RED ONE opening | All the small wide releases | November 15 to 17, 2024 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: November 15 to 17, 2024
1) Red One opening
- This is a soft opening for a movie that was designed from the beginning to launch a new Christmas action comedy series. These are big films and the weekend figure is in the average range for the genre and the season. Critics' reviews are weak, but this is a crowd-pleaser and the audience score is what counts — it's excellent (an A- CinemaScore).
Storyline: “Santa Claus has been kidnapped and an elite group of operatives must work together to track him down and bring him back.” But in countries like Italy and Spain, Father Christmas is not the celebrated mythical figure he is elsewhere, and most of Asia isn't Christian. That limits the foreign sell (which started a week ago):
- The production cost was an est. $250 million, including a reported $50 million in cost overruns. That's a lot of money for a Santa Claus story. The opening is not a disaster, but it's not enough against $250m before marketing & distribution. A film like this should not have been made for more than $150m; that's the upper limit for a big Christmas production, and then the numbers work.
We don't see a double standard for streamers and studios. This is a disappointment because the movie was over-budgeted and shot starting in 2022. Amazon, who financed the film, Apple, and Netflix are not in the business of losing money. Their budgets are re-evaluated to align with the current market, along with everyone else's. The entire industry has run into this kind of trouble at one time or another.
2) All the small wide releases
- Below are the wide release counts from 2017 to 2024 (skipping 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic). The figures look healthy in 2024, but note the number of titles opening to less than $3 million over their first weekend. They've jumped significantly:
- These small, under-$3 million openings are coming from:
the platform releases that start on fewer screens and expand to wide over several weeks based on reviews, word-of-mouth, film festivals and Awards — it's a familiar part of the business, and there's no change here;
the outright misses that simply fall short — there will always be a handful of them;
and the small movies that are not expected to do much business but open wide anyway, hoping to generate some box office and elevate the film before moving on to ancillary distribution — these are the films that have multiplied.
- In the current market, these releases are raising a couple of questions: What is the minimum level of theatrical success that helps a picture financially and adds to its stature before ancillary distribution?
And does a passive release in theaters, with as little marketing spending as possible in order to save money, help a movie after it moves on from theaters?
- We are not going to speculate because we don't have the marketing budgets and ancillary income reports for these films. No one does. These movies are particularly non-transparent. But something significant is happening here. Some of these pictures are benefiting from a theatrical release as a "loss-leader," before making money in ancillaries and reaching profitability, while some of them are making very little money in theaters and not recovering after that.
Our last two posts were:
HERETIC | THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER openings | November moviegoing | November 8 to 10, 2024 weekend here
HERE | ABSOLUTION openings | Original non-series films in 2024 | October and year-to-date 2024 box office update | November 1 to 3, 2024 weekend here