If you walked into a movie theater this afternoon for a matinee, you might find that you’re the only one there. That’s how low matinees are right now. Any moviegoing activity will register tonight, so what we’re seeing now, especially with Sony/Screen Gems/Studio 6’s late night horror draw Don’t Breathe, could go higher than its current $13.5M four-day holiday forecast in 3,501 locations. The Fede Alvarez movie’s three-day is on course for $11M, -58%.
The new stuff is currently looking worse than forecasted with Disney’s final DreamWorks title, The Light Between Oceans hardly shining at 1,500 theaters with a $4.2M three-day and $5.2M four-day.
20th Century Fox’s Morgan at 2,200 locations looking at $2.4M over three days and $3M over four. That’s according to industry estimates, and it really doesn’t help that this star-ensemble horror thriller is coming in the wake of Don’t Breathe‘s cult success.
The slow action over the Labor day period spells for a summer that might hit $4.49B per ComScore for the calendar range of May 6-Sept. 5. That would make it the second best summer after 2013’s $4.75B, but it’s going to take a $141.3M weekend to beat last year’s total. Summer 2015 was 130 days long starting on May 1, with this year’s season short by a week since it started on May 6. When you compare this summer to last year’s in a that apples to orange date range, we’re in a dead heat. But if you compare the first 118 days of each summer, we’re +3% over last year with $4.34B.
While the standard analysis blah blah is that Labor Day weekend is never a great time at the box office, statistical history buries that hasty generalization. If the studios program junk, then they get nothing in return. However a strong genre title can always pull in the younger crowd, read the holiday’s all-time four-day opener, 2007’s Halloween at $30.6M or even a strong summer carryover like Disney’s The Sixth Sense which minted $29.3M in its fifth weekend over Labor Day 1999.
