NIGHT SWIM opening | Horror movies update | Notes on the 2024 lineup | January 5 to 7, 2024 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: January 5 to 7, 2024
1) Night Swim opening
- This is a fair opening by Blumhouse’s own impressive standard for launching a new horror series. As a Blumhouse single episode release and not the start of a new series, the opening is just above average, pending final numbers.
Critics' reviews and audience scores are weak (a C CinemaScore), but that's not uncommon for the genre. The production cost was a modest $15m — Blumhouse is always disciplined with their budgets — so Night Swim should be profitable after it finishes in all markets:
2) Horror movies update
- Horror movies had a good year in 2023, with little sign of a pandemic hangover. There were 19 wide releases that generated $2 billion in worldwide box office, led by Five Nights at Freddy's ($289.4m worldwide/Blumhouse), The Nun 2 ($268.1m), Insidious: The Red Door ($189.1m/Blumhouse), M3gan ($180m/Blumhouse), and Scream VI ($169m).
2024 should generate similar total BO. There are 17 horror pics currently scheduled, but it's early and that number should grow during the year. These low-budget projects can come quickly out of nowhere. With other genres not fully recovered, horror movies now represent approx. 10% of Hollywood’s worldwide BO:
3) The 2024 lineup and notes
- Below are the current 2024 film counts for wide releases on 1,000+ domestic screens. We already have 49 franchise series releases on the calendar — that's a good number — and there will be a handful more when we get to the sleepers that do unexpected, great business and generate a sequel.
The count of original, non-series wide pictures is low right now, but again, it's early. The number will increase during the year and should end up similar to last year. During the last several years, the original film counts are down approx. -15% from pre-pandemic levels:
- Last week we made some overall observations about changing tastes. In terms of the lineup going forward —
The 1st quarter is going to be slow. Mean Girls (Jan 12), Argylle (Feb 2), Madame Web/Marvel (Feb 14), and Dune 2 (Mar 1) are important titles, along with a number of solid genre pics, but the schedule has holes;
Disney will release three Pixar films that did not get proper wide releases during the pandemic (Soul next weekend, Turning Red on Feb 9, and Luca on Mar 22). Even if business is not big, any association the audience makes between these well-liked titles and the big screen is going to be good for the brand (all three have 90+ Rotten Tomatoes scores).
White Bird: A Wonder Story on October 4, 2024
- The schedule strengthens as the year progresses and fills in, but in the end the success of 2024 will depend on whether we have one or two break-through movies, like we had last summer. It’s not possible to predict. Some people say they saw Barbie and Oppenheimer coming, but nobody saw what was about to happen.
Four to six weeks before Barbie opened, the collective wisdom in the industry was that the film had a shot at opening to $50 million domestically. During the week before opening, the number rose to $75 million. The final number was $162 million. 2024 will need a performance like that (or like Top Gun: Maverick in 2022) to keep up.