ONE PIECE FILM: RED opening | October 2022 and year-to-date moviegoing | November 4 to 6, 2022 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: November 4 to 6, 2022
1) One Piece Film: Red opening
- This is another excellent opening for a Crunchyroll anime film. The weekend figure is slightly above average, and the average is strong. Reviews are superb, as they have been for every Crunchyroll release.
- Audiences for these movies show up fast, and the box office plays out relatively quickly. Foreign business dominates, and not just in Japan where Red was a smash (an eye-popping $117.5m), but also in France ($6.8m), as well as other markets:
- Red is the 15th One Piece Film, but the first to get a wide release in the U.S., another sign of Crunchyroll's growing popularity. Sony-owned Crunchyroll has built an excellent niche business for their unique Japanese anime — it's impressive.
2) October 2022 and year-to-date moviegoing
- In October, the domestic box office was down -43.6% compared with October 2019. Several movies performed well last month — Black Adam ($67m domestic opening), Halloween 13 ($40m), Smile ($22.6m), and Ticket to Paradise ($16.5m) — but not on the level of October 2019's Joker ($96.2m domestic opening), Maleficent 2 ($36.9m), The Addams Family animated ($30.3m), and Zombieland 2 ($26.8m).
- Year-to-date, the 2022 box office is now down -33.9% versus 2019.
In terms of the number of wide releases, there was one more title last month compared with October 2019, 13 versus 12, but like the previous month, there were several smaller films that opened on just over 1,000 screens, which barely qualifies by our definition of wide, but we have to include them (Tár, Call Jane, and Terrifier 2).
The wide release count is now 87 so far in 2022, and it should finish comfortably over 100 wide releases by the end of the year, compared with 138 in 2019, and 152 in 2018. That’s approx. -24% fewer releases in 2022 than in 2019, and -31% fewer than in 2018:
- The explanation for this year’s BO performance is clear: 2022 will finish with 32 franchise series releases, which is roughly half of 2019 (58) and 2018 (62). These films account for over 80% of worldwide business. With the line-up of big movies thinned by the pandemic, business has been volatile and hamstrung all year:
- We estimate there will be 50 series films in 2023, and the line-up is strong: Ant-Man 3, Creed III, Shazam! 2, John Wick 4, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Fast & Furious 11, Little Mermaid live-action, Spider-Verse 2, Transformers 6, Indiana Jones 5, Mission: Impossible 7, Captain Marvel 2, Hunger Games prequel, and Aquaman 2, among others, along with a half-dozen big horror sequels.
- 50 series films next year is, on average, one per weekend, which should help maintain the BO momentum from week to week, without the gaps that we saw this year. There will be challenges — family movies still have question marks — but it will be a major step up. We said that the recovery will be measured in years, not months, and we still believe it will come next year and in 2024.
- Next weekend, business returns to world class form with the opening of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.