SMILE opening | BROS opening | September 2022 and year-to-date moviegoing | September 30 to October 2, 2022 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: Sept 30 to Oct 2, 2022
1) Smile opening
- This is an excellent opening, the kind of horror opening that launches a series. Reviews are very good. Horror movies have lost little, if anything, to the pandemic. Nope ($44.4m domestic opening), The Black Phone ($23.6m), Barbarian ($10.5m), and now Smile — all strong, as well as inexpensive (Smile cost a reported $17m). Young audiences are showing loyalty to the moviegoing experience; they know these movies are enjoyed best in a theater, on the big screen, and with a crowd:
2) BROS opening
- This is a fair opening by mainstream romantic comedy standards. Reviews and audience scores are outstanding. There are no norms for gay film stories because there have been so few of them. Those few that came before generally featured funny gay shtick. BROS’ humor is different — it’s knowing and relatable. That’s a shift and an improvement, a small mark of broader cultural-social maturity.
- Romantic comedies have been under pressure for a number of years: There have been only 40 during the last 10 years (four per year), versus 212 during the 15 years before that (14 per year). But they still work when they're fresh, authentic, and funny, and BROS is all of that. The budget was $22m:
3) September and 2022 year-to-date moviegoing
- In September, the domestic box office was down -54.2% compared with September 2019. This is the second weakest month of the year, slightly better than January.
- Year-to-date, the 2022 box office is now down -32.8% versus 2019.
In terms of the number of wide releases, there were more titles last month compared with September 2019, 11 versus 8, but that is misleading because there were four small films that opened on just over 1,000 screens, which barely qualifies as wide by our definition, but it does qualify (Gigi & Nate, Lifemark, Medieval, Running the Bases).
The wide release count is now 74 so far in 2022, and we still see around 100 wide releases by the end of the year, compared with 138 in 2019, and 152 in 2018. That’s -28% fewer releases in 2022 than in 2019, and -34% fewer than in 2018:
- The original titles in September 2022 were solid, but they could not compete with 2019. This year had Don't Worry Darling ($19.4m domestic opening), The Woman King ($19.1m), and Barbarian ($10.5m), versus It 2 ($91.1m domestic opening), Hustlers ($33.2m), and Downton Abbey 1 ($31.0m) in 2019.
- October business is going to pick up, with Halloween Ends on 10/14, and the Shazam! spin-off Black Adam on 10/21, et al. November (Black Panther 2, Strange World) and December (Avatar 2, Puss in Boots 2) should improve as well.
- The primary hole in the release schedule remains big franchise films. Pre-pandemic, there were approx. 60 franchise releases per year, or more than one per weekend. This year we're going to have 31, or roughly half of normal. We’re in a drought, caused by the pandemic interruption. Big movies take at least 18 to 24 months to plan and produce, and that process was upended during the first 14 months of the pandemic. It will take time to normalize.
- Looking ahead, 2023 currently has 43 franchise movies on the calendar, a significant step up. Moviegoing has shown that it is capable of running at around -10% below 2019 box office levels. To do that on an ongoing basis, we need 50 or more big series films per year: