Dear Gossips,
It’s the day. Everything is fine. I am the dog drinking coffee amidst the five-alarm fire. Everything is fine. Anyway!
Yesterday, I mentionedWicked and Gladiator II are on their respective press tours, ahead of their shared November 22 release date. While the studio machine tried to make a Barbenheimer-style situation happen, it didn’t catch on culturally, but it IS catching on financially. That November 22 weekend is shaping up to be a big one at the box office thanks to the shared release date, and when you add in Moana 2 releasing on November 27, the US Thanksgiving box office is looking healthy. Good! We need it!
Summer got off to a slow start, then it perked up with movies like Deadpool & Wolverine, Inside Out 2, and Twisters, but then it fell off again, and autumn has been slow, despite a strong showing by Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ($484 million worldwide). It’s what I’ve been saying all year—we don’t have any consistency at the box office. Yes, some movies are hitting big, people are willing to go to theaters, but overall, the box office is still down 11% from last year, and almost 27% from 2019, meaning we still haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels (and may never, face facts).
So yes, we need a big event weekend, and we need a big holiday weekend. Wicked is currently tracking for an $80-85 million opening weekend, with Gladiator II projected at $55-65 million. Adding to that is Moana 2 opening the next week, which is projected to earn around $100 million over the five-day Thanksgiving frame. These numbers look low to me—especially Wicked, which is crushing pre-sales—but I know everyone is hedging their bets because of the election. Depending on the outcome, people might be depressed and not want to go to the movies.
Still, Wicked looks like a billion-dollar movie. As exhausted as we are of Wicked—and we’re nowhere near done, with part two coming next year—for the sake of US cinemas, we need it to put butts in seats. Wicked is like the Democratic Party of film, it’s deeply compromised, exhausting, and we’re all a little annoyed at it, but it’s better than the alternative. And Gladiator II could be a movie that sticks around and plays strong into December based on positive word of mouth.
I expect the Wickediator weekend to go something like this: Wicked opens big, but Gladiator II opens strong, too, especially if it gets a “sold out bounce” as people are turned away from Wicked screenings and decide to go see Gladiator instead, which is what happened to Oppenheimer last year. Both movies will continue to play strong into December, especially since there isn’t a unifying holiday release like Avatar or Spider-Man to dominate the December box office (the closest is probably Mufasa, but at this point, I don’t think the live-action Disney remakes appeal beyond the Disney faithful). We’ll end the year on a whimper, though, without a new all-ages blockbuster to carry December (unless Mufasa shocks us all). And then we’ll start the new year with everyone wondering what’s wrong with the box office and the answer will still and always be: over-relying on blockbusters is slowly killing us, please bring back the mid-budget movie.
Live long and gossip,
Sarah
Attached: Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande at a photocall for the Australian Premiere of 'Wicked' earlier today in Sydney, Australia.
