The Box Office Run of It Ends With Us: A Few Thoughts

Boxoffice Pro's first projection for It Ends with Us had it opening in the $20-$30 million range. However, they revised their estimate upward considerably over the following weeks, so that it stood at $45-$55 million just before release, expectations to which the film lived up with a $50 million debut. Since then the movie has not had spectacular holds, but at least decent ones, with the result that 31 days into its North American run it has amassed $141 million. Meanwhile the movie is doing well abroad, actually outearning its domestic gross in the international markets (the split 46/54 in their favor), such that it has already broken the $300 million barrier ($309 million collected at last count), which is very good for a $25 million romance put out in high summer, and enough to mean that, while the movie is already out of the running to be one of the year's top ten grossers, it may yet prove one of its top ten profit-makers when Deadline makes up its list of the year's Most Valuable Blockbuster next spring, way ahead of many movies that grossed much more (or failing that, a near-certain spot on the accompanying list of lower-cost moneymakers, of the kind rarely going to non-horror films).

The movie would seem to confirm the trend I saw last year--namely that the profit-makers reflected careful selection of movies that had a limited but still appreciable audience of very interested filmgoers, and low costs (the animated features based on Nickelodeon animated franchises, Taylor Swift's concert film, Five Nights at Freddy's, in a way even the animated Spider-Man film and Oppenheimer), rather than a mindless pouring of money into gargantuan franchise-based productions in the faith that "Make it and they will come" (which, of course, failed so miserably that year). Right now, as the entertainment press fixates on successes like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine they seem determined to stick with that "Make it and they will come" business-as-usual approach--but I say again that things may not go the way they hope, and if only out of the concern for the bottom line demanded by their Wall Street masters the studio bosses would do well to attend to this movie's example.