ST The Last Jedi Box Office Discussion (see warning on page 307 before posting)

Is It just me or did movies used to have longer theater runs?

TLJ Is actually still playing at my Regal down here in Port Charlotte Florida It Is even playing next week. It only has 4 showings a day and it is In the smallest Auditorium at our theater.

 

Yes. All these massive OW things didn't really start happening until the internet took off and studios were able to start promoting their movies a lot easier. Before movies usually had a slow build and how good the movie was was generally spread by word of mouth.

 

These big entertainment houses prefer a front loaded film. It's more money in their pockets. The major blockbusters are marketed today to get as many butts in the seats during the OW, and the next week or two.

Fans and film pundits are the ones who hang around waxing nostalgic about the days when big films ran for half a year, and longer, pontificating over "legs". Exhibitors love leggy films; more cash in their pockets for longer toothed films, and more popcorn and soda sales.

But studios even cut leggy films off at the shins with digital/home media release dates that absolutely prevent those films from going even further. This is, of course, for myriad reasons, but the bottom line remains the same: studios aren't the ones invested in ultra leggy pictures.

If a major film somehow managed to open world wide at 1.5 billion dollars OW, the studio that produced it would never lament it facing a steep drop off the following weekend and a piss poor multiplier.

 

This is true. Studios keep the highest % of the gross in the first 10 days of the release. After that, theaters get a bigger cut which is why they love legs while studios prefer the opening weekend.

Moreover, when it comes to foreign markets, China mega grosses look good on paper, and fans like to use them in boxoffice wars, but studios prefer traditional markets such as Europe, Australia and Japan because they keep bigger %. They don't keep much from China, Russia and other expanded markets. So while Fate of the Furious's 1B overseas gross looks better than TLJ's 700M in raw numbers, TLJ likely ended up more profitable because Disney kept more from UK, Europe, Oz, Japan than Universal did from China and Latin America:

Fate of the Furious # vs TLJ # from some major traditional markets:

Oz: 21.4M vs 45.7M
France: 29.8M vs 64.7M
Germany: 32.4M vs 82.1M
Japan: 35.6M vs 64M
UK: 37.5M vs 110.7M

Full numbers:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&id=furious8.htm
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&id=starwars8.htm

 

This is so true. Disney should or could try to get TFA over a billion dollars in the domestic box office, but, so far nothing. I'm hoping they release the OT and PT movies in the theaters once the deal with Fox is done. I heard that the 3-D versions of AOTC and ROTS were complete along with ANH. Would be great but who knows.....Disney is Disney

 

There are way more screens these days than back decades ago. If I want to go to a big movie its first week out, there is basically a screening every 15 minutes I can go to. I remember long lines and not being able to get into several films back as a kid.

Weekend estimate according to Box Office Pro: $1,300,000
Comparative:
Force Awakens: $6,159,276
Rogue One: $1,495,988

 

Bowen, please try not to use the term 'true fan'. I understand that your use of the term was innocent enough, but it's a contentious phrase, and might be taken the wrong way. Thanks.

 

could also be the age of Blu-ray and getting it to the consumer at home.

 

After 620M USD DOM? I think both are happy enough.

 

Disney gains nothing by trying to push longer theatrical runs.

Fans are the ones who are concerned about these arbitrary milestones.

 

This. So much this. Also, whether a movie is a boxoffice disappointment is often judged by the same fandom criteria which may not be the studio criteria of success or failure. Unless someone works for the studio and knows exactly how they see TLJ boxoffice run, we can only guess and most of those guesses are made through fandom goggles and whether one liked the movie or not.

Point is, there has never been another movie following up a 900M grosser. So all boxoffice predictions and assumptions were based on how follow-ups to a 600M grosser (Age of Ultron) and 500M grosser (The Dark Knight Rises) did and that was applied to TLJ as a standard for success or failure. Which is extremely imprecise.

TLJ did exactly what every other second movie in a SW trilogy had done - it dropped from the first movie. So based on how the third movies behaved in the past, IX is expected to go up but not enough to match TFA. However, I wouldn't be surprised if IX dropped from TLJ simply because it's very tough to match 600M. The bigger the previous movies, the tougher it's for the next one to keep the pace. It's something that affects both generally liked movies and divisive ones.

 

Box office Pro latest weekend box office estimate:
STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI $1.25M Weekend (Est.) 830 Screens / $1,515 Avg. Weekend 9 / -46.1% Change

 

Cineworld in the UK only has one other cinema outside of London still showing the film this coming week. My local one, Sheffield, was only showing one daily showing the previous few weeks.

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Black Panther tickets booked! This Tuesday. Bring it!

I reckon 140 opening weekend? US.

Here in the UK it’s not really a thing, opening weekend.


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No problem, sorry about that, I was just meaning all of us die hards on the forum as opposed to like my best friend who asked why K2SO wasn’t in TLJ LOL.

To an above poster, that’s correct there are 3D versions of AOTC and ROTS. Many of us saw them in fact at Star Wars Celebration!! ROTS looked absolutely amazing in 3D. I know the conversion of TPM was a bit on the meh side (I was ok with it but it wasn’t great) but ROTS was one of the best I’ve see. It was pretty spectacular. Sure would like that at home one day.

Yeah movies today just don’t hang around that long I’m bummed TLJ is almost gone already it seems like it opened not that long ago but that’s more and more the market. Bring on Solo I guess.

 

I actually really liked TPM in 3d. I think it made Jar Jar and the Droids look like they were actually on set. Also the pod race in 3d on the big screen was amazing.

Shame i never got to see ROTS or AOTC in 3d.

 

The pod race in 3D was amazing. Yeah I’m not ragging on it, but there were people who did and there’s also for me a bit of a feeling like the 3D was turned low, if that makes sense. It wasn’t THAT 3D and I like my 3D to pop more so I wasn’t as big of a fan but that being said I’d still probably chew off my left arm for a home 3D copy I love watching movies in 3D at home, my system looks great for it!

 

Ugh. I woulda killed to see that.

I mean it feels that way, but it opened nearly 2 months ago. That's a good amount of time. Is it totally gone from your area? It's still playing at quite a few theaters here.

Beside the Oscar noms that were re-released or widened, the only November/December releases still playing wide here are Coco, TLJ, Jumanji and The Greatest Showman. Everything else is long gone.

 

Yeah but I remember back in the day big movies played for 4-6 months at many theaters It’s still playing here, barely. Holding on by a thread. It has a half screen at 4 of the 5 theaters near me and the 5th one it has a full screen still but that theater sucks. It’s this “premium” advertised chain but their projection and sound is the worst I’ve ever seen including dollar theaters. It’s amazing you can’t be sued for advertising a premium experience when your quality is the McDonalds of moviegoing. And yet tons of people I know simply don’t know better and they’re like “Oooo big movie coming out, we’ll have to see that at Cinetopia!” Uhh... why?! Lol I could barely make out the dialogue when I saw TFA there, and the 3D projection was so dark I may as well have been blind. That’s also not to mention the ripped up theater seats. It makes me disappointed in humanity that if you just TELL them “it’s great” they ignore their own senses and believe advertising over literally what’s right in front of them!

I’m going to see TLJ tonight for the 29th time. I’m gone to Vegas to see my Golden Knights hockey team this week so I have to hope TLJ is playing somewhere next weekend to sneak in the big 3-0!

 

It still amazes me that you've seen TLJ more in one theatrical run than I have any Star Wars film in my entire life, save ROTJ.

 

Disney now is trying to focus on DVD/BR sales.
TFA sales in US only was >180 mln $ https://www.the-numbers.com/weekly-video-sales-chart so its more important to get about 100-120 mln in that way then trying to reach some 1-3 mln more from theatrical run

 

Just saw the Greatest Showman yesterday and now I understand the great WOM this movie has. I know this is kind of comparing oranges and apples but The Greatest Showman shows how a movie operates on good word of mouth and your audience likes the film. It tomato meter is the opposite of TLJ, TGS has 55% from critics and 89% from audiences, ( I think this renders w.o.m. and social media as powerful as critics) Why the emphasis by big studios on front loading film releases? Because you are selling a film based on expectation, nostalgia etc. and front loading proofs your gross against bad word of mouth or bad critic reviews. Front loading does not require that you make a movie that people like "in general" Wait throw in "you don't want to be spoiled for the big reveal bait" and bam! OW box office gold.

After 6 weeks in release TGS takes number 1 at the UK box office
https://www.theguardian.com/film/fi...-box-office-the-greatest-showman-hugh-jackman
From the Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/enterta...shing-success-of-the-greatest-showman/551081/
"Now, it’s one of the largest word-of-mouth hits in Hollywood history. So what happened?

When The Greatest Showman opened in theaters on December 20, it looked dead on arrival, making only $8.8 million that weekend. But the following weekend it made $15 million, almost twice as much. That’s largely unheard of in contemporary Hollywood, where big studios films are front-loaded (opened on a massive number of screens) and the first weekend is king. The holiday season does offer a little more breathing room for movies as families have the downtime to go to the theater, but even by those standards—by any standards for a wide release, in fact—The Greatest Showman is unique.

In industry parlance, the easiest way to judge a film’s word-of-mouth is by its “multiplier,” an essential measurement of how well a release holds after its opening weekend. To get a movie’s multiplier, you simply divide its box-office totals by the amount it made in its first weekend.

A solid multiplier for a film that opens wide is around 3: Beauty and the Beast, one of 2017’s biggest hits, opened to $174 million and made $504 million over its entire run, or 2.9 times as much. A very good multiplier for a blockbuster is 4 (in 2017, Wonder Woman and Coco are good examples), which indicates an extremely positive audience reaction and a lot of return viewings.

As of now, The Greatest Showman’s multiplier is an astonishing 12.8. And it’s only going to rise; the film is still playing on 2,800 screens and its studio, Fox, is now promoting “singalong” screenings with subtitles for the musical numbers


Someone remind me what TLJ's final multiplier was... I know that it had a 2.6x on this from everyone's fave Scott Mendelsohn,
That’s a domestic weekend-to-total multiplier of 2.6x, compared to the 3.27x multiplier for The Force Awakens and 2.88x multiplier for Rogue One.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottm...y-become-leggier-than-rogue-one/#634a45717f0e

 

The Greatest Showman isn't a sequel to a mega-blockbuster, so of course it's not frontloaded. I don't know why this should be surprising. It's a slowburn midbudget film playing to an audience that aren't going to be queuing up on OW.

Edit: I will say that TGS does have strong WOM--the amount of its gross due to noise (i.e. artificial inflation, e.g. holidays) is only around 11%, compared with 13% for Wonder Woman, Jumanji or TLJ. But all four are on the low-end compared with something like BvS at 25%.

 

The point was not about franchises, sequels or about blockbusters but the mechanics of w.o.m and social media on box office performance and what a multiplier from a well liked movie looks like... see Coco and Wonder Woman's multiplier

By the way The Atlantic article on TGS is really enlightening to Hollywood execs

expectations overall of multipliers whether they are blockbusters or not. The execs know the numbers better than anyone.

EDIT again reading the article about TGS's legs would be helpful, it is not done with it's box office run so we don't have the final numbers on it's box office gross, however, TLJ only hangs with WW & J2 based off OW, not whether it is "well received " by the audience the way WW & J2 and TGS were

 

@Jedha Your multiple numbers are also way off for every Star Wars film, not sure how you came up with that lol. TFA was 3.78 and Rogue One was 3.43, your numbers are a half point low which is a ton of money low. And no TLJ isn’t 2.6 it’ll finish around 2.8.

A movie like TFA couldn’t have a multiple above where it landed, basically. That’s as much as you’ll ever see for an opener so high. It’s very easy for a movie that bombed opening weekend to achieve a higher multiple than a mega-blockbuster ever will.

I’ve heard from several people that Greatest Showman was garbage. My best friend said it was fine and he liked it ok, but nothing special. Several others said do not see, avoid! So I think it found its audience but that audience wasn’t me and apparently wasn’t anyone I know as I have heard very little about it without checking box office sites. My best friend is the only person who told me his opinion in person the others were on FB so that’s how few people I know who saw it lol