Thanksgiving weekend did not play out the way box office trackers had predicted, as Lionsgate’s “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” took No. 1 for a second weekend while Disney’s “Wish,” stricken by mixed reviews, sank to a $31 million opening and the No. 3 spot on the charts.
While overall grosses improved to $173 million after last Thanksgiving fell to lows not seen since the turn of the century, the lack of a major new box office hit is doing damage to what is supposed to be a major moneymaking holiday for movie theaters.
Let’s break down who won, who lost, and who is somewhere in between on this critical weekend.
“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” won’t reach the heights of its franchise predecessors, but it is showing way better holds than it appeared that it would when it opened to $44 million last weekend amid solid but not spectacular critical and audience reception.
The prequel’s $41.5 million 5-day total includes a $27 million Fri.-Sun. total that was just a 37% drop from the film’s opening weekend. While major studios have struggled with budget overruns this year due to the pandemic, Lionsgate was able to keep “Hunger Games” under control with a reported $100 million budget, as they did with “John Wick: Chapter 4,” which grossed $440 million worldwide.
While not all of Lionsgate’s IP-based films have worked this year — see the DOA run of “Expendables 4” — the success of “Hunger Games” and “Saw X” this fall shows that the studio has been able to successfully revive two struggling and/or dormant franchises at the right price.
Undoubtedly, Lionsgate will look for ways to keep these series going, though that will require some imagination. “John Wick 4” ends with its titular antihero meeting his end, and “Hunger Games” author Suzanne Collins hasn’t written any other novels for the studio to adapt. But this weekend shows that there is some appetite among moviegoers for stories set in Panem that don’t involve Katniss Everdeen.
If Sony Pictures had financed the $170 million budget for Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon,” a $32.5 million domestic/$78.8 million global box office launch would be a huge disappointment to say the least.
But Sony is only serving as a distributor on this R-rated historical epic, which was paid for by the abundant tech money of Apple Films. The Silicon Valley studio is sparing no expense to build itself and its streaming service, Apple TV+, as a bastion for unique cinematic visions among both filmmakers and audiences, as they also backed the $200 million-plus budget of Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
Unfortunately, we won’t really know whether Apple is getting the return on investment they seek until next spring, after “Napoleon” and “Flower Moon” get their streaming release and Apple TV+ subscriber numbers following those releases are revealed. Until then, theaters will be happy to have mature, big-budget fare for audiences who don’t want to see what Hollywood’s franchises have to offer.
How ironic that a year that marks the 100th anniversary of the studio that became synonymous with box office domination in recent years has marked the end of that domination. Thanksgiving saw Disney’s animated centennial celebration film “Wish” open to a mere $31.7 million in North America, less than half of the $82 million 5-day opening that “Moana” earned in 2016.
When Disney was once able to fire off multiple chart-topping tentpole hits even as recently as last year with “Avatar: The Way of Water” and Marvel sequels to “Doctor Strange” and “Black Panther,” “Wish” is now left clinging to hopes that positive reception from families will allow it to leg out through the holiday season similar to how “Elemental” salvaged a solid $495 million box office run after earning the worst opening in Pixar history.
Even if “Wish” does salvage its box office run, Disney will finish the year with only one film released this year that grossed over $750 million worldwide: “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” a film whose director, James Gunn, is now working for another studio. This comes after Disney saw at least three releases cross that mark every year between 2015 and 2019 and again in 2022.
Even when taking into account other revenue streams like merchandising and theme parks, the struggles of films like “Wish,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and “The Marvels” — which is now set to be the first Marvel Studios film to fail to gross $100 million domestic — are big financial blows when the majority of Disney’s films come with the biggest budgets in Hollywood.
The budgets were justified for years when the studio’s stable of franchises were all riding high off of audience goodwill, but “Wish” is just another example of how that isn’t the case any more. General audiences, put off by the film’s tepid reviews, largely opted for “Hunger Games” or “Napoleon” if they went to theaters. And while a good deal of families who saw “Wish” were pleased by it, competition from “Trolls Band Together” took its toll.
But despite all of Disney’s box office struggles, here’s a sober truth: the studio has still grossed $1.4 billion at the domestic box office this year and still has an annual market share of 17%, second only to Universal.
Here’s another sober truth: The overall grosses for Thanksgiving weekend are estimated to finish at $173 million, up 29% from the $134 million seen last year, but still 34% below Thanksgiving 2019. Prior to the weekend, this space noted that theaters needed “Wish” to work as much as Disney did, because the Thanksgiving box office has historically relied on a big new release doing the heavy lifting on grosses.
Instead, “Hunger Games” needed just $41.5 million to take the No. 1 spot for a second weekend, matching the 5-day opening that fellow Lionsgate film “Knives Out” earned to take the No. 2 spot on Thanksgiving weekend 2019. While films like “Barbie,” “Super Mario Bros.” and “Oppenheimer” have lifted the box office back to pre-pandemic levels of grosses without Disney’s help, the rest of the film industry hasn’t performed consistently enough to completely pull theaters off the dependence on Disney that was built up in the years prior to the pandemic.
Theaters didn’t always rely on Disney during Thanksgiving. In fact, this weekend is a little bit of history repeating itself — or at least rhyming — as it was the “Hunger Games” films that drove the November holiday in the early 2010s. Perhaps next year, Universal’s “Wicked,” fueled by the power of Ariana Grande, could bring that big 5-day opening that we haven’t seen yet in the post-COVID market.
But in the meantime, Disney won’t have any theatrical releases in the first half of 2024 outside of its 20th Century Studios and Searchlight labels, due in part to strike-related delays. “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” may be a Memorial Day weekend surprise, but theaters will go more than six months without the IP stable that came to be their most reliable audience magnets for years.
Until the rest of Hollywood can deliver hits at a higher consistency, it’s hard to see the box office ever returning to pre-COVID form without that core Disney support.
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