are very good (an A- CinemaScore).
Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are both coming off of popular and Awards-nominated performances, so expectations are high. But the bigger titles that launched action comedy series in the past had another dimension, like a sprawling A-list ensemble cast (Oceans 11), or international espionage (Kingsman), or sci-fi/effects (Men in Black). This story has romantic complications between the leads — that's a smaller sell:
- Action comedies are solid performers overseas, and with this cast foreign business should be good. These films have a track-record of holding up well over subsequent weeks (a strong 3.7x avg. domestic multiple). At a cost of an est. $130m, The Fall Guy is going to need a long run.
2) Tarot opening
- This is a soft opening for a new horror film. The weekend start is a bit below average for a single-episode horror title, and it’s well below the level of a new horror series. Critics reviews and audience scores are poor, although horror audiences are the least affected by those opinions (a C- CinemaScore):
Tarot was inexpensive to make (the cost was around $8m). That's a reasonable number and the film should recover its costs after playing in all markets and on all ancillary media.
3) April and year-to-date 2024 moviegoing
- The April domestic box office was down -47.9% compared with the pre-pandemic average (the average of April 2019/2018/2017). Compared with April 2023, the month was down -39.9%. Year-to-date, January-thru-April is down -43.0% compared with pre-pandemic levels, and down -22.7% compared with 2023.
There's no way to make this pretty. These are rough numbers. We’d like to see the box office improve toward pre-pandemic levels, but in April it fell backwards.
The pre-pandemic period includes Avengers: Endgame on April 26, 2019, and Avengers: Infinity War on April 27, 2018. Those two juggernauts alone make the comparisons tough. And April 2023 had Super Mario, another colossal hit. This April had nothing like that:
- As noted last week, in spite of the challenges, there are titles that are navigating the market, are smartly budgeted and are doing well, including Civil War, Challengers and Monkey Man. And holdover business has been good for Godzilla, Ghostbusters and Dune. But it doesn’t compare to having a steady stream of big new releases.
This table is worth repeating because it’s the story of the first 17 weeks of the year: the lack of franchise series movies. The strikes disrupted the creative development and production process, and this, in the clearest terms, is the result:
Looking ahead, May
- May 2024 should be an improvement. Following this weekend's Fall Guy, there’s Planet of the Apes, then IF, then Mad Max Furiosa and Garfield. That’s what a summer lineup looks like — on average, more than one big movie per weekend. The BO will continue to face headwinds, but it should be better than what we just went through.
[*Note: For our box office comparisons, 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 numbers — this is how we like to do it.]