The Twelve Days of Box Office
By David Mumpower
December 22, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

I love these new gloves! What a wonderful Christmas gift!
Welcome to the 11th annual Twelve Days of Box Office here at BOP. This is the forum in which we demonstrate the unique methodology of holiday movie revenue. I am going to preface this year’s column with a confession that I wasn’t particularly pleased with the way last year’s columns turned out. Part of that was the fact that box office was down across the board, part of it was the fact that even the biggest release (Tron Legacy) was not much of a story and part of it was the fact that after Avatar in 2009, nothing was going to sound as interesting in comparison. Still, I am a perfectionist to a point of fault and I was dissatisfied with my overall 2010 performance. As such, I wanted to acknowledge in advance that I am going to attempt new (and hopefully improved) methods in evaluating holiday revenue.

For those of you new to the process, the time frame of the week before Christmas to the third day of January is the most lucrative box office period on the calendar. The end result of this is that most films will experience daily revenue on a par with a Friday, sometimes even a Saturday. So, we are looking at a 12-day period wherein all films in release experience a run of a dozen consecutive Fridays, give or take a bit. This is a blueprint example of a rising tide lifting all boats.

As we discuss each December, the key to anticipating box office behavior for the titles in release is the calendar configuration. So, the above is a bit misleading in that this particular calendar configuration, the one with Christmas Day and New Year’s Day on Sunday, has a somewhat truncated pattern. The week leading up to Christmas, while lucrative, ordinarily does not have quite the same expansion as a more spread out holiday calendar configuration. Also, we’re going to be short a couple of days because while some people will have January 2nd as a holiday, the reality is that by January 3rd, everything is back to normal once more.

What I mean when I say back to normal is that the x-factor in going to the movie theater is – stop me if you’ve heard this before – free time. Most people are inclined to see quality movies at the earliest possible opportunity since movies remain an affordable, enjoyable usage of free time. The problem is that finding the requisite free time is never easy. Toward the end of December, this is not the case as a pair of government holidays, saved vacation days that have to be used, school vacations and the like create an otherwise unprecedented amount of free time. The end result is that holiday box office is up across the board. The manner in which this occurs is where the story lies.

There is one other aspect to 2011 that will make this year’s conversation a bit trickier. A lot of titles are being released on different days as studios attempt to maximize revenue, which means that we’re going to have a lot of new titles pop up on strange days, which is why I have held off on starting the discussion until today. The primary title I have been awaiting is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but the expansion of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was also a key factor in my decision.


As expected, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was the top performer for December 21, 2011. The Brad Bird film (Brad, I love you. I’ve always loved you. Call me!) spikes huge from $1.69 million on Tuesday to $8.92 million on Wednesday. When your movie increases by a factor of five from the previous day, you must be living right. Well, it’s that or the fact that after being IMAX-exclusive for five days, the fourth Mission: Impossible movie expanded into 3,448 locations yesterday. Tom Cruise’s first hit in a loooooong time stands at $26.0 million after six days in theaters and this is a number I would ask you to keep in mind as our discussion evolves over the next week and a half. Really, this is the crux of the conversation.

The other noteworthy release yesterday is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Hollywood remake of the Swedish movie based upon the global bestseller by Stieg Larsson. After earning a respectable $1.5 million from midnight exhibitions on Tuesday, David Fincher’s latest movie accumulated another $3.6 million yesterday. We will use the $3.6 million tally as a baseline for its future results but what matters at the moment is that the well-relieved $100 million production is off to a modest start. This will be a perfect film to track over the holidays as it continues to increase rather than decline in box office. Such is the expected behavior of movies during the Twelve Days of Box Office.

What will happen with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that they will continue to earn a similarly impressive total each day from now until New Year’s Day. This is how the December holiday season box office works. I will circle back to the last time we had this particular calendar configuration, 2005, to demonstrate. There were two major releases that year and they battled for number one from December 19, 2005 until January 1, 2006.

Peter Jackson’s flawed epic, King Kong, finished in first place five times while The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was champion seven times. That is as tightly contested a holiday race as is possible. There was even a quirky aspect where Narnia won on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day while King Kong usurped the throne on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. There has never been anything like this before or since.

The daily splits are what are particularly fascinating. On December 19, King Kong earned $5.6 million. It hovered within the same $800,000 range Tuesday-Thursday of that week before ascending to an average of $7.1 million over the Friday-Sunday weekend phase. The following week, its box office spiked to $12.0 million the day after Christmas before leveling to the $7.1-$7.9 million range on those weekdays. In other words, a film that earned $5.6 million on Monday the 19th was earning significantly more the following week. As we know, that is not the way box office behavior is supposed to work. We use the word depreciation for a reason.

The first Narnia movie’s splits are even more dramatic. After starting with $4.7 million and $4.9 million on Monday and Tuesday, the 19th and 20th, it earned between $8.8 and $9.2 million the following week’s Tuesday-Thursday. This is the quirky behavior demonstrated during Christmas week and we will examine in detail with all of the major movies currently in theatrical release.