Are Box Office Hits Becoming Less Front-Loaded? (The Evidence of 2022 and 2023)

Last year the success of Top Gun 2 was received as significant confirmation of the recovery of the box office--but also something more.

Some rushed to argue that the movie's success suggested the old-fashioned star-powered vehicle was back.

If so, there has been little evidence for this position this year--with even Tom Cruise's own draw as a star far from affirmed by the way Mission: Impossible 7 flopped.

Such observers would have done better to pay attention to how Top Gun 2 became such a big money-maker. Yes, a big crowd came out opening weekend--but what is more important it drew surprisingly big crowds on the second weekend, and the third, and the fourth, week after week after week, so that even in its ninth weekend in play (by which time many films have virtually vanished from the theaters) the movie still brought in over $10 million. It did not slip from the "top five" of the weekend until week 11, and even after that point managed to bring in another $55 million on top of its already considerable pile. The result was that Top Gun 2 more than quintupled its very respectable first three day gross of $127 million (with a total of $719 million collected domestically).

Few films have done so well. However, it is notable that Avatar: The Way of Water likewise quintupled its opening weekend gross. Meanwhile this year Barbie, Oppenheimer and The Super Mario Bros. Movie each quadrupled their hefty opening weekend gross, while if not a hit on the same scale Elemental more than quintupled its own opening gross.

This is quite a contrast with how movies like Avengers: Endgame, even as their grosses soared to new heights, tended to make forty percent of their money in their first three days of release--and it may well be that we are starting to see a pattern emerge here, the more in as so much else is changing.

Consider the films that have done well in 2023. The kind of movies that were conventionally front-loaded--big franchise sequels--have tended to do less well, as more idiosyncratic movies became successes. Their doing less well would by itself seem to suffice to make movies less front-loaded generally. Yet one can picture other factors at work here, the more in as they can seem related to that weaker response to new releases in big franchises--like audiences being less susceptible to "I've got to see it opening weekend!"-type hype; their, perhaps, being more likely to come out if they heard good things from actual people rather than just the claqueurs, so that perhaps the first weekend is not so strong, but the dip from the first to the second weekend is not so severe as might have been expected, because that word of mouth brought in people who would not otherwise have showed at all--with franchise films providing further confirmation of this by seeming to follow the same trajectory when they do well. There was no second-weekend succor for, for example, The Flash--but Guardians of the Galaxy 3 may be such a case. The movie's opening was generally regarded as disappointing, perhaps even to suggest a film underperforming to the same degree as Ant-Man 3--but industry-watchers were heartened by the second weekend response. This did not make the film as leggy as Elemental, but the sequel proved leggier than its initially better-received predecessor (where Guardians of the Galaxy 2 did not quite make 2.7 times its opening weekend gross, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 tripled that gross), enabling it to go a rather longer way to matching its gross than would otherwise have been possible for it.

The result is that box office-watchers might do better to show a little more caution in regard to using opening weekend response as a basis for their guesses about a film's overall run--the more in as the hits carrying the film industry these days are less likely to be the same kinds of draw on which it relied before.