REAGAN | AFRAID openings | August and year-to-date 2024 box office | August 30 to September 1, 2024 (Labor Day weekend)
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: August 30 to September 1, 2024 (Labor Day weekend)
1) Reagan opening
- This is a good domestic opening for a political biography, at above average levels for the genre. The film is a fawning profile of Ronald Reagan, timed for the American election. The est. cost was expensive: $25 million. Critics' reviews are poor, but the audience score is excellent (an A CinemaScore).
Political biographies that do business overseas rise above partisan politics by telling complicated personal stories with relatable human themes, and they get help from elite actors (Lincoln, The Iron Lady/Margaret Thatcher). That’s not happening here:
2) AfrAId opening
- This is a weak opening for a single-episode horror film, and for Blumhouse Productions, who have a remarkable track-record, it's well below average. The audience score is flat (a C+ CinemaScore).
Labor Day is always a quiet weekend for new releases. Even with relatively little competition, the movie isn't getting traction:
- As usual, Blumhouse made the film on a reasonable budget — an est. $12 million. The picture should recoup its costs in foreign and ancillary markets.
3) August and year-to-date 2024 box office
- August was an excellent month at the domestic box office, finishing up +13.2% compared with the pre-pandemic average (the average of August 2017/2018/2019), and up +13.9% compared with August 2023.
August had two openers that played especially well for late summer: It Ends With Us and Alien: Romulus, both approx. $275m worldwide to date and still playing. Those are outstanding numbers this deep into summer. And there were four strong holdovers: Deadpool 3, Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4 and Twisters. The lineup had something for every key audience segment and demographic:
- Year-to-date, the BO is now down -26.9% compared with pre-pandemic, and -15.1% compared with last year. Bear in mind that last August included much of Barbie, Oppenheimer and Sound of Freedom's record-breaking run. This August was broader and deeper and had its own record-breakers. Last year was more original.
- We're still climbing out of the January-to-May hole left by the pandemic and labor strikes. There's more climbing to do, but...
During the last 10 weeks, moviegoing has looked very healthy, with strong momentum from one release to the next over a sustained period. Business can turn up or down quickly, as it did when this run started. The hot streak is bound to cool off at some point — we’ll see.
Looking ahead, September
- Historically, the August-September-October period is the slowest of the year, and that's not going to change. But Septembers have their hits (It 1 & 2, Kingsman 2, The Nun, Downton Abbey, Hustlers, et al.).
This September looks solid, with Beetlejuice 2 next weekend, plus the Transformers animation pic, Blumhouse's Speak No Evil, several smaller horror films, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and an election-timed political sequel in the faith-based God's Not Dead series, subtitled In God We Trust.
- In the medium and long term, the release schedule continues to improve. We now count 55 franchise series titles in 2024, compared with 60 in a normal year (a little more than one per weekend). That's not bad, and the schedule ahead is loaded:
Joker: Folie à Deux (Oct 4), Smile 2 (Oct 18), Venom 3 (Oct 25), Wicked Part 1 (Nov 22), Gladiator 2 (Nov 22), Moana 2 (Nov 27), Lord of the Rings/anime (Dec 13), Mufasa (Dec 20), and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (Dec 20).
[Note: For our monthly BO calculations, we take the complete weeks of each month (each week runs Friday to Thursday) and we line up the same weeks across the years, so we are comparing the same days/same weeks/same day-mix, like apples-to-apples. There are different ways to do this and you might see slightly different industry figures — this is how we like to do it.]