The 12 Days of Box Office - Day Two
By David Mumpower
December 23, 2015
With Christmas Eve on a Thursday, The Force Awakens has decent positioning. A I mentioned yesterday, Avatar fell only two percent on its first Tuesday. Star Wars 7 dropped a fitting seven percent. Since it’s dealing with larger numbers, it held roughly as well as Avatar overall. I realize that’s a tricky concept. Think of the situation in terms of someone paying sales tax on a hundred dollar purchase versus a hundred thousand dollar one. The sales tax is still the same percentage, but the actual cost is a thousand times as much. Dropping two percent for Avatar meant an actual change in revenue of $300,000. For The Force Awakens, a seven percent drop is $2.75 million. You can see the dramatic difference in scale that the Jedi film faces.
The logical question to ask here is, “Is seven percent a big drop independent of prior models?” My answer at the moment is no. In fact, I’m rather impressed that it’s held this well to date. The lone caveat here is that Avatar actually did better on its first Wednesday than its first Tuesday. If Star Wars 7 falls again tomorrow, that will be a decent sign that it’s starting to cool off a bit. On the other hand, if it gains some, it’s poised to do something special this weekend. Again. Note that whatever it does tomorrow, however, it’ll take a dive on Thursday since that’s Christmas Eve. Even the Force is susceptible to this particular box office anomaly, last weekend notwithstanding.
Finally, while I was joking about Sisters and Generic Chipmunk Sequel, I should point out that both films behaved as expected yesterday. During the Twelve Days of Box Office, comfortable genre titles such as comedies and children’s flicks over-perform. That’s why I’m not surprised that Chipmunk Sequel enjoyed the largest percent increase in the top ten, 37 percent. Another $4 million in the bank brings its domestic tally to $21.3 million, which is lousy for this particular franchise. It’ll look much, much better at the start of 2016, though. This is a perfect film to consider when discussing the impact of the Twelve Days of Box Office on all films good and…78 RPMs of unrelenting horror.
Sisters wasn’t quite as fortunate, but it still did quite well yesterday. Its Tuesday take of just under $2.9 million represented an increase of 14 percent from Monday. It has a running total of $19.3 million, and it too should enjoy smooth sailing for the next 10 days. If these examples aren’t convincing enough, however, note that the rest of the top 10 all enjoyed daily increases. Eight out of 10 titles actually spiked at least 13 percent. That’s the overall power of the holiday acting as the rising tide that lifts all boats.
On a site note, tomorrow’s update will be abbreviated. And you’re fine with that since internet traffic dwindles on Christmas Eve for everything that’s not named Netflix. You should check back here, though. We’ll have the final edition of Elf Off thr Shelf for this year, and you all seem to eat that stuff up.
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