TRAP | HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON openings | July and year-to-date 2024 box office | August 2 to 4, 2024 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: August 2 to 4, 2024
1) Trap opening
- This is a soft opening for an M. Night Shyamalan suspense crime thriller. The writer/director’s movies out-earn other original thrillers by a wide margin, and that's true here, but this start is not on the level of recent Shyamalan films.
Critics' reviews and audience scores are lukewarm (a C+ CinemaScore). Overseas business has been good-not-great for Mr. Shyamalan, and for the genre. At an estimated cost of $35 million, Trap will need strong ancillary business to break even:
2) Harold and the Purple Crayon opening
- This is a weak opening for a live-action family release. Reviews are negative, but the audience score, from kids and families, is very good (an A- CinemaScore). Historically, overseas business for live-action family pics is just fair.
Children's books are frequent source material for these stories. At the BO, family movies based on books perform similarly to original material, not better or worse. However, book-based stories are better reviewed by critics, and that can help later in ancillary markets:
3) July and year-to-date 2024 box office
- July was an excellent month at the box office. After a difficult first half of the year, the release schedule filled up and July 2024 finished just below the pre-pandemic average (the average of July 2017/2018/2019).
Compared with last year, July was down -9.6% because July 2023 included Barbie and Oppenheimer, plus Indiana Jones and Sound of Freedom. But each year has its bursts. We're more interested in the 3-year pre-pandemic average, and on that score, July was excellent:
- July had four big summer titles: Deadpool & Wolverine ($800m worldwide and far from done), Despicable Me 4 ($725m-plus), Twisters ($280m, with more room to run), and A Quiet Place (winding down with an est. $270m). And holding over in July, Inside Out 2 is now the #1 all-time biggest animated movie at $1.56 billion-plus. Fantastic numbers.
Pre-pandemic Julys had Lion King/live-action ($1.66 billion worldwide), two Spider-Mans (Far From Home $1.13b, and Homecoming $880m), and a Mission: Impossible ($791m). Giant movies, but this July had its own giants.
Twisters, $280m worldwide to date and still playing strongly — domestically
- Year-to-date, the BO is now down -31.2%. The first part of the year dug a hole and there’s more business to recover. But looking back at January-through-May, that period should turn out to be the bottom of the cycle. That is when the delayed effects of the pandemic and labor strikes hit the hardest.
Looking ahead, August
- August moviegoing is going to slow now, as summer and school holidays end. Among the new August titles, the Alien series returns with Romulus on Aug 16. Until then, Deadpool is going to lead the market.
The rest of the August lineup is mostly genre pics. It Ends with Us is a strong romantic melodrama. Borderlands is an outlier, a sci-fi/action adventure/comedy hybrid based on a video game, starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jack Black.
- Overall, the release schedule is showing marked improvement now. A normal year has 60 franchise series films on the calendar — a little more than one per weekend — and we're close to that. Currently there are 53 series titles, with the strongest pictures dated from June to December (an overview is here).
Beetlejuice 2 will pick up the momentum on Sep 6, followed by Transformers One/animation (Sep 20), Joker: Folie à Deux (Oct 4), Smile 2 (Oct 18), and Venom 3 (Oct 25). After that, Thanksgiving and the year-end holidays look very strong.
Joker: Folie à Deux, October 4
[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.]