Monday Morning Box Office: July 11, 2022
Lightyear has been cut from 2,000 screens. The theater owners have had it with this bomb, it’s doing nothing but cost them money at this point. It is doing nothing. Look for it to hit Disney + very shortly. At this point it’s nothing but an embarrassment for Disney.
Top Gun: Maverick had a respectable 7th weekend at $15 million. Top Gun 2, is now in the nothing but gravy stage. The big question for Paramount is, do we waste this on Paramount +, or do we take Netflix to cleaners, because they will pay through the nose? A nice position to be in but Tom Cruise is in a better one. Top Gun 2, will be a great lead in for the next Mission Impossible movie.
Thor: Love and Thunder is seriously underperforming in every statistic available to it. It from a projected opening of $205 million domestic opening, to $160 million and then finally delivered $143 million. A fair bit of pocket change to be sure but not for a movie with a $250 million budget. It will have to cross the $700 million mark before it is in the black. It will likely do that but it will struggle to reach $800 million. Breaking the billion dollar barrier is not going to happen.
But things are actually worse for Thor 4 than they would appear to be. The fact that tickets cost more is concealing the fact that less people are seeing Thor: Love and Thunder than they did Ragnarok.
“If we assume an average of $14 per ticket, based on the quote above, about 10,214,000 people will have gone to see Thor in the first domestic weekend release. In 2017 the average cost of a movie ticket was $10.20. That also happens to be the year Thor Ragnarok released. Ragnarok had a first domestic weekend of $122,744,989. That looks smaller than this year’s Thor 4 estimate of $143,000,000. But compare the audience size. Based on ticket prices, Thor Ragnarok had 12,033,822 attend theaters in its first domestic weekend. That’s two million more people who went to see Thor Ragnarok than Thor: Love and Thunder!”
There is also a major hit to merchandising sales. When Pixar released Cars 3, Disney didn’t honestly care if it tanked because the movie itself would have been acceptable loss leader due to the increase in Cars toys being sold.
Disney movies exist to move merchandise and that is annual revenue that is in the billions.
When it sells.
Disney has had a major problem with merchandising sales this year because kids don’t want to play with any of these… things. Lightyear has done nothing at all for Toy Story toy sales and kids want nothing to do with fake Buzz. Thor is in just as bad a position. Grandma goes into the toy aisle to buy a Thor toy and she is immediately confronted with King Valkyrie. She takes a hard pass on that and next discovers The Mighty Thor who has bewb armor. She turns around, buys a Bluey plushy and calls it good.
There is a big reason that Chapek is giving the marketing department suzerainty over the creatives at Disney’s Entertainment Division.
Finally, there is the opportunity costs which is the biggest loss of all for Disney. The money that it didn’t make can’t be put to work to make more money.
That is it for the Monday morning box office.
Okay, I’m done here.
