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With summer coming up, and with the entire theater industry in a death spiral, now seems like a good time to discuss the things happening at the box office, or that will happen.

For example, Sinners had an insane second weekend hold, dropping only 5% from last weekend, which is unheard of for a non-holiday weekend horror movie. Box Office tracking was way off, and theaters that had started dropping the film from this week’s listings last weekend brought it back in a big way this week.

Meanwhile, the “highly anticipated” Accountant 2 took third place after the rerelease of Revenge of the Sith. It feels like no one knows what will happen at the box office anymore.

Anyway, the summer season is coming up, and I thought it might be fun to speculate what will land and what will flop.

Which do you think will be bigger family movie hits, How To Train Your Dragon or Leelo and Stitch?

Do you expect Fantastic Four to outperform Superman?m

How do you see Mission Impossible doing against Jurassic World?

I personally expect the summer season to be a bloodbath for major tent pole films.

So, I think a big part of the problem is "the box office" and more specifically, this need for people to use financial success as an attempt to have an ultimate objective barometer of quality. It's lead to a lot of people dismissing great films for not being financially successful while also losing interest in films because they go to financially successful films that are not great. To put it bluntly, and I in no way mean this as a personal attack:

Do you expect Fantastic Four to outperform Superman?m

I HATE that this is somehow a contest. It's not one I win. A win for me is both movies being terrific films that give me two trips to the theater that I enjoy. Both being successful is what's good for me, but the narrative being established is one where one must "fail" no matter how good they both are. I'm rooting for both to be the best depictions of these characters I've gotten in decades. That to me, is a success.

The "casual" movie-goer is gone. The only ones who go are now "dedicated" movie-goers I.e. folks who are dedicated to the cinema experience for a variety of reasons. Therefore, opening weekend box office is no longer a useful metric. The real metric is what a movie can deliver with the "long tail", which the official metrics are very opaque and hazy to understand. Therefore, the lazy movie-journo's have defaulted to an out-of-date metric to assign success/failure to.

I also expect Super-hero movies to get killed this summer.

Meanwhile, Sinners is tapping a "new" cross-segment of demographics (Horror fans, black Americans, etc) that have barely been tapped before. Lovecraft Country. Get Out, and a handful of others have showed the way with this particular cross-segment. Movies that can tap into these cross-segments are the way forward, Barbie and even the OG Wonder Woman showed that it can apply to other cross-segments too.

I am personally hoping for a resurgence of action/rom-coms but I think a few movies killed that possibility over the last two years.

 LunarSol wrote:
So, I think a big part of the problem is "the box office" and more specifically, this need for people to use financial success as an attempt to have an ultimate objective barometer of quality. It's lead to a lot of people dismissing great films for not being financially successful while also losing interest in films because they go to financially successful films that are not great. To put it bluntly, and I in no way mean this as a personal attack:

Do you expect Fantastic Four to outperform Superman?m

I HATE that this is somehow a contest. It's not one I win. A win for me is both movies being terrific films that give me two trips to the theater that I enjoy. Both being successful is what's good for me, but the narrative being established is one where one must "fail" no matter how good they both are. I'm rooting for both to be the best depictions of these characters I've gotten in decades. That to me, is a success.

I mostly agree. Box office shouldn’t be as big a concern as storytelling or acting for movie fans. But unfortunately it is.


I would love if we could only had to care about the quality of films (and there are threads to discuss their quality), but now we’re more and more seeing only one type of success determine what movies get made or distributed. We’ve seen the death of the mid budget comedy, the rom com and the mainstream drama, and it’s all due to how they performed at the box office.

Now that the rental and TV markets are gutted, and ancillaries like merchandising are mere husks, mid and high budget movies can only turn a profit at the box office. Following what succeeds this year will tell us what we can expect to see two years from now, and what we shouldn’t expect to see. Even evergreen small studios like Blumhouse and A24 are looking at a future of financial instability. Major studios have spent decades crushing the creatives and taking more and more control of the process. It’s a pretty grim time to hope for good movies.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
The problem with the “long tail” or “legs” approach to success is it requires movies to stay in theaters for more than two weeks. Most movies are not given enough time to find that kind of audience, unless they come out in December.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

I mostly agree. Box office shouldn’t be as big a concern as storytelling or acting for movie fans. But unfortunately it is.

That's because we continue to engage with all this nonsense that mostly only serves to drive people to skipping experiences altogether in favor of reading the summary on Wikipedia or a two hour roast of a 100 minute film on YouTube. We don't need to feed the monster just because its hungry. Seeing every film on that list is a better use of your time than a minute of the "discourse" around them.

It was sometime in the late 70s that the studios realized that they could use sales as a marketing strategy thanks to the success of films like Jaws and Start Wars. We can talk about how silly it is to use Box Office as a metric for quality but it still works as a marketing device. We know bad films can make bank and quality films flounder but in the end it is to useful of a beatstick to not use to sell things.

Always worth keeping in mind that some now incredibly well regarded films were originally box office duds.

For instance? The Thing.

I’m also confident the majority of “professional” movie reviewers don’t have a great deal of media literacy.

But I do think consumer appetites are changing. The big films usually crop up on Amazon Prime in a matter of weeks. So you don’t need to rush out to the cinema or face a lengthy wait.

Me? I tend to save the cinema for Big Things. Like, I just booked to see Thunderbolts in about an hour. Whereas horror stuff I much prefer to wait for home media, so I can completely avoid shrieking morons.

We’ve also seen the studios trying to get their head round Streaming. Prey was straight-to-streaming, and was fantastic. So fantastic, its warm reception and success mean Alien Romulus got shifted to a cinematic release, and took quadruple its budget, making it a bona fide success. For me? Romcoms lose nothing from streaming, and the same for comedies. Just my personal taste and preference though.

You should definitely see Sinners in the theater, though, despite it being horror. See it in imax if you can.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
. For me? Romcoms lose nothing from streaming, and the same for comedies. Just my personal taste and preference though.

Same here. My wife and I both enjoy romcoms, but neither of us see any point in paying cinema prices to see them. Cinemas are, for us, for those movies where the big screen and the big sound system actually add something to the experience. For romcoms, we'll wait to catch them on streaming.

I'll also wait for horror movies and thrillers on streaming, but that's more because I don't particularly like going to the cinema by myself...


For the original topic... I do think the days of big budget action movies pulling in big money by being 'good enough' are gone. And, yes, it's well past time that studios and reviewers stopped using the box office as a metric for success, because it's not even remotely the whole story anymore. I mean, it really hasn't been ever since the explosion of DVD in the early 2000s, but it's exponentially more absurd now.

So Sinners continues to have a remarkable hold from weekend to weekend. Considering it lost all of its IMAX screens to Thunderbolts, it had a very mild drop. It indicates people who couldn’t see it in the premier screens decided to see it on regular screens rather than not at all.

Thunderbolts on the other hand will be lucky to break even. It’s not doing terribly, but considering the good reviews and word of mouth it ain’t doing great. The MCU might have a new ceiling at less than half what it was 5 years ago. And with almost no interest from Gen Z, it will die a slow death.

I saw both movies this weekend (Sinners for the second time). The prime time Thunderbolts theater was about 3/4ths full. In the midafternoon Sinners showing, every single seat was sold out.


In other news, we can look forward to tariffs on movies shot overseas in the near future.

Given Thunderbolts hasn’t even been out a week, and slightly exceeded its expected opening box office, and currently stands as the eighth highest grossing movie of 2025, it seems to be doing fine.

Some distance to go to break even of course, but doesn’t seem to be a cause for concern?

I guess it depends on its week to week holds. However, with likely 50% or greater drop offs and major competition in two weeks, it doesn’t have a lot of space to leg out.

I'm curious, Bob - do you want to fail?

 Dysartes wrote:
I'm curious, Bob - do you want to fail?

Want me to fail? Or do you mean want the movie to fail?


I want the movie to succeed. I want good quality to be rewarded. But I am also exasperated at the studio system that wrecked the theater economy for everything but big IP movies and then cultivated their Ips the way Lenny cultivates rabbits.

It’s just been officially renamed “*The New Avengers”

Likely a well planned bit of clever marketing to boost second week takings.

I was a fairly regular cinema goer pre-covid, but then we had a kid and I've rarely been back since - both Dune movies and the LOTR anime were my only cinema trips.

I used to rewatch films quite a lot and collect DVDs. I still do buy the odd DVD (I'm just not into streaming) but I rarely find myself in the mood to watch a film these days. Probably to do with having a small kid running around, maybe I'll get back into it. But given the choice to spend my limited free time watching a film or listening to an audiobook while doing some modelling or painting, the latter wins nearly 100% of the time.

I know my situation isn't applicable to everyone but if similar things have happened I can't see cinemas lasting too long anyway.

When I was at the cinema for the last couple of times I paid for a "luxury" cinema seat because my friend has back trouble and it suits him to sit in those recliners. I ordered some popcorn and it was absolutely crap both times - kinda stale, full of the dregs of broken kernels and just little bits. And because it was "luxury" it was also a smaller portion served in a little bowl.

So I dunno I don't feel my local cinema even really deserves to survive with that approach. There was a nice family run international cinema I used to go to but they went under during covid, only the big chain has survived and it's kind of unpleasant.

Thunderbolts had an incredibly low opening in China, one of the MCUs lowest. I wonder what made them not what to see an American film like they have in the past?

truly one of life's great mysteries

 Da Boss wrote:
I was a fairly regular cinema goer pre-covid, but then we had a kid and I've rarely been back since - both Dune movies and the LOTR anime were my only cinema trips.

I used to rewatch films quite a lot and collect DVDs. I still do buy the odd DVD (I'm just not into streaming) but I rarely find myself in the mood to watch a film these days. Probably to do with having a small kid running around, maybe I'll get back into it. But given the choice to spend my limited free time watching a film or listening to an audiobook while doing some modelling or painting, the latter wins nearly 100% of the time.

On the 'watching at home' front, I found it helped a lot once the kids got old enough to start introducing them to some old favourites...

We're also planning (any week now, for sure) to get the girls out to the drive-in now that they're old enough to stay awake.

 Da Boss wrote:
I was a fairly regular cinema goer pre-covid, but then we had a kid and I've rarely been back since - both Dune movies and the LOTR anime were my only cinema trips.

I used to rewatch films quite a lot and collect DVDs. I still do buy the odd DVD (I'm just not into streaming) but I rarely find myself in the mood to watch a film these days. Probably to do with having a small kid running around, maybe I'll get back into it. But given the choice to spend my limited free time watching a film or listening to an audiobook while doing some modelling or painting, the latter wins nearly 100% of the time.

I know my situation isn't applicable to everyone but if similar things have happened I can't see cinemas lasting too long anyway.

Your situation is not unique. People have been finding their cinema time & interest curtailed because of having kids as long as there's been cinema.... and cinema is still here.

Historically, though, that's been partly because once the kids reach the right age, the cinema visits start up again.

I can't speak for other families, but my kids have only been to the cinema a handful of times, because it's just not an affordable family outing anymore. And I suspect that kids growing up with streaming at home and without those regular cinema trips in their formative years are going to grow up into teenagers and young adults who just don't feel strongly enough about going to the cinema to pay cinema ticket prices...

It’s also a different world from when I grew up.

80’s and 90’s, you saw it in the cinema, because it would take months to come to VHS/DVD, and a year or more to come on the telly.

But over time, that gap has grown narrower and narrower. Not just as a piracy preventative, but because getting the film to the cinemas is cheaper and easier, and you’re not relying on countries taking it in turns to have in theatres, as they had to share limited print copies.

And, at the same time, home equipment has improved and typically become cheaper. It’s a rare household that doesn’t have a digital widescreen by default, as the days of crappy wee CRTs has passed entirely. That’s eaten into the cinema experience too.

Even a cinephile of modest means can get a decent setup for a reasonable price.

I don't mind the price as a one off outing if the experience is gonna be good. But if I've got sticky floors, dirty seats, poor quality snacks and obnoxious patrons in my showing that cost me an arm and a leg I'm just not encouraged to do it again.

If you've got that kind of set up you need to lower the price to make up for it. And throw people out if they're acting up.

I don’t have kids, but I also find myself watching less films than I used to. Part of it is a lack of time / energy from life in general, but I think part of it is…cynicism, for want of a better word? I have seen my favourite films so many times I could probably recreate the script from memory, so my time between rewatches has extended so that I still enjoy the experience when I do watch them, and I find a lot of new films to be generic and uninteresting. Not because they’re bad, per se, but just because they’re using tropes and cliches I’ve seen before. So now I only get excited about something new and different.

Once they stopped making Francis the Talking Mule movies the inevitable decay of film viewership was a given.

 Jadenim wrote:
and I find a lot of new films to be generic and uninteresting. Not because they’re bad, per se, but just because they’re using tropes and cliches I’ve seen before. So now I only get excited about something new and different.

I find this is happening to me too.

One of the worst things I ever did in life was taking a bunch of courses on writing and script-writing. Now, I can not see some show without seeing a lot of the tricks-of-the-trade.

This has led me to be more interested in "live" non-scripted things like sports than I ever did before. I am too familiar with the tricks and story beats of most common scripted shows now. I can still appreciate a solid show, but very rarely am I "blown away" by anything I watch anymore.

I can only imagine how terrible actual film critics have it. The boredom they must face.

Ouch.

Apparently, if your film is produced (in any part - including special effects) outside the US. It's gonna get more expensive to... uhmm... How do you put a tariff on a film?

Trump's plan for movie tariffs leads to global confusion

May 5, 20254:48 PM ET
The film and TV industry around the world is reeling from President Trump's announcement that he plans to impose a 100% tariff on movies produced outside the U.S.

On his social media platform Truth Social on Sunday, Trump declared that America's movie industry is "dying a very fast death," arguing that Hollywood is being "devastated" by other nations that draw filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. with incentives.

Many American films and TV shows are shot entirely or at least partially outside the U.S. The upcoming movie, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, was shot on a Norwegian archipelago, among many other locales.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Ouch.

Apparently, if your film is produced (in any part - including special effects) outside the US. It's gonna get more expensive to... uhmm... How do you put a tariff on a film?

Trump's plan for movie tariffs leads to global confusion

May 5, 20254:48 PM ET
The film and TV industry around the world is reeling from President Trump's announcement that he plans to impose a 100% tariff on movies produced outside the U.S.

On his social media platform Truth Social on Sunday, Trump declared that America's movie industry is "dying a very fast death," arguing that Hollywood is being "devastated" by other nations that draw filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. with incentives.

Many American films and TV shows are shot entirely or at least partially outside the U.S. The upcoming movie, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, was shot on a Norwegian archipelago, among many other locales.

Dude doesn't understand how movies are made.

 Vulcan wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Ouch.

Apparently, if your film is produced (in any part - including special effects) outside the US. It's gonna get more expensive to... uhmm... How do you put a tariff on a film?

Trump's plan for movie tariffs leads to global confusion

May 5, 20254:48 PM ET
The film and TV industry around the world is reeling from President Trump's announcement that he plans to impose a 100% tariff on movies produced outside the U.S.

On his social media platform Truth Social on Sunday, Trump declared that America's movie industry is "dying a very fast death," arguing that Hollywood is being "devastated" by other nations that draw filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. with incentives.

Many American films and TV shows are shot entirely or at least partially outside the U.S. The upcoming movie, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, was shot on a Norwegian archipelago, among many other locales.

Dude doesn't understand how movies are made.

There's a lot the Dude doesn't understand....

The Dude doesn't deserve that comparison - he simply abides.