DC LEAGUE OF SUPER-PETS opening | VENGEANCE opening | July 2022 box office versus 2019 | The rest of 2022 | July 29 to 31, 2022 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: July 29 to 31, 2022
1) DC League of Super-Pets opening
- This is a moderate opening by animation series standards. The weekend figure is around average, audience and review scores are good, and there will be no new competitive animation entries until October (Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile on Oct 7). Recently, several animation movies have extended their runs to six weeks, generating healthy domestic multiples — they've had legs.
- With the dollar at its strongest level in 20 years, Russia and Ukraine at war, and Chinese censors making access to that market difficult, nearly every release is showing the effects in their international numbers:
2) Vengeance opening
- This is a weak opening for an indie crime thriller, which is a modest genre to begin with. Reviews are very good:
3) July 2022 box office versus 2019
- Domestically, the four weeks of July were down -14.1% compared with July 2019. Combined with June, the two month period was down an excellent -11.5%. (We prefer to compare weeks, rather than complete months, because each month has a different mix of days, which can distort the numbers.)
- The July movies were strong (Thor, Minions, Nope, and Crawdads, plus Top Gun and Elvis holdovers); in fact, July 2022 was running ahead of 2019, but then The Lion King came along and opened to $192 million on the fourth week of the comparison, and that was that.
- Including the slow start in Jan and Feb, the box office is now down -28.9% year-to-date. There were 7 wide releases in July 2022, versus 6 in 2019, which is an outlier. We see fewer wide releases during the next five weeks compared with the same period in 2019 (11 vs. 15). The total movie count is down by -30% so far in 2022, and that is roughly where we expect it to finish at the end of the year, assuming a handful more titles are added to the schedule between now and then:
4) The rest of 2022: August to December
- The rest of 2022 is going to be tough to match 2019, but Hollywood has been beating expectations all summer and most of the spring, from Dr. Strange to Top Gun to Jurassic to Elvis to Minions — it's been very good to see. Avatar 2 and Black Panther 2 lead the line-up, and then as you can see below, it falls off. By comparison, the top movies in the second half of 2019 were strong and deep — Frozen 2, Joker, Star Wars, Jumanji, and Hobbs & Shaw, et al.
- I would not bet against the films this year. Avatar and Black Panther have enormous potential and those two pictures alone could make up a lot of ground. Black Adam and Shazam! 2 will be important, as well. And there are a few significant movies that might still join 2022. Overall, there have been more positive surprises this year than disappointments. The difference is, going forward the big films will come later than they did in 2019, and so August and September are going to dip (note the dates):
- And hey, let's not over-romanticize the good old days. Remember Charlie's Angels ($73m worldwide)? The Goldfinch ($10m)? Stuber ($32.4m)? Uglydolls ($32.5m)? Cats ($74m)? Those were 2019 movies, too. We haven't had nearly that many bombs this year, now that the bombs are sold directly to the streamers.
- There is an additional area that we are watching for the long-term. Soon it will be time to launch a new billion-dollar juggernaut series. We haven't had a giant new superhero series since 2019 (Captain Marvel), or a giant new animation series since 2016 (Secret Life of Pets). It’s been longer than that for action and adventure. The legacy series have been holding up well, but we need new billion-dollar franchises to sustain the business well into the future.
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