STRANGE WORLD opening | Family moviegoing | DEVOTION opening | BONES & ALL opening | GLASS ONION and THE FABELMANS releases | November 23 to 27, 2022 Thanksgiving weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: November 23 to 27, 2022 Thanksgiving weekend
1) Strange World opening
- This is a weak opening by Disney animation standards. The 3-day weekend figure is below average for a Disney original single-episode film, and it's not in the league of a big series launch. Reviews are good-not-great. At a cost of $180m plus marketing expenses, the film will finish in the red, even with good ancillary income.
- Strange World is a creative departure for Disney — an action adventure told from the point of view of an earnest, realistic family, unlike the studio’s classic fairy tales or Pixar’s hyper-realistic fantasy comedy-dramas. It's a smaller story and Disney hasn't done many of these theatrically:
- Strange World is bypassing a number of countries where censors demanded story cuts because of a same-sex relationship, and international numbers are going to be affected. To Disney's credit, the studio decided to forego releasing in those markets, rather than cut the film.
2) Family moviegoing
- The family movie business is at a crossroads. Many of the animation and live-action series that were so successful during the 2000s are finished or are deep into their series now — The Lion King, Frozen, Beauty and the Beast, Incredibles, Minions, Toy Story, Despicable Me, Shrek, Ice Age, Wreck-It-Ralph, Hotel Transylvania, LEGO, Sonic, Trolls, et al. Disney continues to lead family moviegoing, but every studio has made a major contribution:
- Next year has a Disney live-action The Little Mermaid, and 2024 has a Disney live-action Snow White. There will be strong titles from DreamWorks (Kung Fu Panda 4), Warner Bros. (Willy Wonka, Toto), Sony (Spider-Verse 2 and 3), and Paramount (Sonic). Right now, next year’s total family lineup has half the number of releases that 2019 had (a couple more titles might arrive during the year).
- The early 2000s has been a Golden Age of family moviegoing. 2019 was the pinnacle; family films accounted for a remarkable 32% of Hollywood’s worldwide BO during that year. We may never see a lineup like that again (The Lion King $1.66b worldwide/Disney, Frozen 2 $1.45b/Disney, Toy Story 4 $1.07b/Disney, Aladdin $1.05b/Disney, How to Train Your Dragon 3 $522m/DreamWorks, Maleficent 3 $492m/Disney, Pokémon 4 $433m/Universal, and Secret Life of Pets 2 $430m/Illumination).
- Family moviegoing is a cornerstone of the business. While superheroes look poised to have a strong year in 2023, over time family films will need new energy and reinvention to recapture the imagination. It's been done before and it will happen again. Recently, animation/live action hybrids have shown good potential.
3) Devotion opening
- This is a weak opening for a war action movie. Reviews are very good. War action movies are big, expensive productions — this one cost an estimated $90m:
4) Bones & All opening
- This is a weak opening for an original horror movie. Reviews are excellent:
5) Glass Onion and The Fabelmans releases
- Estimates are that Glass Onion, the sequel to Knives Out, made $9.0m on 696 screens over the last three days. It’s a terrific result. Considering that wide releases make most of their money from their top 1,000 screens, it doesn’t change our estimate that with a strong marketing campaign and a big wide release, the sequel would have opened in the low $30ms domestically and made $300m worldwide.
That kind of business would have benefited the film and the streamer, but Netflix cannot do a wide release — they do not have the infrastructure for it. They have considered it and they do not want to do it. Disney+ has Disney, HBO has Warner Bros., Paramount+ has Paramount, Peacock has Universal, and Amazon has MGM/UA, but Netflix chooses not to be in the wide release theatrical business. That’s how it is and it’s not going to change. (Last week we ran Glass Onion numbers here.)
- We’ll catch up with The Fabelmans when it goes all-the-way-wide soon.