TRANSFORMERS ONE | NEVER LET GO | THE SUBSTANCE openings | Where we are now | September 20 to 22, 2024 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: September 20 to 22, 2024
1) Transformers One opening
- This is a lukewarm opening for an animation adaptation in a live-action series. There aren't many series that go from live-action to animation, but we have a few, and this weekend’s start is roughly average.
Critics’ reviews and audience scores are outstanding (an A CinemaScore). Overseas business should be solid as the film rolls out over the next month:
- Into the Spider-Verse broke ground in 2018 as an animation spin-off from Spider-Man. That opening, and this weekend, lost more than half their live-action audiences at the time. Spider-Verse then had a terrific run based on sensational reviews and word-of-mouth. Transformers is set up for a good run now.
Industry expectations are high for a big series like this, but an animation adaptation is not going to hold all or even most its live-action audience — it's too big a shift.
The contrast between animation and live-action does some very good things — it invigorates a story line with new ideas, energy, and dimension. But it's not a seamless change from an audience point of view.
2) Never Let Go opening
- This is a weak opening for a single-episode horror movie. The weekend figure is below average for the genre. Critics' reviews and audience scores are soft (a C+ CinemaScore).
The production budget was $20 million — not a lot of money, but it doesn't appear that the film will cover its costs:
3) The Substance opening
- This is a fair opening for an indie horror pic. The weekend start is somewhat below average, with excellent critics' reviews and a very good audience score (a B CinemaScore). This is the first theatrical release from distributor/streamer MUBI:
- Most body-horror stories involve an outside force invading and threatening the body: the exorcism movies, The Possession, Annihilation, The Possession of Hannah Grace, Malignant.
Here the body damage is self-motivated and self-inflicted. The central character wants to be a better person. That's human and relatable, and it makes for a disturbing horror story, but it's not as shocking as evil forces wreaking havoc — that kind of shock value goes a long way with this genre.
4) Where we are now
- Next week we'll have September box office numbers for the 4-week period. The market is cooling, especially this weekend. Beetlejuice is doing very well, but this month’s other wide releases are opening at the low end of, or below, expectations.
September is the slowest month of the year, so we don’t expect the kind of BO figures we saw during the summer. It looks like September will be down around -12% compared with pre-pandemic business levels. It's way ahead of 2023, and it's not bad, but again, it's slowing.
Joker: Folie à Deux opens October 4. That film will tell us a lot about how business is going to hold during this stretch between summer and the Thanksgiving and year-end holidays.
The Wild Robot, September 27, currently with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score from 35 early reviews
