Hollywood just gave theater owners an early Christmas present…
The biggest Thanksgiving moviegoing weekend—EVER – a 30% increase over 2011’s turkey days.
Box offices around North America registered a record setting $290 million in ticket sales.
Topping the onslaught at theaters was the continued strength of the final episode in the Twilight saga. BREAKING DAWN–PART 2 scoring another $ 64 million in ticket sales.
Coming in # 2 this holiday weekend was Daniel Craig as James Bond in SKYFALL with an additional $51 million.
Daniel Day-Lewis as LINCOLN earned the bronze medal with $34.1 million during those five days of extreme moviegoing.
Other new titles that exceeded box office projections included Ang Lee‘s LIFE OF PI with $30.2 million in ticket sales and the 2009 remake of RED DAWN which (finally) opened to $22 million.
If there was one major disappointment at the movies this past holiday weekend it had to be DreamWorks Animations’ family flick RISE OF THE GUARDIANS at $32.6 million. It mightily underperformed earlier industry projections of $55 million.
Limited new national release titles included SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK with Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro with an impressive 3-day per screen average of $12,600 and Anthony Hopkins as HITCHCOCK averaging $17,700 per theater since its limited roll out Friday.
HITCHCOCK widens its release pattern to include Kansas City on December 7.
The only major motion picture scheduled to open this coming weekend is the mob-drama KILLING THEM SOFTLY with Brad Pitt, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta and James Gandolfini.
You can catch my review of that movie here this Friday.
Should the boffo Thanksgiving moviegoing trend hold through the coming Christmas release period 2012 could go down as a record breaking year at the box office.
Amazing what a good lineup of movies will do for ticket sales. “Lincoln”, “Life Of Pi”, “Firefox”, “Silver Linings Playbook”, Hitchcock” all quality films. Let’s not forget “Argo” or “Flight” either. They’re still selling tickets.
JACK for one I am thrilled. Finally some adult films are making big money. 007 is going to do around a billion world wide! Damn. As you know and the public doesn’t. big studios no longer put their money in smaller films, i.e. Brad Pitt’s new film so on…they need the money for Batman, Spiderman, Iron Man…all the 200 plus million dollar budget films that gross over a billion and keep the film dept. open. Even films like THE TOWN, that were huge adult hits, don’t matter to the majors, they only gross one or two hundred million world wide, not big deal to them anymore. Why, THEY ARE BROKE. At least the film division…tv with reality leading the way is a big money maker today and of course sports programming…not good films…so unless you are a super, major star the answer is NO to a regular adult film almost everytime out…they will distribute the good ones that are funded by others however.
So this past couple weeks was BIG for keeping up with films not for the under 20 group. Thank God.
By the way small films are movies that cost under 60 million dollars to make, which are most movies for the over 30 crowd.
Craig, one of my best friends has a production company that focuses on documentaries and has become quite successful. And while this isn’t likely new news for you, he’s told me a full blown movie’s budget, can be 100 pages in length!
With what’s happened in rising costs for pre-production, filming, post-production and promotion, the average major movie today costs $126 million. Marketing expenses keep climbing and can now run 50% of the total production costs, spent on trailers, TV ads, web sites, etc. to capture that strategically important first week.
Studios used to spend major money on a big-name actor but after a series of relatively star-less hits plus a growing list of superstar bombs studios are starting to modify that approach with the big names taking less up front in exchange for a bigger cut on the back end.
It’s an interesting business and the “creative accounting” and “additional unexpected expenses” would leave the average “star”, his manager or attorney unable to decifer the truth unless they were totally adept at forensic accounting!!
Hey Paul,
I’m sure that some producers, studios or financial backers would be happy with a 50% ad-pub-distribution budget on top of the cost of production.
You take a $60 to $90 million movie today and the ad-pub, etc. expenses will probably run closer to 75%.
That’s one of the reasons why certain producing outfits (like the one behind the James Bond franchise) use ‘placement revenues’ in exchange for marketing funds. It’s a better deal for them in the long run.
Placement has come a looong way, hasn’t it? I did some major promotions for Columbia Tri Star a few years back, it was a whole different world then to now! Yeah, there was money in product placement, but not what it is today!
Absolutely correct observations, Craig.
And on top of that the international market now means more to Hollywood than the mother country does. Who would’ve thought it