Box Office Breakdown for Weekend of 5/5/24
What’s up, Geeks + Gamers? It’s ODIN!
The Fall Guy Wins Another Slow Weekend
Even though the new Universal film The Fall Guy won the domestic box office weekend handily, it still came in almost $1 million less than what many were projecting it would make. With an early international release last week in some countries, the movie so far has made about $65,403,000. With a budget projected to be around $130 million, the film still has a long way to go before it has any chance of profitability. According to my charting (using a 2.5x multiplier), the film needs to make roughly $325,000,000 just to break even, which, though it may not be impossible, is still very unlikely based on the numbers we are seeing. This is quite sad because The Fall Guy is very fun and even features a recorded thank-you message from the director and one of the film’s stars, Ryan Gosling. Based on these early numbers, the chances of the film losing roughly $100 million is a strong possibility.
One film that was predicted to do well but, surprisingly, was actually able to grab the #2 spot this weekend was the re-release of the 1999 Star Wars prequel film, The Phantom Menace. Though many fans have a special place in their heart for it (arguably because of the solid score and countless memes that have come from the prequels), to see this movie in the Top 3 for the weekend shows just how poorly the current releases are doing at the box office this year and spells trouble for the upcoming summer box office season.
According to the-numbers.com, the top 5 this weekend domestically were:
- The Fall Guy ($28.5 million as a new release)
- Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace ($8.1 million as a special re-release)
- Challengers (49% drop in 2nd weekend)
- Tarot ($6.5 million as a new release)
- Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (38% drop in 6th weekend)
Deadline’s Terrible Box Office Rankings
The man I simply call “Tony” over on Deadline has been covering his yearly retrospective on the previous year’s box office and which films were the biggest hits. As usual, “Tony’s” math presents a very rosy picture of movies that were actually box office flops and makes them look like the biggest hits of the year. Whether he adds the reported take from any PVOD sales or the absolutely misleading streaming “profits” – which are nothing more than what the studio pays to themselves to have the right to stream on the platform they already own – “Tony” fails to show the facts of just how poorly some of the biggest tent pole titles performed last year. One of the better examples of this is what he did with the coverage of Guardians of the Galaxy:Vol. 3, which he has listed as the #9 most profitable film of the year and as having received roughly $124 million in “profits.” Even before breaking down what the actual numbers look like, if you just take the $180 million that he credits to Disney under “television and streaming,” which he openly admits is what Disney paid to itself for the film to stream on Disney+, it is easy to see that the film lost +$50 million according to the rest of his metrics.
Using my RCC method and the numbers being reported over at Deadline, Disney spent roughly $410 million on the budget and marketing combined. Though one could argue that the budget will likely be higher when we find out what they actually spent from the UK tax returns, until we get those numbers (if we get them), we will have to stick with what has been reported. Since the film made about $358 million domestically, $399 million internationally (without China), and $87 million in China alone, it means that after taking into account the total spend and typical box office/theater splits, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 actually lost about $31 million for Disney. The fact that this film was meant to be the one bright light for Disney in 2023 – a year of massive flops – shows just how much worse they did financially versus initial estimates. Though one can debate that Disney was able to make up some ground on the PVOD and Blu-ray sales for the film, there is no denying that the Deadline numbers are grossly misrepresenting the financial reality of Disney’s box office woes.
For video coverage of this weekend’s box office, check out my latest video HERE.
If you want further analysis on these or any other films, check out the full charting I do over at my website. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and, as always, God bless!
(If you ever want further insight into my methodology, see my previous articles HERE and HERE and the RCC method I use to break down movies internationally HERE.)
