FANTASTIC BEASTS 3 opening | FATHER STU opening | Moviegoing in China, Russia, Ukraine | April 15 to 17, 2022 (Easter Weekend)
Opening weekend box office numbers, charts and commentary
The current weekend: April 15 to 17, 2022 (Easter Weekend)
1) Fantastic Beasts 3: The Secrets of Dumbledore opening
- This is a fair domestic opening, down an est. -29% from the previous film's first weekend, and roughly average for a 3rd episode action adventure. Fantastic Beasts was never going to maintain Harry Potter’s success — that was a once-in-a-generation phenomenon. However, the series remains strong overseas, in spite of softness in China and no business in Russia and Ukraine, where Fantastic Beasts 2 made $26.7m in the two warring countries (see below).
- Some action adventure series finish as trilogies (Lord of the Rings, Hobbit, Narnia), but more than half continue beyond three episodes (Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones is trying). It's not easy keeping these stories original and exciting, episode after episode. Harry Potter did it with brilliant new characters woven into the narrative to carry it forward. This domestic opening is below average for a more-than-three-episode series, but it’s well above average for international:
2) Father Stu opening
- This is a weak 3-day opening for a Christian sports biography. The lead actor is A+, but he’s not elevating the material here. There have been break-out hits among Christian dramas and sports biographies, but generally these movies play in a tight, modest range. Their strength is that when they connect, they can go for a long run, and perhaps Father Stu will do that. Audience scores are strong, although critics reviews are not. These movies make little money overseas — each country has its own sports and religious culture:
3) China, Russia, Ukraine
- With the world in geopolitical conflict, here are the most immediate and pressing challenges for the theatrical business:
China. In the short term, China continues to struggle badly with the pandemic. Their vaccines are less effective than the West's (52% effective, versus 93% and 88% for Moderna and Pfizer — Reuters & CDCP), and the country quickly goes into lock-down when Covid spreads. Today key parts of China are closed, including large sub-markets of moviegoing. The Chinese box office is anemic, at best.
But the long term picture is more serious than that. China blocks any movie that does not support its authoritarian, cultural and political ideals. What they did to Marvel during the last year, for one political reason or another, was ruthless. With improvement in its own movie production quality, China is distancing itself from Western film entertainment.
Several years ago, China’s theatrical market was on a trajectory to quickly surpass the U.S.’s, and there was hope that with that success, the government would relax the number of Western films annually permitted for release, opening the door to untold riches. That dream is over.
Here is the kind of money involved: In recent years, Avengers: Endgame made $629m in China; Fate of the Furious made $393m; Transformers 4 made $301m; Aquaman made $292m. Even with the distributors' reduced share of the box office, that's good money. Today, The Batman is finishing with $21m, versus Batman v Superman's $95.8m in 2016. And Fantastic Beast 3 just opened to $10m, after the previous film finished with $57.3m in 2018. It's hard to imagine a return to the good days.
Russia and Ukraine. As noted, in 2019 Russia was the #9 ranking international theatrical market at around $900m, and Ukraine was approx. 10% of that. Together, they may have been only 2.3% of the worldwide box office, but who wants to let go of a billion dollars of business? Needless to say, with the nightmare happening there now, that money isn't coming back soon.
Globalization has been very good for the entertainment industry — we are an export business — and there are international markets that are still developing and growing, such as Indonesia, Eastern Europe, and parts of the Middle East. But globalization is coming to an end as we know it, for many industries. Our Western, liberal storytelling tradition is embraced by most audiences, but it is a threat to some of the biggest governments.