Daily Box Office Analysis
By David Mumpower
June 10, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com

You totally look like a 14-year-old boy.

Summer is here and the offseason for schools means one thing for Hollywood: money. With the under-18 crowd suddenly free to do whatever they want during the day, parents become much more likely to use one of their favorite seasonal babysitters, the movie theater. The outcome is that all titles in release receive a welcome injection in revenue thanks to the artificial inflation that stems from the summer.

For those of you who have been reading the site since its inception in 2001, accept BOP’s gratitude for your loyalty. Feel free to skip ahead two paragraphs, blanketed with the knowledge that I love you dearly. For everyone else, the rules of the summer box office campaign are fairly simple. Despite the box office boost from the season, bombs are still going to bomb. Yes, they will be aided a bit but a rejected movie generally remains rejected. Meanwhile, the movies that usually receive the largest spike in daily box office revenue are family films due to the influx of youths at matinee exhibitions. For this reason, family films that may not do well on opening weekend can still wind up being quite profitable. If you were wondering why there have been three movies in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid franchise, you now have your explanation.

There is also an established pattern of behavior for all titles in release. Monday will be a solid day of box office, particularly for titles that experienced weekend sellouts. Tuesday box office generally exceeds Monday for all but the heavily frontloaded releases. The explanation is that there are discount deals performed across North America to entice consumers to catch a movie on what was historically the worst day of the week for the industry. Wednesday will see a slight drop from Tuesday while Thursday is almost always the worst weekday for everything in release. These are the basics of summer box office behavior. Every week and every day within those weeks will experience a bit of fluctuation, though. Rules are made to be broken.

Now that we have covered the basics, the story of the day is obviously The Fault in Our Stars. The romantic drama about cancer patients in love grossed a whopping $48 million over the weekend. In the process, it became one of the most successful debuts ever for the genre. That statement covers only a portion of the story, though. The John Green adaptation also demonstrated fairly epic frontloading, by which I mean that over half of the revenue earned on opening weekend occurred by the close of business on Friday. That is a box office rarity.

Mathematically, 54.4% of box office for The Fault in Our Stars was earned on its “first” day in theaters. Technically, its Friday revenue was $26.1 million. In reality, $8.1 million of that was accrued from Thursday preview showings, which are allowed to be included in opening weekend results for reasons that pass understanding. Or the laugh test. Even if we exclude that total from the opening weekend and Friday result, however, the picture is still clear. $17.9 million was earned on Friday proper with another $12.7 million attained on Saturday followed by $9.3 million on Sunday.

BOP frequently discusses the internal multiplier, a calculation of opening weekend box office divided by Friday box office. A strong weekend multiplier was once considered to be 3.0 for new releases. As studios have punished for more money to be earned as quickly as possible, we have reached a point where 2.85 is solid most of the time. Anything under 2.40 is considered heavily frontloaded. It is quite difficult to possess a weekend multiplier lower than 2.20. The official multiplier for The Fault in Our Stars is 1.84, one of the lowest in the history of our industry. Even if we remove the $8.1 million in Thursday box office, we are still discussing a weekend multiplier of 2.23. In other words, even if I work to paint The Fault in Our Stars in the best possible light, the results are still grim. We are discussing a movie that was massively frontloaded on opening weekend.

As we enter the summer daily box office analysis season, the seminal question about The Fault in Our Stars is whether it can regain momentum. I want to be blunt here that I am as big a fan of this project as anyone you will ever meet. The author, John Green, is someone I respect because of the way he earned his stripes via the Internet’s meritocracy system. As much as I want to say nice things here, 15 years of box office experience forces me to acknowledge that movies that die this quickly on opening weekend rarely find a second wind with regards to momentum.

In order for that to be a real possibility in this particular instance, The Fault in Our Stars would have to hold extremely well on weekdays. At first blush, the news is middling at best. The tearjerker performed well enough on Monday to finish in first place. The surprise would have been if it had not. The marginal good news is that it fell 45% from Sunday’s $9.3 million to $5.1 million on Monday, the best Sunday-to-Monday hold in the top 10. While the movie should receive a Tuesday bump, even that is not guaranteed, meaning that The Fault in Our Stars is shaping up to be a one day wonder at the box office. Prove me wrong, zealous fangirls!

Of course, no matter what happens next, the movie is already wildly profitable. The $12 million production now has a running total of $53.1 million after four days in release. In terms of return on investment, that is the stuff of myth and legend. Generally speaking, only horror films ever accrue so much profit so quickly although 2014 has seen its fair share of religious offerings match the feat.

The rest of the top three is predictable but unexciting. Maleficent continues to hold down the second spot, garnering $4 million yesterday. It fell 62% from Sunday, which is another indication that it is not as child-friendly as most of Disney’s releases. Third place goes to the subject of tomorrow’s column, Edge of Tomorrow. The lavishly praised Tom Cruise flick declined 59% from $7.7 million on Sunday to $3.2 million yesterday. With a running domestic total of $31.9 million, the Warner Bros. release is already fixated on international revenue to carry it out of the red on the ledger sheet. I will explore its path to solvency in our next discussion.