The 12 Days of Box Office
Analysis for Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
By David Mumpower
December 23, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
For those of you who are new-ish to BOP and holiday box office behavior, the key concept to remember is the x-factor of time. Movies remain a relatively economical way for people to spend their free time and hard earned discretionary income. For this reason, consumers like the bang for the buck that movies offer and are inclined to see a lot of them as long as they have the free time to do so. Of course, that's the tricky part. We lead busy lives and our free time is at a premium. As such, we are not always able to catch all the movies we want to see. This is why the home video marketplace has been a booming industry for the last quarter century. Most of the time, it's easier to watch a film at home than it is to get out to a theater. It's also why the under-25 demographic is the anchor portion of the movie industry. They are the ones who have free time and are always looking for cheap ways to pass it in communal environments.
What makes the holidays special is that most of North America is on vacation, meaning that they have more free time than normal. This is particularly true during the Christmas-to-New Year's Day portion of the calendar. People habitually save their vacation time until this time frame in order to maximize the number of consecutive days they don't have to go to work and despise their bosses, co-workers and customers. This is why it's the most wonderful time of the year. The end result is that movie theaters are absolutely packed with infrequent consumers who are otherwise inclined to wait until Redbox has a film to watch it.
As I mentioned yesterday, a rising tide lifts all boats in these situations. If you doubt this, take a moment to peruse the chart posted at the bottom of today's column. Focus on the Daily Change and Weekly Change entries. The natural state of a movie in the box office frontloading era is to start strong its first few days then quickly depreciate until eventually vanishing from theaters. There are fluctuations in this behavior involving genre, word-of-mouth and the like, but the rule applies to everything that isn't named Titanic or My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Except during the 12 Days of Box Office.
Generally speaking, a film should fall somewhere in the range of 35-50% week over week. You'll notice that the *largest* decline in the top 12 from last Tuesday to this Tuesday was 1%. Even if we scroll all the way to the bottom and factor in the titles with the most extreme frontloading, only four titles fell more than 30% week over week. Conversely, 15 films increased at least 30% from the previous Tuesday. Obviously, that's not supposed to happen. If it did, every film would be Titanic.
This end-of-year phenomenon doesn't have a lot to do with quality, either. For instance, Astro Boy is a box office train wreck yet it spiked from $3,309 last week to $25,367 yesterday. Sure, we're talking about tiny numbers, but the only time a film is supposed to go up by a factor of eight week over week is when it is a platform release with a huge venue count increase. A title that is slinking out of theaters only sees such an increase through holiday box office inflation. You'll note that many of the family films experienced such a lift in their week over week totals. Where the Wild Things Are, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Old Dogs, A Christmas Carol, and The Princess and the Frog all went up significantly. This is of course because family films in particular are popular choices at this time of year. Some of this isn't rocket science.
In terms of the specifics yesterday, you'll notice that the entirety of the top 12 either effectively matched or exceeded their totals from Monday as well as last Tuesday. This is particularly impressive in the case of Avatar, which is the 800-pound-gorilla of the box office world at the moment. It fell only 1.8% from Monday's $16,385,820 to Tuesday's $16,086,461. It has a running tally of $109,497,762; more impressively, it has fallen only 40% from its first day in theaters. As a comparison, if we normalize The Dark Knight to remove its disproportionate first day from the equation, it was down 43% from its first Saturday to the following Wednesday (i.e. the same period of four days of depreciation). And while I've been trying to avoid the Titanic comparisons, you're probably wondering now. Its drop from its first day in theaters to the following Tuesday was 30%. We'll continue to monitor these trends over the next 10 days as we determine just how high Avatar will soar in terms of expected final box office.