Each week Jacob recaps the weekend box office and the winners and losers in the Midnight Warrior Fantasy Movie League.
WEEK 13 BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN
So Week 13 ended up having a simple solution: 3 screens of Doctor Strange and 5 screens of Arrival. In retrospect, this should have been a pretty obvious choice. Arrival is showing it’s legs and still getting great word of mouth, even if I didn’t think it was all it could have been. Doctor Strange is staying relatively strong even though Fantastic Beasts should be eating into its numbers. Hacksaw Ridge is still outperforming estimates, but just not enough to justify being in any good box offices for last week. I think it will be out of Perfect Cineplex contention for a little while until its Oscar Buzz heats back up.
Another interesting number to look at this weekend is Almost Christmas‘s strong $5.7 million dollar gross. It has been rising in $ per bux over the last few weeks and may continue to outperform as we all get farther into Christmas mode. If you’re not the type who wants to see Bad Santa 2, this will be the movie for you, and judging by the number of bad reviews for the sequel, there’s going to be a whole lot who fit that type.
In the climactic finish to our Midnight Warrior league, perpetual winner Film School Dropout nailed the perfect cineplex for two weeks running, securing the spot for number one overall in our league. If she keeps up this kind of performance, we may be tracking her progress on the overall progress board next season. I haven’t ruled out that she is a time traveler or is paying some of these movies to take a dive.
Rounding out the top 5 for the season were School of Rock, This Cineplex Kills Fascists (me), Movies Suck, and Tell Mr. Royal This is the Pagoda (Chris). So that goes to show that our listeners are, for the most part, better than us at predicting the whims of the American people. We would just stick to talking about the movies themselves if this game weren’t so darned addicting.
AWARDS SEASON – WEEK 01 PREDICTIONS
Lord, have mercy on us this week. Awards season is upon us, and with it comes the difficult task of picking what the dropoffs on these films will look like after a 5 day weekend for most of them. I’ll give you a little hint: these movies are going to fall flat. How can you compete with a long weekend where everybody had time to see any movie they wanted? No, we’re looking at a cold weekend where, if you do go out for a movie instead of just Christmas shopping, you’re probably going to be seeing your second or third choice.
I’m going totally off the wall for my prediction this week. This is more of a discussion than a pure recommendation. What if Fantastic Beasts only falls 50% this week? That would land it at about $22 million. Let’s say Moana underperforms and lands at $24 million. This is a little unlikely, but not impossible. Then, what if Moonlight takes it’s ever growing list of award wins and nominations and does a measly $1 million in box office gross. Then you’d be looking at a perfect cineplex that looked a lot like…
Since I’m publishing late this week, I’m going with this long shot prediction instead of the much safer plays described by FMLNerd. If you want to start the season off on a strong foot, take his advice. Next week I’ll be back to real world recommendations, but if you want my last minute prediction for this week, follow me @jakerg23!