The Box Office Prospects of It Ends With Us: Some Thoughts

As Ryan Reynolds stars in what may be the biggest movie of the summer, the year and his career, his wife will also have a film hitting theaters--a big-screen adaptation of Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us.

Why bring it up when I rarely consider the box office chances of movies that are not big splashy sequels to comic book superhero films and the like? From a box office point of view this movie interests me for two reasons:

1. Where adaptations of bestselling books--and not just young adult books or adaptations of children's classics but recent bestsellers for grown-up readers--used to regularly become blockbusters substantially on the basis of readers' interest in them, this has become less common these past many years, with adaptations of publishing sensations in fact tending to be commercial disappointments, as happened with Where the Crawdads Sing and Killers of the Flower Moon. I suspect this is partly because books are mattering less in people's lives (that books become bestsellers after selling fewer copies as the market shrinks, that people less often read the books they buy, that those books they read leave less impression on them, etc.), and partly because what people look for in those movies they go to the theater for increasingly diverge from what they are prepared to enjoy in their books (or on the small screen) when they bother to go to the theater at all. The result is that looking at this movie I wonder whether it will buck the trend, or confirm it.

2. In Deadline's list of the most profitable films of 2023 we saw an unusually high share of smaller and lower grossing films. These movies succeeded not by selling the most tickets through appeal to the widest audience, but the combination of the existence of a limited part of the audience whose interest was high, with low costs. Thus did such movies as Five Nights at Freddy's and Taylor Swift's concert film beat Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in absolute profit, never mind relative return (the net on Taylor Swift's movie twice the total expense, as against a little over a fifth of its expenses with Guardians), all as, with a little help from marketing revenue, the PAW Patrol and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made the cut as well (the latter movie actually taking the #4 spot!). The result is that if It Ends With Us looks small next to a Deadpool it might find its way to success by that path--with the trajectory of Where the Crawdads Sing suggestive. Where that movie took in a mere $140 million worldwide at the box office (gross, not net), the combination of that figure with the limited outlay for production and promotion made it not just profitable, but translated to a very respectable cash-on-cash return that did not get it on the main list of profit-makers, but did get it on the accompanying list of what one might call "honorable mentions" for lower-budgeted movies. For now Boxoffice Pro forecasts a $20-$30 million opening for It Ends With Us, but for all that it might well end up on Deadline's honorable mention list come next spring--or even better still should the big movies continue to falter as they have done so often this past year and a half. Indeed, it would be all too symbolic of the trend were It Ends With Us to rank higher on Deadline's list than Deadpool come next spring.