KRAVEN THE HUNTER | THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM openings | Notes on 2024 moviegoing | December 13 to 15, 2024 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: December 13 to 15, 2024
Holdover business from Moana, Wicked and Gladiator continues to carry the box office, in advance of the big openings on Friday (Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Mufasa: The Lion King). This weekend’s two new films are doing relatively little business:
1) Kraven the Hunter opening
- This is a very weak opening for a new superhero film, at well below average levels for the genre. The audience score is flat (a C CinemaScore). Kraven is a spin-off from the Spider-Man story, as was Venom, Morbius and Madame Web. Venom was a hit and grew into a trilogy, while the others flopped.
As the superhero genre has declined over the last five years, Morbius, Madame Web and Kraven have led the race to the bottom. Kraven's budget was downsized according to the realities of the market (the cost was an estimated $110 million), but it's still too high for this kind of result:
- This is the new normal for superhero films. Nothing is working outside of well established stories. Superman and Fantastic Four reboots are due next summer. Please see below for more...
2) The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim opening
- This is a prequel story to the award-winning and enormously successful Lord of the Rings trilogy, which was released in 2001, 2002 and 2003. The filmmaking is Japanese anime and the production was modestly budgeted at an est. $30 million.
For an anime episode like this, the opening is weak. Critics' reviews are mixed and the audience score is good-not-great (a B CinemaScore). The film should play well around the world given its Japanese anime roots and The Lord of the Rings’ success overseas:
3) Notes on 2024 moviegoing
During the year, we’ve written about the changes in the theatrical market as they happened. For convenience, here are the key points, everything altogether all at once...
Half & half. The 2024 box office was healthy for 6 months, and unhealthy for the other half. During the summer and year-end, the big franchise series worked and records were broken. But the first 4 and 1/2 months of the year and the autumn were weak;
With the current year-end rally, 2024 is on track to end down around -22% compared with the pre-pandemic average (2017/2018/2019), and it will land very close to, or even catch 2023’s total. It’s a strong finish to the year, and the momentum will carry into 2025. The dead periods in 2024 left some deep bruises, so we’re going to save the champagne until we’re sure that’s completely behind us, but for now this is an excellent run:
The number of wide releases on 1,000+ screens came back to pre-pandemic levels in 2024, but that's misleading — there was a rush of small movies that opened to less than $3 million domestically. The release schedule was still recovering from the pandemic and labor strikes during 2024, particularly early in the year. We believe it will improve in 2025;
Family movies had a terrific year and are the worldwide BO champ. Again, it was the series (Inside Out, Despicable Me, Kung Fu Panda, Moana, Mufasa and Sonic the Hedgehog). 2025 will have another strong family lineup, with more emphasis on originality (Zootopia and How to Train Your Dragon are the only billion-dollar titles on the calendar);
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 opens next week, the animation/live-action hybrid stars Jim Carrey and Ben Schwartz, with Keanu Reeves this time. #2 finished with $405m worldwide. This is Sonic’s first year-end holiday release date and it will lift its BO way above the previous performance. There were 4 superhero titles in 2024, and there will be 4 in 2025, down from 7 titles per year before the pandemic. Superhero movies are not going away (Deadpool 3 broke records), but 3 fewer titles per year represent a loss of at least -$1 to -$1.5 billion worldwide — it's a significant hole to fill.
There hasn’t been a new character and series that's still alive since 2018 (Black Panther). The floor for anything less than established and extremely compelling has fallen out. That’s the new normal;
Horror movies continue to thrive. In total, 2024 was a fair year for the genre, but the count of horror wide releases rose to 28, which is +33% more than any recent year. 2025 already has 19 titles on the schedule, with a number of big series returning, and it's still early. These movies cost very little to make. They multiply like rabbits — there will be more;
Longlegs finished with approx. $127 million worldwide on an estimated budget of $10 million. New, original stories had an off year, particularly after 2023’s successes (we’re talking about character-driven dramas, romances, comedies, romantic comedies, crime stories, etc.). Only It Ends With Us was a worldwide smash. There were some interesting stories from interesting filmmakers — in their defense, there was good risk-taking — but very little of it connected with audiences;
The streamers' big-budget tent pole experiment is coming to an end. The streamers are successfully contributing to the business of high-quality, Awards-nominated movies. With their reasonable budgets, it doesn't matter where those movies come from or where they're seen — it's good for audiences and good for the industry. But…
The streamers have not been able to produce $200 million-plus projects that make sense creatively and financially at the same time. The streamers are not built to make money with these films theatrically, and if they can’t do that, then $200 to $300 million is too much to spend on two to three hours of streaming programming. It doesn't work structurally, and the experiment appears to be ending. Titles include Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon, the two Knives Out sequels, Wolfs, and Red One, among others;
As far as we're concerned, every year is a good year for Awards movies, including this year. The handicappers say 2024 is a wide open race. As long as there is culture, there will be interesting, challenging, and well-told stories (a good list of this year’s contenders is here).
- In 2025, we're looking for consistency and a handful of surprising original hits.
Our last two posts were:
PUSHPA: THE RULE - PART 2 | Y2K | WEREWOVLES openings | November and year-to-date 2024 box office update | December 6 to 8, 2024 weekend here
MOANA 2 opening | Family genre update | Awards movies overview | November 29 to December 1, 2024 weekend here